The History of SEO

Zeal powered GoSmart, Go.com was a directory, and Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves (now Ask) and AltaVista made their entry into the search engine field. AltaVista was highly popular and was the first search engine to fully index every word of all HTML web pages with a crawler named Scooter. On it’s first day in late 1995, over 300,000 users access the search tool, with 80 millions hits per day near the end of 1997. A purchase by Yahoo and a change from a search format to a portal format led to an eventual closing of AltaVista. Iktomi began in 1996 and eventually their server technologies were purchased by Microsoft to be used in Microsoft Network in 1998. This led to the debut of MSN Search in 1999 followed by developments and name changes, with Microsoft eventually releasing Bing, its search engine returning results by category, in May 2009. Yahoo (1994) and Google (1998) entered the scene focusing on indexing and delivery. Yahoo made acquisitions of companies such as Overture (AltaVista and AlltheWeb) and Iktomi’s search database. It also used Google’s client search engine through 2004. In 2017, Yahoo was acquired by Verizon. Google has emerged as the top search engine and sets the general standard for web search rules. It now has more than 50 services and products and ranks as one of the top influential tech companies. The search engine processes over 5.6 billion searches per day. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that joined the ranks in fall of 2008. It processes over 44,000,000 searchers on a daily basis and is built around the privacy of its users.

In early 1997, John Audette of Multmedia Marketing Group was using the term Search Engine Optimization. Later, in 2001, the term Search Engine Marketing came to light, focusing on paid searches. In reality, the terms suggest that search engines are being optimized, but really it’s the process of optimizing web sites and pages for best search results.

In the early stages of web development and search engine optimization, many businesses would use strategies such and excessive tagging, stuffing keywords, and multiple backlinks that may have been spammy in nature, in hopes of higher rankings. These techniques were know as black-hat SEO and could go undetected because algorithm updates were not done nearly as often as they are in today’s world.

Eventually, search engine companies jointly developed Internet guidelines that are in currently in place. Search features were developed that helped users gain more information easily and in a variety of presentations, local search results appeared in the SERPs, and social media began having an impact. More recently, the mobile platform has impacted SEO and sites that have not optimized for mobile devices or embraced responsive design will experience lower search rankings. Google and other search engines continue to make updates on a daily basis. Listed here are some of the major Google updates that had significant impact of SEO.

2003-2005 brought local search to the forefront and Google’s “don’t be evil” theme rewarded ethical web development.

2006-2009 brought a more user friendly search experience including media content, a result of Google’s Universal Search, and in 2008 Google’s Suggest, Trends, and Analytics keyword research tools tapped into more focused optimization.

From 2010-2012 SEO changed the focus to high quality content relative to the user. In addition, stricter regulations were put in place that affected indexing, and in turn, search results. Those sites choosing to use black-hat practices would become subject to stiff penalties and often were publicly chastised for non-compliance.

In February 2011, Google issued, Panda, a major algorithm update cracking down on questionable tactics and targeted sites with low quality content known as content farms. Google stated an impact of nearly 12% of search results.

In November 2011, Google issued the “Freshness Update,” and algorithm update giving more emphasis to those sites with fresh content. This change impacted close to 35% of queries.

Penguin appeared in April 2012, addressing spam factors, including keyword stuffing. During the next few years, Google continued issuing updates to Panda and Penguin. In March of 2013 Panda was integrated into Google’s core algorithm and the same occurred with Penguin in the fall of 2016.

Google issued an update in May of 2014 focusing on search queries that would likely bring “spammy” results, calling it The Payday Loan algorithm update. 2014 also brought an algorithm update known as Pigeon focusing on local search and improving map queries.

2017 Google announced in 2014 that it would give SERP preferences to secure sites. In April of 2017, as reported by MozCast 10K, about 50% of sites ranking on page 1 SERP were secured. This number grew to almost 75% by the end of 2017.

July 2018, following warnings about non-https sites, Google brought an update in which Chrome 68 started marking non-https sites as not secure.