The technique of SEO appeared for the first time more than 10 years ago. Danny Sullivan, the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, mentioned it in his blog which comments on news and information about search engines. By 1995, SEO was a known means for getting high results with search engines and the race to produce the best results for clients of SEO firms had begun.
The all-important programs feeding data to the search engines, the algorithms, have a history of their own. The first famous algorithm was in a program called “backrub”, developed by two grad students from Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This program eventually became a pat of the Google link analysis system, PageRank, named after Larry Page and used by the Google internet search engine. Pagerank gives a numerical value to each web page that it visits, to determine overall rank, by weighing the value of a its links, because as well as looking at written content, search engines also take into consideration inbound links. These links to other sites can make or break a page’s rating. Google describes how PageRank works by saying, “Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.”
Search engines had to evolve quickly, as an engine that failed to get relevant results did not last long, with customers expressing irritation at often irrelevant and sometimes disturbing results from searches. As the engines were reliant on webmasters to give the correct keywords for a given site, unscrupulous ones found the system easy to abuse. Webmasters could, for example, stuff pages selling goods with keywords containing the names of popular celebrities, or news figures
In 1998, Page and Brin established the company Google, which fast became popular with internet users, for ease of use and reliability. The Google search engine was less likely to be fooled by dubious SEO techniques as it ranked pages by keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links, page rank and hyperlink analysis, to name a few of its sources. Google now admits to using 200 different measurements when ranking pages for search results.
Not in the least bit discouraged, SEO webmasters were soon coming up with ways to exploit this new engine, using techniques developed on gaming the Inktomi search engine, which was eventually acquired by Yahoo. Link-farming, keyword stuffing and other processes all became popular ways to get high rank by fooling the search engines.
Google, Yahoo and Bing,(Microsoft) became the three largest search engines as by 2004 the smaller ones were left behind, often the victims of bad SEO practices, which caused their popularity to wane by returning irrelevant search results, for example, porn sites would buy highly ranked pages and substitute their own content, giving offense to users.
The next milestone came in 2005 with Google’s use of search histories to provide targeted results based on predictions of what customers would want based on those histories. The public outcry against invasive practices did not last long, as advertisers sought to exploit this new tool to their advantage. At the time, Bruce Clay commented that meant the end of the ranking system, because a page’s value for each person could be different, but time saw this actually just changed the game, and did not halt it.
2007 and 2009 saw two big changes in how Google rated paid links, taking on the “pageranksculpters”, as SEOs who exploited Pagerank were called, with a system called nofollow. This consisted of using HTML codes to tell search engines that some links should be excluded from a page’s overall ranking. Very effective in cutting down spam in search results, nofollow improved the service Google offered its customers, who responded by boosting it to the top the of search engine pile.
