SEO - A Brief History
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the holy grail of Internet marketing.
Who doesn’t want a number one ranking in Google for their keywords? Natural results – not paid. Top of the rankings. King of the hill. Free.
The first generation of search engines, headed by Altavista, were based on information retrieval technologies. These were simple bots that based results on a combination of boolean queries, text relevance, and link popularity.
Metatags developed to let webmasters tell the bots what they thought was relevant to the search engines. Then, the webmasters figured that a simple bot would reward their ranking after every new trick was put into place.
Small text. Hidden text. Keyword dumping. Repeated title tags. Keyword stuffing. Gateway/doorway pages. Cloaking. Keyword anchor text. Link spamming. Link dumping. Keyword laden redirects. H1 text the same color as background. Invisible text. Incoming links from FFA or link farms. Duplicate pages. Meta refresh.
If an SEO trick is known by you, chances are the search engines have already changed their algorithm to detect the trick and penalize – or even delist – your site.
The second generation of search engines has been dominated by Google. By indexing every word on the page, Google developed algorithms and theories about keyword density and inbound links which increased the relevance of the search results. Meta keywords are ignored, but the description still counts.
Google’s position as the 800 pound gorilla in the SEO server room has made it’s owners rich, and the company arrogant. Webmasters work to achieve top natural results positions in the Top 10 only to be crushed with every change to the Google algorithm.
Along comes Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and now the free search engines have a revenue model. Believe it or not, many people thought it was doomed to failure. Google’s Adsense is by far the leader in PPC, but I see the model as getting worn, hacked, and tired. People are still making money, but from the advertisers’ and webmasters’ points of view, the ROI is diminishing.
The other players could not sit back and watch Google take over search. While Google at one point had over 80% of the search market, it’s now about evenly split between Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Money talks. Bullshit gets bought out by the big three.
Third generation search engines include Rollyo, Clusty, Wink, and Lexxe. Built from the existing search engines up to emphasize the user, they have used Web 2.0 collaboration and interoperability to improve the whole search experience.
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