Timeline of search engine optimization
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This is a timeline of search engine optimization.
Contents
Sample questions
The following are some interesting questions that can be answered by reading this timeline:
Big picture
| Time period | Development summary | More details |
|---|---|---|
| 1991–2002 | Prelude time[1] | Early period starting from launch of the world’s first website by Tim Berners-Lee. As websites start crowding the Internet, the first search engines fill a need for structure and accessibility. in 1993, search platforms like Excite revolutionize how information is cataloged and make finding information easier by sorting results based on keywords found within content and backend optimization. Webmasters and content providers begin optimizing websites for search engines in the mid-decade. Yahoo in 1994 and Google in 1997 enter the scene to improve and simplify how data is indexed and delivered. "This is a primitive stage of SEO, in which marketers would leverage keyword stuffing, excessive tagging, and (often spammy) backlinks to generate high rankings in search. Often, major algorithm updates would take several months to complete, allowing black-hat SEO tactics to remain effective for long stretches of time. " "However, in 1996, SEO really took off when Sergey Brin and Larry Page began building what would become the biggest, most recognized search engine to date: BackRub. "[2] |
| 2003–2005 | Early developments[1] | |
| 2006–2009 | "The Middle Ages"[1] | |
| 2010–2012 | "The Enlightenment "[1] | "That year also saw a growing importance of social media content in SEO. " "While the 2009 introduction of Google's real-time search had some social ramifications, social media is becoming a more pivotal piece of SEO strategy."[3] "By 2010 a tactic had appeared where websites were created from large amounts of low-quality textual content, frequently updated and specifically designed to lure search engine algorithms. These sites were linked together forming so-called ‘content farms’ whose only purpose was to drive search engine traffic and, just like doorway pages before them, sending the incoming traffic to the final destination.
As a response, Google decided that the quality of the content should matter more for search engine rankings, and in 2011 launched its ‘Panda’ update which effectively killed the practice. This was later followed by ‘Penguin’ which focused on websites that contained irrelevant links, sneakily added to the otherwise relevant content to the visitor."[4] |
| 2013–present | Modern SEO era[1] | "Then focus moved towards mobile. First in 2014, with the launch of app indexing making apps appear alongside websites in search results and then in 2015 with the so-called ‘Mobilegeddon’ update that made website mobile friendliness a ranking signal in searches."[4] "2018 started with the continuation of mobile as a key focus for search engines."[4] |
Full timeline
| Year | Month and date | Event type | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1945 | Dr.Vannevar Bush in 1945 Introduced the concept of “collection of data and observations, the extraction of parallel material from the existing record, and the final insertion of new material into the general body of the common record.”[5] "The need for search engines was first noted in 1945 when American engineer and scientist Vannevar Bush published an article in The Atlantic Monthly, emphasizing the necessity for an expansive index for all knowledge: "[Information] has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored...Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of the systems of indexing. The human mind does not work this way. It operates by association.""[6] | ||
| 1990 | "Several decades later, in 1990, McGill University student Alan Emtage created Archie, which some say was the very first search engine -- though that remains up for debate, according to research from Bill Slawski, president and founder of SEO by the Sea. However, Archie was what Slawski called the “best way to find information from other servers around the internet at the time,” and is actually still (very primitive) operation."[3] "The first search engine - it searched FTP sites to create index of downloadable files.4 Due to limited space, only the listings were available and not for the contents for each site"[7] "In 1990, McGill University student Alan Emtage created an Archie, which some say was the very first search engine."[5] ". The development of Archie (named for "archives"), the very first search engine created in 1990, was designed to search and store directory listings on file transfer protocol sites."[6] | ||
| 1991 | "Tim Berners-Lee set up a Virtual Library. CERN webserver hosted a list of webservers in the early age of the Internet"[7] | ||
