The history of SEO is short in terms of years, but it is long in terms of development and evolution. In fact, to those who earn – or steal – their living from the industry, it might seem like SEO strategies change so often that entire livelihoods can be made and destroyed overnight. While this isn’t generally true today for those who abide by the guidelines of the major search engines, it was a serious problem in the recent past that caused the rise and fall of hundreds of search professionals. But unlike studying the history of other things, it's unlikely that we'll learn much about the future of this industry by studying its past, considering the rapidly changing state of technologies and software involved in organic search. And ultimately, what IS likely is that the search engines will continue to prefer to keep us guessing.
The history of SEO begins with the birth of search engines – the earliest of which would not be recognizable today as a search engine at all. These were primarily text-based programs that compared files on a shared system – the very beginnings of FTP or File Transfer Protocol. The most famous of these search programs was a student project at McGill University in Montreal that achieved some success, but even this example didn't provide enough functional features to catch on with the public. It wasn't until these text-based programs were expanded upon significantly that this changed, beginning with the launch of Wandex.
Wandex was the first real search engine in that it had a spider that collected information and an indexer that categorized it, and a GUI or Graphic User Interface that allowed users to conduct searches and sort the resulting data. This is the basic premise of how nearly all search engines operate today and led to the development of early SEs like Excite!, Yahoo!, Lycos, AltaVista, and in 1997, Google.
However, early search engines only collected and displayed information, but each search engine displayed different results even if the overall pool of data or information was the same. In effect, there was seemingly no specific method of ranking the results related to any real definable relevancy factors.
The first real search engine optimization tactic (although the term had yet to be coined at the time) became search engine directory submissions, as this provided a way to get the attention of the search engines directly. However, this practice quickly led to thousands of spam submissions as sites sought to improve their rankings by blasting as many search engines as possible with requests for inclusion. For a time, this worked, and directory submissions became the first tried-and-true practice of SEO. It didn't last for long.
Search engines began to filter out spam from their directories, some doing so by switching to a paid model. The most notorious of these was Yahoo, which continues to charge hefty fees to be included in its directory even today. In fact, the fee is payable even if Yahoo decides not to include the site in its listing. As an alternative, many SEOs have turned to DMOZ because the listing is free, but unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to get a website listed on the DMOZ directory.
In any case, by the late 90's this technique was all but finished. Instead, SEO was born in its truest sense when internet marketers discovered that rankings for search terms were based on the appearance of those terms on the pages of a site. This led to the second major SEO tactic of On-Page optimization.
It was also around this time that John Audette of Multi Media Marketing Group and SEO legend Danny Sullivan had given a conference on search marketing, and at some point one of the two men is said to have coined the term Search Engine Optimization. However, the first verifiable written reference to the term occurred on the MMG website owned by Audette.
Early SEOs worked hard to reverse engineer and otherwise uncover how these on-page keyword factors functioned, and it wasn't long before they had cracked the secret. Internet marketers and SEO professionals were able to easily gain top rankings for their clients using this information.
This led to a war that was fought on two fronts: SEO professionals fought off attacks by search engines that revoked their rankings or banned their websites from search while simultaneously battling spammers and thieves that would simply copy the entire code of a high-ranking page and publish it elsewhere.
To combat this problem, the practice of cloaking developed. Initially used to hide the code of a high-ranking page, cloaking was also used by spammers and others to embed keywords and search terms on a website that could not be seen by visitors.
Search engines quickly realized that results were far too easy to manipulate, and they also knew that if they couldn't return relevant results, the industry would die as quickly as it had been born. In response to the effort of SEOs looking to rank their client's websites as quickly as possible with as little work as possible, search engines – most notably Google – began to overhaul their algorithms.
Of particular noteworthiness during this period was the further development by Google of the PageRank system, which assigned websites and web pages a number based on the trustworthiness and quality of the site. While some clues were given as to what signals were used to rank a site (and thus provide its authority for ranking) most SEOs at the time were just guessing, leading to yet another trend where the manipulation of PR was the primary focus.
Over time internet marketers and web developers realized that a site's PR was seemingly based on the quantity, quality, and velocity of backlinks to a site. (Velocity refers to the number of backlinks being built during a given period.) This began the great SEO race for links, during which time every strategy from straight-up buying links to participating in schemes, link exchanges, and many other tactics was used.
Many SEOs began to manipulate the anchor text of the backlinks they were building, as this seemed to be a critical metric used to determine the quality of the link and the site it referenced. In fact, this strategy is still widely practiced today despite compelling evidence that the power of an anchor text link has been seriously diluted by over-use.
During the last decade SEO has been sometimes a battle and sometimes a dance between internet marketers, webmasters, and of course search engines. With Google's algorithm updates in the last year that targeted poor-quality content, paid links, links schemes, and sites with over-optimized on-page factors, there really isn't much left to the industry.
Today SEO is very different from what it was in the past. The only remaining effective strategy is to create powerful, valuable, and useful content and distribute that content in the places where users will specifically look for it. This isn’t an easy task, and if the history of SEO thus far is any indicator, it’s a full-time job for most businesses. Trust this job only to a leading SEO firm by calling the number at the top of your screen now for an immediate consultation.
