Oldest known version of this page was edited on 2012-01-26 15:00:32 by GaryFreeman []
Webmasters and content material providers began optimizing websites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters had to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that webpage, extract links to other pages from it, and return data discovered on the page to be indexed. The system requires a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, including the words it contains and where these are located, in addition to any weight for specific words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later time.

Site owners began to appreciate the value of having their web sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase search engine optimization probably came into use in 1997. The first documented use of the term Search Engine Optimization was John Audette and his company Multimedia Marketing Group as reported by a web page from the MMG web site from August, 1997.

Earlier versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index data files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using meta data to index pages was identified to be less than reliable, however, given that the webmaster's choice of keywords and phrases in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Web content providers additionally manipulated a variety of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an effort to rank effectively in search engines.

By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To present better ranking results to their users, search engines had to adapt to guarantee their results pages displayed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with many keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its capability to create the most related results to any specified search, allowing those results to be untrue would force users to find other search solutions. Search engines responded by designing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more challenging for webmasters to manipulate.

Graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed "Backrub," a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the possibility that a provided page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank site is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the escalating number of Word wide web users, who liked its straightforward design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more tricky to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these measures proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the development of thousands of sites for the sole intent of url spamming.

By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks web-sites using more than 200 different signals. The leading search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. SEO service providers, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Travis Safford, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.

In 2005, Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their record of previous searches, Google crafted ranking results for logged in users. In 2008, Bruce Clay said that "ranking is dead" as a result of personalized search. It would become meaningless to discuss how a web site ranked, simply because its rank would potentially be different for each user and each search.


In 2007, Google announced a campaign in opposition to paid links that transfer PageRank. On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken techniques to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer deal with nofollowed links in precisely the same way, in order to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting. As a result of this change the usage of nofollow leads to evaporation of pagerank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers created alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated Javascript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Furthermore, several alternatives have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, Flash and Javascript.
In December 2009, Google announced it would be employing the web search history of all its users in order to populate search results.

Google Instant, real-time-search, was launched in late 2009 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to develop search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs the primary engines made changes to their algorithms to enable fresh content to rank quickly within the search results.

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