| 1991 | "It is believed that SEO was born in 1991. Around this time, the world’s first website was launched, and one quickly turned into many as websites crowded the internet. So, there was a huge need for structure and accessibility, and the world’s first search engines were created. "[2] | ||
| 1992 | ", in 1992, Gopher became the first search engine using a hypertext paradigm. "[8] | ||
| 1993 | "In 1993, Excite revolutionized how information was categorized"[2] | ||
| 1993 | "For example, in 1992, Gopher became the first search engine using a hypertext paradigm. Only a year later, the graphical Mosaic web browser improved Gopher’s primarily text-based interface. About the same time, Wandex became the first search engine to crawl the web indexing and searching indexed pages on the web."[8] | ||
| 1993 | "For example, in 1992, Gopher became the first search engine using a hypertext paradigm. Only a year later, the graphical Mosaic web browser improved Gopher’s primarily text-based interface. About the same time, Wandex became the first search engine to crawl the web indexing and searching indexed pages on the web."[8] | ||
| 1993 | February | "February 1993: Six Stanford students create Architext, which would later become the search engine Excite. Some, like Search Engine Land (SEL), say that Excite “revolutionized how information was cataloged,” making it easier to find information “by sorting results based on keywords found within content and backend optimization.”"[3] | |
| 1993 | June | "June 1993: Matthew Gray debuts World Wide Web Wanderer, which later became known as Wandex."[3] "World Wide Web Wanderer. Created by Matthew Gray; a bot counted active web servers and “measured the growth” of the Internet. Bot was soon upgraded to capture actual URLs. Database was called Wandex. Bot accessed same page hundreds of times a day and caused lag"[7] | |
| 1994 | January | "Yahoo was created by Stanford University students Jerry Wang and David Filo in a campus trailer. Yahoo was originally an Internet bookmark list and directory of interesting sites. Webmasters had to manually submit their page to the Yahoo directory for indexing so that it would be there for Yahoo to find when someone performed a search. AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos also launched."[9][7] | |
| 1994 | " the first full-text search engine, WebCrawler created in 1994 by Brian Pinkerton. Prior to this, only webpage names/domains were indexed in catalogues."[6] | ||
| 1994 | "The earliest pioneers in the field of SEO also found the Internet not only interesting, but a viable industry money maker. For example in 1994, Greg Boser discovered that he could use the Internet to sell protective foam equipment to fight fires. He built a website and started seeking ways to drive potential customers to his site for sales."[8] | ||
| 1995 | " For example in 1995, John Audette formed Multi-Media Marketing Group (MMG) in Lake Oswego, Oregon on the sale of 4,000 copies of his $30 online book about marketing on the World Wide Web."[8] | ||
| 1996 | " Page and Brin, two Stanford University students, built and tested Backrub, a new search engine that ranked sites based on inbound link relevancy and popularity. Backrub would ultimately become Google. HotBot, powered by Inktomi, also launched."[9] | ||
| 1997 | According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase "search engine optimization" probably comes into use around this time. Sullivan credits Bruce Clay as one of the first people to popularize the term.[10] "all signs definitely point to the term SEO originating around 1997."[9] | ||
| 1997 | April | "April 1997: AskJeeves is introduced, later becoming Ask.com." | |
| 1997 | September | "September 1997: Google.com is registered as a domain name." | |
| 1998 | Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then graduate students at Stanford University, develop "Backrub", a search engine that rely on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links.[11] | ||
| 1998 | "Goto.com launched with sponsored links and paid search. Advertisers bid on Goto.com to rank above organic search results, which were powered by Inktomi. Goto.com was ultimately acquired by Yahoo. DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) became the most sought-after place for SEO practitioners to get their pages listed. MSN entered into search with MSN Search, initially powered by Inktomi."[9][5] | ||
| 1999 | "The first-ever all search marketing conference, Search Engine Strategies (SES), took place. You can read a retrospective on that event by Sullivan here. (The SES conference series continued running under various monikers and parent companies until shutting down in 2016.)"[9][5] | ||
| 2000 | "In 2000, Yahoo pulled off the worst strategic move in the history of search and partnered with Google and let Google power their organic results instead of Inktomi. Beforehand Google was a little-known search engine. Hardly known! The end result: every Yahoo search result said “Powered by Google” and they ended up introducing their largest competitor to the world and Google became a household name."[9] | ||
