This is just a little grouping of some of the most significant dates known to SEO. Often we hear about what it is and what it can do but we don’t really learn about the history of where all of this search optimization came from and its roots in history.
- 1990’s – Website owners began to optimize for the search engines for the first time. Website owners began to recognize the value of having a website that ranked highly in the search engines and this created an opportunity for both white hat and black hat marketers.
- 1997 – The phrase “Search Engine Optimization” was born according to Danny Sullivan and he credits Bruce Clay as the person that made the term popular.
- Early versions of search algo’s relied on webmasters to supply the needed information. For instance meta data.
- 1997 – Search Engine creators began to realize website owners were manipulating the rankings with HMTL, meta data and stuffing keywords. This made the search engine creators to begin to change their algorithms to try and prevent manipulation of the search rankings. The best way to achieve the best results was to make sure it was factors that were not necessarily in the website owners hands to control.
- 1998 – Two graduate students developed what was termed “Backrub” which is now known as PageRank. Pagerank is an algo that measures the strength of a website determined by the number of links linking to the website. Google began to stop updating pagerank years ago and now the technique is outdated and no longer used because website owners figured out many ways to stack the deck and create inbound links.
- 1998 – Google is born
- 2005 – Google began to personalize search to each individual user
- May 2, 2007 – Jason Gambert tried to trademark the term “SEO” by convincing the trademark office that this is more of a process and not a marketing technique or service. That didn’t really work out for him.
- June 2007 – Saul Hansell stated Google ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.
- 2007 – Google announces a campaign against paid link
- 2009 – Google begins to use the Web History of searchers to populate their results
- 2010 – Google Instant is released and provides real time results
- February 2011 – Panda Update is announced
- 2012 – Google Penguin is released, aims at detecting spammy links and devaluing the site or the links.
- 2013 – Hummingbird was released
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