The History Of SEO



Search Engine Optimization, the term and the phenomenon has dominated the online marketing since its creation. In this digital age, we tend to pay attention whenever somebody talks about SEO. Developers, digital marketers and online influencers take SEO very seriously and make sure that everything works perfectly when it comes to delivering and increasing brand value through SEO.

SEO provides a tremendous opportunity for each and every type of business to make an online impact. Search engines support SEO practices to improve their services and their customers’ experiences. The art of SEO is nearly two decades old. So it is evident that SEO has a fascinating history.

Over the time, people have predicted that “SEO is dead” or “SEO is a boon”. Now, sticking to the topic, we will delve into the brilliant history of the SEO.

A history of an online superhero- SEO

Back in the day when there were only a couple of websites and email service providers who were ruling the internet, Archie (yes, the word read “Archie” without the letter ‘v’) had been introduced in 1990 as the first search engine of the world.

In initial years, search engines were managed by humans, not by crawlers as is the case of today for Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. People at Archie used to index and rank the web pages/websites manually. Sounds a tough job, right? Well, not exactly because unlike today, earlier there were not many websites.

The legend was born

After a couple of years, on 1994, a genius and enthusiast of Washington, Brian Pinkerton invented a revolutionary concept of now, i.e. Crawlers. He made it possible to crawl all the web pages across the World Wide Web that were favorable results for a searched query. However, his invention was only able to index then top 25 websites in the world.

After that, comes the excite.com, a portal of website collection which is still active. They purchased Brian’s web crawler in 1996. However, in 2001 Excite had stopped collecting results.

In 1994, Lycos was invented, which was one of the earliest crawler-based search engines that had crawled over 60 million online sources. In the past, Lycos was a strong competitor of Google and also used to lead the market for some time.

In the initial years of 21st century, Yahoo was the major player in the market. People used to find resources mostly from Yahoo. But the dominance did not last long as Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed their search engine.

Yes, it was the Google!

Not discussing about the Google while talking about SEO is not possible. Today, Google is one of the largest enterprises of the world. The company is the leading service provider when it comes to search engines. Google now rules the search engine market and almost everybody who uses the internet, follows Google and its guidelines for better online revenue generation.

Major players have started emerging then, as back in 2009, Microsoft created its search engine too, known as Bing. Though the product is good and holds a slight amount of the market share but has not succeeded so far in beating Google.

How Google drives the markets of search engine and search engine optimization is also very fascinating. The invention of PageRank algorithm (named after one of the founders of Google, Larry Page) by Google also helped them in clinching the industry title. It is an algorithm which Google uses to rank its website in Search Engine Result Pages. Due to the existence of PageRank, also known as “Link Juice”, one of the essential elements of SEO came into existence, i.e., Link Building.

Link building is a technique of creating our websites link in various authoritative websites to get the benefit of their domain authority and rank better in search engine result pages.

Today, Google holds more than 70%; Bing holds around 20% and Yahoo holds almost 8% market share for search engines. Google has come with several algorithms like Panda, Hummingbird, Penguin and Pigeon to improve its services which proved to be very successful for Google.

There is no second thought that SEO has come a long way from being managed by humans to crawlers and from giving information to generating revenues.