Study On The History and Evolution Of Search Engine Optimization

History and Evolution of Search Engine Optimization     

Google was launched in 1998, the company has been continuously redesigning  its search algorithm to better match users with online content. Search engine Optimization is about making Small Modifications To parts of your Website, which will certainly create a good improvement on your site’s user experience & performance in the search engine result.

Three Basic Terms in SEO :

·       Crawling (discovery), Google crawls our site and records data & analysis on what our website is marketing and will list accordingly. This process is done by Google’s spider crawling

·       Indexing, after crawling has been done the result gets put onto Goggle’s index. Indexing is the process of adding website into Google page depending upon which Meta tag you used.

·       Ranking, it refers to a websites position in the search engine result page, this depends on the quality of backlinks pointing to the page. backlinks are links from outside that point to pages on your domain.

Search Engine Optimization is divided into two parts mainly

On-Page Optimization is the aspects of a given web page that influences search engine rankings, it is easy and user friendly to use.

Off-Page Optimization refers to all the measures outside of the website in order to improve its position in search rankings, these are measures that can create many high-quality backlinks as possible.

Webmasters, are the people who controls the website and make changes to the page if necessary to get listed in the ranking Webmaster is a tool that helps in informing us if there is any problems accessing the website such as increased crawling errors, unnatural links and more .

          

                          Evolution of SEO

Google became content specific, this led to a problem known as “Keyword stuffing “It is the process of unnecessarily adding more and more keyword in a content to list them self in top of the ranking list and lacked good content which made Google users unsatisfied.

There are 3 types of SEO experts

·       BLACK HAT EXPERTS are those who follow these non-ethical practices to get listed in top of Google ranking, such as hidden text, keyword stuffing, duplicate content, bait and switch and so more.

·       WHITE HAT EXPERTS are those who follow the rules and guide lines of the Google and struggles hard to get their website listed in Google with ethical practices.

·       GREY HAT EXPERTS also known as growth hackers are those whose practises are much riskier than White Hat SEO, but one that may or may not result in your sites being banned from search engine.

Due to these Black Hat and Grey Hat SEO’s Google keep making changes or updating their algorithm in order to punish these unethical SEO users by banning their website from Google or listing them out from search engine. The CHANGES that Google made along these year to improve there search engine are by bring in the following updates in their algorithm.

Ø Keyword met tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; they are little content descriptors that tell search engine what the web page is about. Meta tags only exist in HTML.

After this Google search engine became

Ø Link Specific, Google decided to rank the websites by the number of links they have or get for their website. More links in website more value, this was the new policy introduced

Later it became

Ø Quality link specific, by this Google ranked websites according to the number of quality links they have, Google modified links by giving them ratings from 0 to 10. Hence links with higher rating got preference and the ranking of websites with such links became on top position.

Ø Passing the Juice, Link juice is the term used in the SEO world to refer to the value or equity passed from one page or site to another. This value is passed through hyperlinks. Search engines see links as votes by other websites that your page is valuable and worth promoting.

Hyperlink Anchor Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. In modern browsers it is often blue and underlined.

Later Google stared advertising products through Google ad words, this is a system where people could pay and promote their products and websites.

2008, Google became more user friendly, Google suggest came into place, by typing the fest few words, google started giving suggesting totheir users making it more easier. But only if the user is logged inn.

This is the year when Bounce rate started affecting the websites ranking, i.e. users not spending sufficient time in a website and quickly going in search of a better one.

Pogo Sticking also started affecting the ranking of websites, pogo-sticking occurs when a website ranks highly but fails to satisfy the needs of people using that search term. If this becomes a common occurrence on your landing pages, Google and other search engines will come to the conclusion that your page is ranking for the term erroneously and your rankings will drop. 

 2010 was the most powerful year for Google, they started dominating the industry. Their social media changes to Google media authority.

 2011 Google started a new team named Web Spam Team to maintain the quality of their search engine and give only good results to their users. Further modifications were made to ensure quality and trust to their users hence PANDA UPDATE was introduced.

1. The Panda Update was first launched in February 2011 This update is designed to target sites with low quality content and prevent them from ranking well in search engine results pages. They removed content spammers from search engine.Their methords in removing content spammers where according to 

           ·       Copy/content plagiarism/content duplication

           ·       Grammar/ spelling mistakes

           ·       Content spinning

           ·       Thin pages(low content)

           ·       Keyword stuffing

In 2014 May 20^th an updated version of Panda was added to their algorithm named “Panda 4.0” this update was responsible for removing millions of websites with content duplication. Panda update became a main algorithm; it became the permanent filtration process in Google.

2.    Penguin update came into action from October 5, 2012 .This update was introduced to fight against;

·       Link Spamming

·       Link Exchange

·       Link Selling/Buying

·       Link Farming

·       Content Spamming

·       Wiki Spamming  &

·       Guest Blogging

Later this update was upgraded with “Penguin 4.0 version” on September 23^rd of 2016. This version penguin update became Real time i.e. punishment on link spammers became on the spot, as and when one does it.

3.    Pigeon Update was announced on July 2014 and this update was responsible for “locally listing SEO” on to their website. The pigeon update compared to the other updates in the Google algorithm is very minute update.

4.    On 2012, April 16^th a new update named “parked domains”

A Parked Domain is a domain that usually sits underneath the Primary domain. Parking is a function of a DNS (Domain Name Server) entry, where the DNS zone for both the parked and primary domains resolves to the same document root.

5.    Exact-Match Domain (EMD) update is a filter Google launched in September 2012 to prevent poor quality sites from ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names. When a fresh EMD Update happens, sites that have improved their content may regain good rankings. New sites with poor content or those previously missed by EMD may get caught.

6.    August 20^th 2013 was the day when Hummingbird update was launched . This update became a semantic search result, Semantic SEO refers to a question  that produces meaningful results, even when the results don’t contain an exact match of the words 

A new version of this update is “Rank Brain update”. This update was announced on October 26^th 2015, is an artificial intelligence system that helps Google process some of its search results. It is based upon feedbacks.

7.    2015 April 21^st was the year when Mobilegeddon update was introduced to their algorithm to make Google become mobile friendly as more users started using mobile phones and tabs more than of laptops and computers . it became a Responsive device i.e. website adjusting to the width of the tab or phone,tap targets should be placed properly , texting should be readable without zooming or tapping ,should be vertical scrolling  and so on. If these requirements weren’t fulfilled by the websites Google removed them out of their search engine. This was the main responsibility of Mobilegeddon update.

               Ivan Iype Jacob