SEO history
Webmastersand content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in themid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page andstoring it on the search engine's own server, where a second program,known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, whichare then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.
Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, 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 in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provided a guide to each page's content. But using meta datato index pages was found to be less than reliable because the webmaster's account of keywords in the meta tag were not truly relevantto 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 withinthe HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.
By relying so much on factors exclusively within a webmaster'scontrol, early search engines suffered from abuse and rankingmanipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engineshad to adapt to ensure their results pagesshowed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pagesstuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since thesuccess and popularity of a search engine history is determined by its abilityto produce the most relevant results to any given search allowing thoseresults 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.
While graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed "backrub", a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached bya web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one pageto another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger thanothers, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by therandom surfer.
Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google 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) wereconsidered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags,headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kindof manipulation seen in search engines history that only considered on-pagefactors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult togame, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemesto influence the Inktomisearch engine, 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. In recent years 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 history had incorporated a wide range of undisclosedfactors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 differentsignals. The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs. SEO history practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.
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