Part 1. The Early Years
The actual term SEO (search engine optimization) started being thrown around in 1997. Webmasters and content providers started doing SEO in the mid 1990’s. What is SEO today however is though quite a drastic revolution from what constituted SEO back then.
People started to mess around with SEO concepts in the days when Yahoo was the dominant force in the search engine space. Back then webmasters only needed to submit their URL’s the different search engines. These search engines would send spiders to crawl and index the sites. As soon as the realization was made of having your website on the first page of a search engine’s results, they began in earnest for ways to manipulate the algorithms used to create these results.
Search engine algorithms relied on on-site information to determine page rankings, in other words they relied on information that was provided by the webmaster. Things such as meta tags, density and index files. All webmasters needed to do was put in the right keywords in the sufficient density and they would start seeing front-page search engine rankings in no time. The web content providers also started to manipulate source code to get clients higher rankings. This started to result in SERP’s becoming unreliable and often filled with spam pages who’s keyword tags did not accurately represent the actual content of the page.
The first algorithm ‘crackers’ appeared around 1997. Being able to decode a search engines algorithm (which back then was quite possible), unscrupulous webmasters could get sites into the top 10 as their will. In 1997 several SEO providers decoded Excites algorithm to its full extent of 35 parameters.
Staying with the historical theme here’s a short video about how it all began…
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Excellent article! Any link for part 2?thanks
Hi Chris, It will be coming soon. Watch this space..
Hi Rick,
the seo is as old as the first introduction of www at that time few Stanford researchers tried to promote thru blinking link ( there was a browser instead of search engine which had a lot of link which one person on another end could navigate to find files/folders). Though that time there was no option to track the traffic or maintain it but linking was the option to find datas. Even in 90s in montreal telnet server search or archieve was launched but it was damn slow ( you see how ftp webserver works ).
wayback machine is the example of old archive engine .
i regular follow your post but this time writing to you.