The History of Search Engine Optimisation

Do a search on the mid 90’s and Wikipedia (not even a glint in the eye back then) lists the most memorable events of the decade. The PC revolution, the Internet, Gulf War and horrors of the Yugoslav wars. Webmasters & content providers trace their roots back to this period.

The first search engines set about cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines. They would send a spider to "crawl" that page, extracting links to other pages from it, returning information found on the page to be indexed. This included information about the page, such as the words it contained, where they were located, as well as any weight for specific words, additionally all links the page contained, which were then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Of course it was not long before site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, thus creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners! According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the earliest known use of the phrase search engine optimization was a spam message posted on Usenet on July 26, 1997.

Early versions of ‘search algorithms’ relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files. Meta tags provided a guide to each page's content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable as often keywords in the meta tag were not truly relevant to the site's actual keywords. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags caused pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.

Too much reliance on factors exclusively within a webmaster's control, led early search engines to suffer from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed only the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

Google, founded by Page and Brin in 1998 attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered, as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the ‘Inktomi’ search engine ‘HotBot’, later displaced by Google and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaining PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming. Latterly major search engines have begun to rely more heavily on ‘off-web’ factors such as the age, sex, location, and search history of people conducting searches in order to further refine results.

By 2007, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals. What is the future of SEO? the answer is simple, quality and content unified by a stable programming platform capable of indexing, organizing and serving categorized content at a moments notice through relevant naming conventions, descriptive taxonomy and prominent topical saturation. In other words, if you need a preview of things to come, just think of Wikipedia toned down to topical theming and internal linking augmenting by off page deep linking.