Trying to figure out the history of search and SEO is like trying to figure out the history of a handshake. It’s a lot more difficult. Its existence and importance to business are well-known. Our attention is drawn to how we use our marketing strategy on a daily basis, rather than where it comes from.
SEO, on the other hand, is a relatively new field that is rapidly evolving. It appears to be a millennial, with a birth year of 1991 or later, as predicted.
Take a look at how many changes Google’s algorithms has gone through in its brief history to observe how quickly it’s evolved and altered.
So, how did SEO get started, and why has it become so important? Join us on this adventure as we explore back in time to see what occurred.
Related: What is search engine optimization?
The 1990s Were A Great Decade.
As search engines got more well-known and more homes had Internet access, finding information became easier. As previously noted, the problem originated from the data’s poor quality.
Keyword stuffing, or the practice of constantly repeating phrases in the text to boost rankings (for which there is no criterion), increase traffic to one’s site, and provide eye-catching numbers for potential advertisers, was common among website owners.
Related: What is social media marketing?
The First Decade Of The Twenty-First Century
In the early 2000s, Google launched its conquest. Google created white hat SEO principles, which the “good folks” follow to help websites rank, to decrease the amount of marketing search engine technology.
2000-2002
Individuals ignored the guidelines of these marketing strategy because they did not affect rankings at the time, according to Moz. Because PageRank was formerly based in part on reduction. The more links pointing to a specific page, the higher the ranking. However, there was no way to check the links’ legitimacy. In the early 2000s, identical link-building strategies might still rank pages that had nothing to do with search parameters, according to Marketing Technology Blog.
Related: What Is Lead Nurturing And What Are The Right Tactics?
2003-2004
This online approach, which would be about more than just words, began to take shape with Google’s “Florida” algorithm improvement in November 2003. As a result, Search Engine Watch has classified the response to Florida as a major “outcry.” However, it’s worth noting that this algorithmic tweak helped a slew of other websites as well. In this notable example of sites being punished for issues like keyword stuffing, Google’s marketing strategy focus on solving problems for users first — mostly through high-quality content — was clear.
When it originally launched in 2004, the New York Times labeled Google’s voice search experiment as “half-finished.” Even though mobile technology was still in its infancy, it was a premonition of the importance of mobile in SEO (just look at the original instructions).
Related: Lead Generation: Can It Be Useful For Your Products?
2005 Was A Pivotal Year For Seo.
2005 was a watershed moment in the history of search engines. In January, Yahoo, Google, and MSN introduced the Nofollow Attribute, which decreased the quantity of spam comments and links on blogs and web pages. Google introduced personalized search in June of that year, which leverages a user’s browsing and search history to offer more relevant results.
SEO Shifts in 2009
In 2009, the search engine business witnessed a number of developments. When it launched in June of that year, Microsoft’s marketing strategy strongly promoted Bing as a search engine that gives far better results than Google. It was not, however, a “Google killer,” and its content optimization recommendations were not considerably different from Google’s. The only notable difference between the two, according to Search Engine Journal, is that Bing prefers terms in the URL structure, capitalization, and “pages from prominent sites.”
2010-Present
When you enter a search query, it’s always intriguing to see what Google provides. That can be attributed to Google Instant, which debuted in September 2010. According to Moz, it “combusted” SEOs at first until they realized it had no effect on rankings.
From 2010 forward, SEO developed, but the search engine’s goal remained the same: to assist people, despite some controversy about how pages with unfavorable online reviews were ranked. According to their statement, Google’s algorithm eventually penalized this method.
The Year Of The Panda Is 2011
The trend of punishing websites that manipulate Google’s algorithm will continue. Some of these incidents were made public, such as the one involving Overstock.com in 2011. According to the Wall Street Journal at the time, Google saw domains ending in.edu as needing to diminish their authority, but this did not affect those who continued to utilize a similar link-building marketing strategy. Overstock took advantage of this by offering instructors and students discounts in exchange for connecting to their site and utilizing keywords like “bunk beds” and “vacuum cleaners.” The inbound links aided Overstock’s rankings for queries containing specified keywords until they ceased doing so in 2011, at which point Google punished them.
Panda, Google’s algorithmic assault on content farms, was first released in the same month. Those sites feature a lot of low-quality, often updated content that was developed only for the sake of search engine optimization. Panda’s marketing strategy has evolved to hunt for places with high commercial-to-residential ratios, which are detrimental to the company.
Along Came A Penguin in 2012
When Google’s marketing strategy made the first of several Penguin modifications in April of 2012, it noted Bing’s blog post from a week earlier on SEO’s changing nature, which it had published a month earlier. “Another move to boost high-quality sites,” the search firm said. Penguin-targeted sites were mostly employing black hat SEO techniques.
Then There’s 2015
The most major SEO declaration made after 2010 was Google’s marketing strategy mobile update in April 2015, which began penalizing websites that did not optimize for mobile devices. As a result, SEO is no longer just about keywords and relevant content, but also about responsive design.
Google’s marketing strategy announced this change ahead of time with a smartphone test that allowed web administrators to discover potential issues and make changes before the launch in February 2015. Google initiated an offensive against mobile pop-ups in August 2016. This isn’t the end of Google’s mobile enhancements. To lessen the impact
Conclusion
It’s simple to understand how SEO has evolved into a full-time occupation. Its history will only play out in the future. You’ll need a lot of knowledge, ethics, and modern technology to accomplish it correctly.
We recognize, however, that having a single person dedicated to SEO isn’t always possible, which is why we’re dedicated to developing the most polished SEO learning resources accessible.
Search and SEO have a history, marketing strategy and understanding it can help us understand how they evolved and were recognized as marketing tools.