| 2000 | "It was also in 2000 that the Google Toolbar became available on Internet Explorer, allowing SEO practitioners to see their PageRank score (a number between 0-10). This ushered in an era of unsolicited link exchange request emails."[9][5] | ||
| 2000 | "Google’s organic results also got some company in the form of AdWords ads starting in 2000. These paid search ads began appearing above, below, and to the right of Google’s unpaid results."[9] | ||
| 2000 | "Meanwhile, a group of webmasters informally got together at a pub in London to start sharing information about all things SEO in 2000. This informal gathering eventually turned into Pubcon, a large search conference series that still runs today." | ||
| 2001 | "At one point in 2001, one prominent industry writer suggested search engine marketing as a successor to search engine optimization. Obviously, it didn’t happen."[9] | ||
| 2003 | "In 2003, after acquiring Blogger.com, Google launched AdSense, which serves contextually targeted Google AdWords ads on publisher sites. The mix of AdSense and Blogger.com leads to a surge in monetized simple Internet publishing and a blogging revolution."[9] | ||
| 2004 | "Around 2004, Google and other top search engines started improving results for queries that had a geographic intent (e.g., a restaurant, plumber, or some other type of business or service provider in your city or town)."[9] | ||
| 2004 | "It was also around 2004 that Google and search engines began making greater use of end-user data, such as search history and interests, to personalize search results. This meant that the results you saw could be different than what another person sitting next to you in a coffee shop when searching for the same query."[9] | ||
| 2005 | January | "One of the biggest years in the search engine world was 2005. That January, Google united with Yahoo and MSN for the Nofollow Attribute, which was created in part to decrease the amount of spammy links and comments on websites, especially blogs."[3] | |
| 2005 | June | " Then, in June, Google debuted personalized search, which used someone’s search and browsing history to make results more relevant."[3] | |
| 2005 | "Also in 2005, nofollow tags were created as a means to combat spam. SEO pros began using this tag as a way of PageRank sculpting."[9] | ||
| 2005 | September | "Google also unleashed a couple of noteworthy updates:" "Jagger, which helped to diminish the level of unsolicited link exchanges that were flying around, as well as heralding the decline in the importance of anchor text as a factor due to its corruptibility."[9][12] | |
| 2005 | November | "That November, Google Analytics launched, which is still used today to measure traffic and campaign ROI."[3] | |
| 2005 | December | "Google also unleashed a couple of noteworthy updates:" "Big Daddy (coined by Jeff Manson of RealGeeks), which improved the architecture of Google to allow for improved understanding of the worth and relationship of links between sites."[9][13] | |
| 2006 | " By 2006, Google rolled out a Maps Plus Box, which I was quite impressed by at the time."[9] | ||
| 2006 | October | "In October 2006, Google acquired user-generated video sharing network YouTube for $1.65 billion, which ultimately became the second most used search property in the world."[9] | |
| 2006 | "Google also launched two incredibly important products in 2006:" "Google Webmaster Tools. Now known as the Search Console, Google Webmaster Tools let webmasters view crawling errors, see what searches your site showed up for, and request reinclusion."[9] | ||
| 2006 | "Google also launched two incredibly important products in 2006:" "Google Analytics. This free, web-based tool was so popular at launch that webmasters experienced downtime and maintenance warnings."[9] | ||
| 2006 | "Also in 2006 XML sitemaps gained universal support from the search engines. XML sitemaps allow webmasters to display to the search engines, every URL on their website that is available for crawling. An XML sitemap contains not only a list of URLs but a range of further information, which helped search engines to crawl more intelligently."[9] "XML Sitemaps, introduced in 2006 and acquired a great support from the search engines."[5] | ||
| 2006 | "In 2006 it was time for BMW to get banned and utterly removed from Google’s search results for using a technique called cloaking, which means showing one type of content for search engines and another one for users."[4] | ||
| 2007 | May 2 | Jason Gambert attempts to trademark the term SEO by convincing the Trademark Office in Arizona that SEO is a "process" involving manipulation of keywords and not a "marketing service."[14] | |
