SEO Basics History And Evolution

SEO - History And Evolution

SEO - History and Evolution is vast topic.First of all let me give you a brief idea of - What is SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a technique used to increase the visitors to a website by achieving High Ranking placement in a Search Engine results page. The higher a website is ranked in a results page of a search, the greater the chance that the site will be visited by more users. SEO optimizes websites by using different techniques.

There are two types of SEO practices.

1) White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO make use of optimization techniques and tactics that focus mainly on human audience of a search engine and completely follows rules or guidelines by Google themselves.

2) Black Hat SEO 

Black Hat SEO on the other hand focuses only on aggressive SEO strategies and tactics on a search engine rather than a human audience. And this type does not follow search engine guidelines.

Basics 

Before I start with the History of SEO, I would like to give you a basic idea about how a search engine collects all the information and gives back the required answer in the results page. For this a Google or any search engine uses 3 techniques

1) Crawling : - The Googlebot crawls web pages to analyze the details of that each page in a website.

2) Catching: - After crawling, Google bots takes a snapshot of the web page and saves it in the database.

3) Indexing: - After crawling and catching is done.When users search for a website in a search engine, Google displays appropriate answer. This display of results to the users by a search engine is called Indexing.

Other Important basics one must know about is Google Adwords and Adsense

Google Adwords: - AdWords is an advertising service offered by Google for businesses wanting to display ads on Google. The AdWords program enables businesses to set a budget for advertising and only pay when people click the ads, that is called PPC (Pay Per Click) . By using Addwords we can .

1. Attract More Customers

2. Advertise Locally or Globally              

3. Reach Right People  at Right Time

Google AdSense: - AdSense is an advertising service by Google. The program is designed for website owners who want to display videos, text or image advertisements on our website pages and earn money when site visitors view or click the ads. These advertisements are administered and maintained by Google.

History

As the internet evolved, greater need to organize and find information inspired developers to create some means to search information. In 1990 first search engine was created as a school project. They did not resemble today's modern search engines. Like the internet, search engine evolved as advances were made in technology. With search engines becoming more popular between people. More people becoming connected to the internet, for finding information with great ease. One of the main problems at this stage was the quality of information. While search engines matched the keywords that users searched for, it was really limited to just that. As a large amount of website owners did keyword stuffing and other black hat SEO practices to improve ranking and increase the possible visits to their sites.(Here keyword stuffing technique means that a web page is repeated or stuffed with a keyword in the contents of a web page).

  Evolution

If we talk about SEO Evolution. In the early 90's there were no ranking criteria. It was in the early 2000 that marked the beginning of Google takeover. Google began to provide guidelines for white hat SEO's to help webmasters rank without any problem. There were many updates throughout the years in a search engine. Some of them were as follows.

Niche specific Method 

 

At first Google was Niche specific or content specific. It gave priority to the repetition of keywords. When people began to take advantage of this technique and started to practice keyword stuffing, Google changed its method to Link Specific.

Link Specific Method

This guidelines didn’t have an actual impact on ranking so people didn't bother to follow them. This was because Link specific page ranking was based on the number of inbound links to a given page. The more link you are able to collect to your site, the higher your ranking went. But there wasn't yet any means to measure to authenticity of these links. Google outdated this update by introducing a new method called Quality link specific.  

Quality Link Specific Method

In this method Google introduced a new measure called Page Ranking. By this means we could measure the quality of inbound link.That is if we have a number of possible inbound links with higher Page Rank (High Quality Pages) our website will be ranked much higher in the results page of a search engine. When people began to misuse this method by buying and selling high quality pages to improve the ranking, Google introduced an algorithm called passing the juice.

Passing The juice: - In this algorithm, if a website sells the links to many other low quality of unethical sites, the Page Rank of that website will automatically decrease. Here a problem that came was you need to set some links in our websites. Example: If you want to link the meaning of a word to Wikipedia, the ranking will decrease. So to prevent this Google also set a new measure called rel=”nofollow”.

rel=nofollow: - This is a value to instruct Google that the link should not influence the ranking of the website. It was in the year 2009 that Google put forward a big update.

Pogo Sticking Method

In this update depending upon the user response to a site Google automatically increased or decreased the ranking of a website. In this method if users spend more time in you site the ranking of the site will automatically increase.

Bounce Rate: - Users tend to bounce from your site by closing or navigating to another site within seconds of opening your site, bounce rate of your site increases and the ranking automatically goes down.

Google Updates  

In 2011 Google assigned a search quality team to measure and maintain the quality of updates. Throughout the years Google put forward many updates to avoid the black hat users from practices which are unethical. These update helped Google to find and punish the black hat practices like spamming, keyword stuffing etc. Some of the main updates Google put forward are.

Google Panda Update

It’s an update against Content Spamming. If a website tends to do content duplication or spamming by copy pasting contents from other websites, Panda will catch and punish you for content Plagiarism. With the success of this update Google updated panda into version 4, where content spamming pages were permanently removed. Google also added panda algorithm into their main algorithm as a permanent filter.

Google Penguin Update


This update was to fight against link spamming practices. Some of the link spamming methods are.

1. Selling or Buying Links.

2. Quality Less Directory.

3. Link Exchange.

4. Website Hacking.

5. Comment Spamming.

 

Google Pigeon Update

It is an algorithm to provide users with more relevant and accurate local search results. Example: If we search for hotel from somewhere we need to get a hotel near to us as the first priority. But for our websites to be enabled in the search result after this update, we need to optimize our website with some details. They are
1. Place mark list should be given  
2. Our website should be visible in local Directories (Sulekha Yellow pages etc.).
3. Address, contact number, Pin number should be available in the about us page or contact page.
4. Geo tagging should be enabled in our website
5. Social media interactions should have local reviewers or audiences.


Humming Bird Update

It mainly focuses on deep search results. Through this update a more personal search result is received by the user. Hummingbird is an algorithm, which is made up of more than 200 factors that can affect ranking and search. Hummingbird was released very quietly in August 2013 and most site owners didn’t notice a difference. So instead of working in such a way that looks for individual words, Hummingbird works in such a way that it can better understand a question, such as “where can I find a chemist in Cochin”. It looks for the meaning behind the words, rather than just at the words themselves and it looks at the entire phrase to decipher that meaning.


Google Pirate Update

According to this update by Google we cannot copy files from a copyright protected file from another website. Pirate Update is a filter introduced in August 2012 designed to prevent sites with many copyright infringement reports, as filed through Google's DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) system, from ranking well in Google search engine.

SEO is important because it is not only about search engine. But a good SEO practices improves the user experience and usability of a website. Users trust search engines. So having a high rank in the search results page is really important. This is because the search engine users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the results page. So SEO is a unavoidable factor now and even more in the coming years.

Sulfikar K M