Next, I’ll present a brief history of SEO, highlighting some milestones that will help you understand the current reality of search engine optimization.
SEO evolves
“There’s nothing better than knowing where we come from and where we are to know where we’re going.”
Search engine optimization has undergone significant evolution since the appearance of the first websites. This evolution has been driven primarily by two factors:
Firstly, due to the emergence and development of the major search engines, especially Google.
.Due to the paradigm shift in SEO, which has gone from being understood as a set of technical improvements and implementations to being an area closely related to Marketing and Digital Business.
To clearly understand how this evolution has occurred, let’s divide the life of SEO into a series of stages.
Primitive SEO. The 1990s
The first recorded website appeared around 1991. By 1993, when indexing began, there were already a handful of sites that could compete to be the most visited by Internet users at the time. Due to this growth, it became necessary to begin organizing and cataloging these pages based on their content.
At this time, what would become the first search engine emerged: Excite. This search engine began classifying web pages based on two main criteria:
The keywords found in your content.
The quality of the backend
Since the emergence of the Excite search engine, webmasters began developing and orienting their websites with the idea of being indexed.
In the mid-1990s, search engines began to proliferate, improving the way they crawled, indexed, classified, and displayed information to users. Thus, powerful companies such as Yahoo and AltaVista emerged, and later, in 1997, Google appeared.
At this time, with the emergence of new players, search engines were already incorporating new parameters into their algorithms to decide which pages responded to user searches and how visible each one should be. These parameters include the number of visits, the number of times the search keyword was repeated, and the number of backlinks or external links pointing to a given page.
This increase in the complexity of algorithms means that webmasters must adapt to these changes when developing their portals. The new possibilities that are opening up also lead to the emergence of certain techniques of dubious legality aimed at increasing visibility. Shortcuts, cheats, and over-optimization are among the tools that are beginning to be used during this period, and which are being called Black Hat SEO.
The beginnings of SEO as we know it. The 2000s
The beginning of SEO as we know it stems from the paradigm shift I mentioned at the beginning of the article: Internet users are no longer seen as users, but as consumers. This leads to a race of work and investments by companies to try to be in the top positions and therefore increase their potential customers and revenue.
SEO is moving from being a matter for developers to becoming part of companies’ marketing techniques, in this case digital marketing. This new reality is leading to a deeper focus on SEO specialization, and all kinds of techniques continue to emerge to gain positioning advantages. Thus, we see how Black Hat SEO techniques continue to increase. In this case, keyword stuffing (the over-appearance of keywords in web text), backlink traffic, and content copying are becoming very popular.
Since its inception, Google has summarized the philosophy of its algorithms as follows: customer experience. Any assessment this company makes of internet websites will aim to meet users’ expectations when performing a search with its tool. Therefore, all shortcuts, traps, and black hat SEO techniques begin to be considered a problem.
In this situation, Google decides to take the initiative and end a certain monopoly established by webmasters through dubious procedures. In this way, it aims, on the one hand, to penalize irregular techniques and facilitate visibility for the maximum number of websites possible. Always with the aim of offering the best experience to its platform’s users.
With these objectives in mind, in the 2000s, it began a series of updates to its algorithms, taking SEO to very high levels of complexity and professionalization. This led to the fall of some of its competitors (such as Altavista, which was absorbed by Yahoo).
User orientation continues to deepen, and greater interaction with users begins to be sought. With this objective, attention is placed on more attractive elements and content, such as multimedia or news.
The Impact of the Panda Algorithm. 2010
Between 2010 and 2012, perhaps the most significant changes in SEO to date took place. Among these changes, the emergence of the PANDA algorithm, named after the engineer who designed it: Navneet Panda, stands out. Following the development and implementation of this algorithm, changes began to be implemented that promoted the most interesting websites with the best content over those that were poorer and less developed. This caused a true revolution, as the shift in websites and the changes in their rankings were significant. It is estimated that up to 20% of websites were affected by the PANDA algorithm during this period.
From this moment on, many of the tricks and shortcuts that had been used for ranking stopped working, and websites had to earn their rankings through hard work. Among other factors and practices, SEO efforts began to focus on aspects such as:
Original, high-quality content
High-value content
Easy to share
And most importantly: at the user’s service
This last point is fundamental, as it is the guiding principle that should govern all SEO actions.
SEO Today
Currently, SEO is undergoing continuous changes, heavily focused on offering more personalized results to users, while also seeking customer satisfaction with new formats for presenting information and meeting needs.
In this new SEO paradigm, elements and technologies such as BIG DATA, cookies, search history, and user location are very important. All of these elements combined lead to increasingly personalized results. On the downside, access to certain technologies is, in some cases, restricted due to their cost, so there is a risk of gaps in the ability of different Internet players to position a website.
Although it has been around for some time, the emergence of Web 2.0 brought about a series of important changes in terms of user behavior and the new information formats that were beginning to be used. It is no longer a website, developed by specialists, where information is sent in one direction. Since the emergence of Web 2.0, user participation in the Internet ecosystem has been considered essential. This makes perfect sense if we consider that user satisfaction is the goal of all SEO actions.
Thus, formats such as reviews, product and service ratings, posts, news, and multiplatform content have begun to appear and gain positive value. Websites that contain this type of information and formats tend to be valued more highly, to the detriment of conventional websites. This last point is crucial, as it should govern all SEO actions.
The Brief History of SEO Doesn’t End Here
So far, I’ve presented this brief history of SEO, but I’m sure this article will be updated soon, as SEO is a discipline or set of techniques that are constantly developing and evolving at a considerable speed.
Vector de Tecnología creado por vectorpouch – www.freepik.es
