{"id":110672,"date":"2018-02-14T18:07:05","date_gmt":"2018-02-14T12:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.digitalvidya.com\/blog\/?p=110672"},"modified":"2018-02-14T18:10:11","modified_gmt":"2018-02-14T12:40:11","slug":"history-of-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.digitalvidya.com\/blog\/history-of-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"An Absolutely Fascinating History of SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/span>Introduction<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n
Search Engine Optimization helps you to rank higher up in search engine results<\/a> by providing answers to online searcher queries. Let\u2019s look at a Brief History of SEO and understand how it has evolved over the past 20 years, so we can get a perspective of how to optimize our site and its content better.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span>The Beginning<\/span><\/h3>\n
Google\u2019s founders \u00a0Sergey Brin and Lawrance Page published a paper in the year 1998.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThe Anatomy of Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search\u201d.\u00a0<\/span>The emphasis on quality search results for users had started from then on.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span>The Early 2000s<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

The key objective of Google at that time was to ensure that search-engine technology focused on providing quality results to the users. \u00a0<\/span>Google had issued guidelines for creating quality content.\u00a0<\/span>PageRank of a website was measured on the basis of inbound links. The higher the number of inbound links a website had, the better would be its PageRank. Google also provided a toolbar on Internet Explorer for webmasters to check the PageRank effectively. Adwords had also begun during this time and you could see paid results alongside organic search results.\u00a0<\/span>At this time link quality was not measured. Webmasters were not really following a ‘White-hat’ way to get rankings as suggested by Google.\u00a0<\/span>It is then that Google started off with its algorithm updates.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>Florida Update – 2003-2004<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n
Google rolled out the Florida update in the year 2003. This is when quite a few sites lost their search engine rankings. Many sites who were doing keyword stuffing got penalized. 2003 was also the year when Google acquired Blogger.com and created the blog monetizing platform Adsense. <\/span><\/div>\n
The development did pave the way to a blogging revolution of sorts. But at the same time, there were many blogs which were creating poor quality and thin content and using Adsense to monetize and make quick money. It was 2004 when Google started considering geographic intent when providing results for search queries. This was when local SEO was born. The same year Google also initialized personalized search by utilizing searcher data such as search history and preferences.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span>No-Follow Links – 2005<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n
This was the year of two key developments: Introduction of no-follow link attribute and Google Analytics.<\/span><\/div>\n
This year also saw the advent of Google Instant – the technology helped improve search engine results while social signals became an important ranking factor.<\/span><\/div>\n
Some of the key updates during this time included Jagger and Big Daddy. Jagger was to help Google reduce the low-quality link exchange schemes. It also did away with the anchor text in backlinking. Big Daddy would help Google to better understand the quality and relevance of backlinks.<\/div>\n

<\/span>The Panda Update – 2011<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n
\"Brief
Google panda<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
The Panda update from Google aimed at improving the quality of website content. At this time many sites were found creating content farms with low-quality content (using keyword stuffing) to achieve higher search rankings. The Google Search Engine Pages were full of irrelevant results during this time. Many of these unauthentic content sites saw their rankings vanish in this period.\u00a0<\/span>These sites were penalized by Google and lost their rankings because of poor quality content. \u00a0Google also provided some guidelines on how to create quality content. \u00a0<\/span>This article on guidance for building a high-quality site<\/a>, details quite a few points and these, I think, are relevant even today. There were about 15 versions of the Panda update spread between 2011 to 2014.<\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span>The Penguin Update – 2012<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n
It was seen that many websites were creating spammy low-quality links for better search rankings. The Penguin update penalized websites with irrelevant and bad quality links. The update dealt with all kinds of sites that purchased links from spammy blogs or directories. Here is a brief history of Google Penguin Updates till date and how you can protect yourself from it:<\/span><\/div>\n
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Penguin 1.1 (March 2012)<\/strong><\/div>\n
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This was not exactly an update to Google’s algorithm. This Penguin release punished all those spammy sites which were missed in the original release. At this time, the webmasters who had worked on improving their link profiles saw their rankings go up.<\/div>\n
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Penguin 1.2 (October 2012)<\/strong><\/div>\n
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This release too provided fresh rankings and penalized English as well as Non-English International sites.<\/div>\n
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Penguin 2.0 (May 2013)<\/strong><\/div>\n
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This was a major algorithm update. Google crawlers now started checking websites more thoroughly. They checked suspicious sites beyond their home page and category pages.<\/div>\n
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Penguin 3.0 (October 2014)<\/strong><\/div>\n
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This release too refreshed the rankings and penalized sites which had escaped the earlier updates. Webmasters who had worked on their link profile saw their rankings improve, with this update as well.<\/div>\n
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Penguin 4.0 ( September 2016)<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Penguin now became a part of Google’s core algorithm. It became a real-time update and if you worked on your link profile after this update, you would not have to wait for the next update to see better search rankings. Post this update Penguin would not punish sites with spammy backlinks, rather it would consider spammy backlinks equivalent to no backlinks.<\/div>\n
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