History and Evolution of SEO

HISTORY OF GOOGLE

First of all we will be talking about the history of Google, before the history and evolution of SEO. Initially Google was a project which was given to the founders of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, by Stanford University, California. After their studies they stared Google as a company. Google was a search engine. Google was not famous till 2000. The major turning point in the history and evolution of Google was after the World Trade Center attack. Many people started using google after the World Trade Center attack which was on September 11, 2001. The attack was planned by Al-Qaeda to get popularity. People used google and searched for World Trade Center. In 2001, the biggest building was World Trade Center. But Google was unable to give enough information about World Trade Center since those web pages were unable to crawl. 

                           

SEO - Search Engine Optimization 

In 1989, the World Wide Web burst into our lives. It later evolved into a highly intelligent, unbelievably sophiscated source of the accumulated knowledge of the world. Once the dust had settled, there came a desire to explore the ever-growing forest of information, so search and SEO were born.

Crawling is the process of scanning documents to understand what it is about. Google takes snapshots of web pages and saves relevant database according to their categories. Crawling is done using web crawlers; they scan new pages. It can also be known as robots, spider, bots, google bots etc. 

Catching is a process or way of taking a copy or snap of a website. 

Indexing: Show the relevant results that was already cached during crawling.

Webmasters controls websites and make new editions; updates login details.

EVOLUTION OF SEO

When the web pages were optimized google was able to easily crawl the pages. But over-optimization leads to spamming.

At first, Google was niche specific (a.k.a content specific). In a content specific search engine, a website was ranked based on the number of occurrence of keyword of keywords. If the key word occurs more number of times, the chances of ranking high were more. Purpose of keyword: For getting first preference in google search. During this phase, when users searched in google, they got low quality results. These low quality results were shown only because the use of key words were more. Google didn't want to provide low quality results for the users since that may affect google. The webmasters started and tried to maximize the use of key words in their web pages and the technique is known as key word stuffing. 

SEO techniques are of two types : White Hat SEO (Ethical) & Black Hat SEO (Non-ethical)

Keyword Stuffing?

It is a black hat SEO technique where we inject/stuff the keyword to increase ranking.

Due to the usage of this technique Google changed the search engine from content specific to link specific. 

In a link specific search engine, if we get recommendation links or hyperlinks from other websites (as vote of recommendation), the ranking increases.  In this phase, webmasters tried to increase the number of links available in their websites.   The webmasters didn't bother to improve the quality of their website neither tried to improve the login time nor did they try to publish the contents which were useful for the users.  In this situation, many websites started to sell links which were not under the policy of google.  So google again changed, to quality link specific.  

In the quality link specific type, google introduced a new rating system called page rank.  Page ranking was introduced to increase the trust value.  Page rank decides which type of websites should be shown in the search result.  Page rank indicates trust value of a website.  Basic units of page ranking is done using around 200 points.  From 2019, page rank can't be seen; google either hided or cancelled.  Webmasters started buying links from websites having good page ranks.  When this started, google again changed their algorithm and introduced a new technique called passing juice.  

Passing juice:  Link juice is the term used in the SEO world to refer to the value or equity (power) passed from one page or site to another.  Google also introduced rel=no follow; a provision for adding no follow links. 

< a href ="https://www.google.com" rel="nofollow"> Google</a>

When google got famous as a search engine, it introduced an advertisement program called GoogleAdWords (nowadays known as Google Ads).  It also introduced GoogleAdSense, which helps to generate revenue by showing ads in websites.  Literally, both Google Ads and GoogleAdSense are connected.  The amount spent by users for  Google Ads is given to the users who use GoogleAdSense in their websites, as their commission.

AdSense CPC:  The cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount you earn each time a user clicks on your ad.  The CPC for any ad is determined by the advertiser; some advertisers may be willing to pay more per click than others, depending on what they are advertising.  

To increase revenue in the websites, publishers do SEO in their website, optimize, and try to increase their ranking.  At the same time, if google does an update, this affects the ranking, decreases the number of visits to the website and also decreases chances of generating revenue through CPC.

When their revenue decreases, automatically google's revenue also decreases.  In 2009, google introduced some new changes in their search engine such as Google Suggest, Google personalized search result.  The Google search engine was made more interactive so that their search engine becomes more useful for other users.  They also introduced provision for doing calculation, for knowing IP address, for knowing weather etc.  Moreover, a search engine they tried to make Google a personal assistant.  In 2009, an important modification was done, that is the websites were ranked based on the interaction of users.  If a user spend more time in a website or go to the inner pages of the website or do a re-visit/regular visit in that website or comment or subscribe or register or do any such activity on a website, this increases the ranking of the website.  

In 2010, Google brought a change in their algorithm by introducing social media signal.  In this updation, if the page of a website, blog post or article got shared in social media platforms like Facebook, Orkut etc. the ranking of that website increases.  

It was during 2010, the social media usage got an increased hike.  So Google made social media also a way of increasing ranking.  Users who have their websites, blogs etc. started sharing it on social media; they created accounts in Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn etc. and created their pages which brought an increased  change in their website  ranking. Change in ranking based on the interaction of users was therein social media signal also.  If users having more influential power on social media interact (that is like or comment) to your website post, this also helps to increase the ranking.