The History of Search Engine Optimization Part 1: 1994 to 2000
In the early days of the internet, search engines were edited by humans. Back in those days, the internet had very few websites and search engine staff could manually rank websites according to their relevancy to search terms.
Today, things have obviously changed, and there are nearly 4 billion webpages on the internet according to WorldWideWebSize.com. Even for a large team of human beings, it would take centuries to manually rank and review all of these websites.
That’s why today’s search engines use ‘spiders’ to crawl the web. Spiders look for key search terms (and other information) on webpages and use that information to rank websites according to their relevancy.
1994 – The world’s first web crawler is created
In 1994, a scientist named Brian Pinkerton created the world’s first web crawler. That crawler was designed to index webpages from top to bottom and use that information to generate a list of the top 25 websites. At the time, it was advanced. Today, it’s primitive.
1997 – Search engines rise and fall using crawlers
A handful of companies realized the power of a technology that could instantly scan webpages and extract information from those pages. Between 1994 and 1997, a number of search engines would rise and fall, including Excite and Lycos.
This was also the year when marketing agencies started to take serious note of the internet and, by extension, search engines. As a result, SEO pioneer Danny Sullivan launched his website Search Engine Watch, which continues to be an excellent source of SEO information to this day, over 16 years later.
1998 – Google becomes a serious force
In 1998, Google was one of many search engines competing for attention over the strange landscape known as the internet. Google knew it had to do something to differentiate itself from the competition, which is why it created PageRank. PageRank isn’t named after the word ‘webpage’. Instead, it’s named after Google co-founder Larry Page. Instead of basing a site’s value solely off its content, PageRank looked at the website’s incoming links from other websites and instantly changed the SEO industry.
1999 – Search engine algorithms begin confounding SEO experts
By the late 1990s, SEO experts and search engines were already a few months into their love/hate relationship. Algorithm updates are the bumps in this relationship, and the first major ‘algo’ update to hit the radar of SEOs was Altavista’s 1999 algorithm update which caused plenty of sites to disappear completely in a day known in infamy as Black Monday.
2000 – Google launches AdWords and revolutionized the industry again
Google is king today because it saw potential in ideas before other search engines could. AdWords was one such idea. Google launched AdWords late in 2000. Unlike today, the early version of AdWords was a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model and not a PPC (pay per click) model.
Around the same time, Google decided to make PageRank information publically available with the use of the Google Toolbar. This toolbar, installed on your Internet Explorer browser, would display the PageRank of the website you’re currently visiting. SEOs began to use this information to focus on finding links from high-value sources.
Read part 2, from 2002 to 2013, to find out what happens next!
