content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the
mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early web Initially, all webmasters needed to do was to submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a "Spider" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be
index
The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and
storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program,
known as an indexers,
extracts various information about the page, such as the words it
contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific
words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a
scheduler for crawling at a later date.
Site owners started to recognize the value of having their 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 documented by
a web page from the MMG site from August, 1997.
Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like AlIWEB.
Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using meta data to
index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the
webmaster's choice of keywords 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 also manipulated a number of attributes within
the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.
By relying so much on factors such as Keyword
which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search
engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better
results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their result pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages
stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the
success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability
to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those
results to be false would turn users to find other search sources.
Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms,
taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for
webmasters to manipulate. Graduate students at Stanford University ,
developed "Backrub," a search engine that relied on a mathematical
algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by
the algorithm, PR is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound link
PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given 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 page is more likely to be reached by the
random surfer.
Page and Brin founded google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.
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Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were
considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, ,
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 difficult to
game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes
to influence the
search engine, and these methods 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 involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of
By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed
factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link
manipulation. In June 2007, The New York Times' Saul