History And Evolution Of SEO

Google was founded in 1998 as a search engine, its growth was very rapid. So, now let's take a peep into the history and evolution of SEO. In 2001, they introduced web crawler also called spider or google bot which scans the web pages and takes a snapshot. These pages were saved to the database according to various category and processes are crawling, caching and indexing. In order to make the web pages crawlable google gave the access to modify or optimize web pages to webmasters. They tried to give quality search results by avoiding all non-useful data. For that, updation of search algorithms were done.

Initially, the search algorithm was content specific that is the results were given on the basis of focusing keyword's occurrence in web pages. The website having a higher number of searching keyword was ranked top. This resulted in many problems like keyword stuffing, non-ethical SEO practice etc. Here the quality of search results was less so the algorithm was changed to link specific from content specific. In link specific, the ranking was based on the number of links to publishing pages. The quality was not improved much after this updation due to paid links. Then quality link specific came, here ranking was based on page rank or trust value of website which provides the links. After implementing this the website having pagerank began to sell links and for avoiding this, a feature called passing the juice was added to the algorithm.

The revenue of Google was increased after advertisement programme called Google AdWords which include text ads and shopping ads. Google AdSense helped users to make revenue. In 2009 Google suggests and personalized search result was implemented. After the addition of social media signal to the algorithm in 2010, the websites can be shared in social media. Then ranking was influenced by authority value or social media influential value based on interactions in social media.

Google Updations 

Let us have a glance into the updations of Google.

Panda Updation

Google made a strong updation in 2011 called panda updation which was against content spamming includes content duplication, content spinning, thinny pages, grammatical errors and fewer quality contents. Panda 4.0 updation was successful and was added to Google's main algorithm as a permanent filter which helped to remove content spamming.

Penguin Updation

In 2012 Google made another updation called penguin updation which was against link spamming like paid links, link exchange, link farming, internal link, comment spamming, wiki spamming etc. Penguin 4.0 was made real-time updation.

Other Updations

There are some other updations, pigeon updation is related to local ranking or local SEO that means some category listing will be based on the location of the user. Hummingbird updation is related to the semantic search result and Rank brain updation is an advanced version of hummingbird updation which uses Artificial Intelligence(AI) to filter search results. Parked domain updation was done to remove parked domains from search results. Exact Match Domain(EMD) updation punished websites using the exact focusing keyword as the domain name. The pirate update is against duplication of images, contents etc. Mobilegeddon updation was made to make websites mobile friendly, the text must be readable without tapping or zooming the screen. Now the websites which are not mobile friendly are not shown in the search listing.

Hope that you enjoyed the blog and got an idea regarding the history and evolution of SEO.

-THASNEEM M.H