| 2007 | "We really began to see search starting to evolve in new and exciting ways starting in 2007. All of these updates were aimed at improving the user experience." "Let’s start with Google’s Universal Search. Until this point, the search results had consisted of 10 blue links."[9] | ||
| 2008 | Yoast SEO starts operations as a SEO tool.[15][16] | ||
| 2009 | January 18 | "In 2008, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the Internet was becoming a cesspool and that brands were the solution. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool,” he said. Less than six months after his comment, along came a Google update called Vince. Big brands suddenly seemed to be ranking a whole lot better in the SERPs." "The Vince Update appeared January 18, 2009. It was named after a Google engineer by this name in admiration of his effort in this algorithmic change – or what Matt Cutts, who was head of Google’s webspam team at the time, would refer to as a “simple change.”"[9][17] | |
| 2009 | June | "In 2009, the search engine world saw a bit of a shakeup. Bing premiered that June, with Microsoft aggressively marketing it as the search engine that would produce noticeably better results than Google. But as SEL predicted, it was no “Google-killer,” nor did its advice for optimizing content significantly contrast Google’s. In fact, according to Search Engine Journal, the only noticeable difference was Bing’s tendency to give priority to keywords in URLs, as well as favoring capitalized words and “pages from large sites.”"[3] | |
| 2009 | August 10 | "On August 10, 2009, Google announced Caffeine – which would become one of the most important updates in the search engine’s history."[18] | |
| 2009 | "In 2009, Microsoft Live Search became Bing. Then, in an attempt to challenge Google’s nearly 70 percent grip of the U.S. search market, Yahoo and Microsoft joined forces to partner on a 10-year search deal (though it ended up being reworked five years later)."[9] | ||
| 2009 | Year round | Google executes between 350 and 550 adjustments to its search algorithm along the year, meaning at least once a day, showing the "rapid advancement required to stay on top if playing the game of SEO at the highest level".[4] | |
| 2010 | December | " In December 2010, both Google and Bing added "social signals," which first displayed any written Facebook posts, for example, from your own network that matched your query. But it also began to give PageRank to Twitter profiles that were linked to with some frequency. The importance of Twitter in SEO didn't end there -- stay tuned."[3] | |
| 2010 | "By 2010 a tactic had appeared where websites were created from large amounts of low-quality textual content, frequently updated and specifically designed to lure search engine algorithms. These sites were linked together forming so-called ‘content farms’ whose only purpose was to drive search engine traffic and, just like doorway pages before them, sending the incoming traffic to the final destination."[4] | ||
| 2011 | "In 2011, Google found its search results facing severe scrutiny because so-called “content farms” (websites that produced high volumes of low-quality content) were dominating the search results. Google’s SERPs were also cluttered with websites featuring unoriginal and auto-generated content – and even, in some instances, scraper sites were outranking content originators."[9] | ||
| 2012 | April | "In April 2012, Google took what it called “another step to reward high-quality sites” with the first of many Penguin updates -- and, in the process of announcing it, acknowledged Bing’s month-earlier blog post on the changing face of SEO. "[3] | |
| 2012 | May | "In May 2012, Google unveiled the Knowledge Graph. This was a major shift away from interpreting keywords strings to understanding semantics and intent."[9][19] | |
| 2013 | October | "launch of app indexing making apps appear alongside websites in search results"[4] "Google App Indexing was launched in October 2013 for a limited set of publishers."[20] | |
| 2014 | "Keeping with the tradition of animal-named algorithm updates, Google released "Pigeon" (dubbed so by SEL) in 2014, which carried quite an impact on local search results. At the time, it seems to have been designed to improve Maps queries, which began to be treated with some of the same technology that was applied to its other search functions, like "Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms". Local searches were going to become a big deal -- and it will only continue to do so, as you'll see in a bit."[3] | ||
| 2014 | November | "Back in 2014, Google added a "mobile-friendly" label for search results that were optimized for such platforms -- where text is readable without zooming or horizontal scrolling, and links are spaced well enough so that there’s a reduced chance of mis-tapping."[3][21] | |
| 2015 | February | "Google announced that change in advance, in February 2015, with a mobile-friendly test that allowed webmasters to view potential issues and make changes before the rollout."[3] | |
| 2015 | April | "The biggest post-2010 SEO announcement might have been Google’s mobile update of April 2015, when non-mobile-friendly websites would start getting lower rankings. That meant SEO was no longer about keywords and content -- responsive design mattered, too."[3] | |
| 2015 | May | Mobile search surpasses desktop search.[22] | |
| 2015 | "Finally, in 2015, we had the Year of Mobile – the point at which mobile searches overtook desktop search for the first time on Google"[9] | ||
| 2015 | October | "In terms of search, we’ve already started to see the impact of AI with Google RankBrain. Announced in October 2015, RankBrain was initially used to try to interpret the 15 percent of searches that Google has never seen before, based on the words or phrases the user has entered."[9][23] | |
| 2015 | ", and then in 2015 with the so-called ‘Mobilegeddon’ update that made website mobile friendliness a ranking signal in searches."[4][24] | ||
| 2016 | August | "It wasn’t the last of Google’s mobile updates -- in August 2016, it announced a crackdown on mobile pop-ups."[3] | |
| 2018 | July | "Google announced that from July 2018 page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches."[4][25] | |
| 2020 | "Comscore predicts that by 2020 50% all searches will be voice."[4][26] |
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References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "The Evolution Of SEO Trends Over 25 Years". searchengineland.com. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEO". bluefrogdm.com. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 "A Brief History of Search & SEO". blog.hubspot.com. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 "A brief history of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)". blog.zooma.se. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 "THE HISTORY OF SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)". amcodigital.com. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "History of Search Engines". whatisseo.com. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 "THE HISTORY OF SEARCH ENGINES". wordstream.com. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 "The History of Search Engine Optimization". thehistoryofseo.com. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
- ↑ 9.00 9.01 9.02 9.03 9.04 9.05 9.06 9.07 9.08 9.09 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13 9.14 9.15 9.16 9.17 9.18 9.19 9.20 9.21 9.22 9.23 9.24 9.25 9.26 "20 Years of SEO: A Brief History of Search Engine Optimization". searchenginejournal.com. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
- ↑ Danny Sullivan (June 14, 2004). "Who Invented the Term "Search Engine Optimization"?". Search Engine Watch. Archived from the original on 23 April 2010. Retrieved May 14, 2007. See Google groups thread.
- ↑ Brin, Sergey & Page, Larry (1998). "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web. pp. 107–117. Retrieved 3 January 2020.
- ↑ "Google's Jagger Update Rocks Manipulative Link Building". searchenginejournal.com. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
- ↑ "Google's Big Daddy Update: Big Changes to Google's Infrastructure & the SERPs". searchenginejournal.com. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
- ↑ "Trademark/Service Mark Application, Principal Register". Retrieved 3 January 2020.
- ↑ "YOAST SEO". wordpress.org. Retrieved 8 January 2020.
- ↑ "The history of Yoast". yoast.com. Retrieved 8 January 2020.
- ↑ "Google's Vince Update: The Day Big Brands Won". searchenginejournal.com. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
- ↑ "Google's Caffeine Update: Better Indexing & Fresher Search Results". searchenginejournal.com. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
- ↑ "Google Testing Semantic Search Update". searchenginejournal.com. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
- ↑ "Google: App Indexing". searchengineland.com. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
- ↑ "Helping users find mobile-friendly pages". webmasters.googleblog.com. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
- ↑ "Inside AdWords: Building for the next moment" Google Inside Adwords May 15, 2015.
- ↑ "A Complete Guide to the Google RankBrain Algorithm". searchenginejournal.com. Retrieved 4 January 2020.
- ↑ "Finding more mobile-friendly search results". webmasters.googleblog.com. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
- ↑ "Using page speed in mobile search ranking". webmasters.googleblog.com. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
- ↑ "Stat of the week – Voice Search". blog.zooma.se. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
