When taking a long-term perspective on SEO, there are three broad eras you need to understand. It will come as no surprise that all three of these eras are defined by Google, the world’s most popular search engine A very brief history of SEO.
Epoch 1: The pre-Google era
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, SEO was gambling database china easy for businesses to manipulate. Simply use your keywords repeatedly throughout your website, and you’ll likely get traffic.
For end users, this era delivered search results of uneven quality. Fortunately, a new search engine would come along and change everything.
Era 2: Google Era 1 (late 1990s – late 2000s)
As Google grew from a small project at Stanford, it quickly became the world’s most popular search engine. Google’s focus on citations—how many websites link to your site?—was a crucial improvement.
Although Google’s search engine model has never been disclosed in detail, SEO experts have found methods to optimize the system.
Two SEO methods stood out from this era. Some marketers published “spun articles” (i.e., computer-generated remixes of content) to gain Google’s inside sales manager bobby danielson favor. Afterward, we also saw the rise of content mills—companies that paid large numbers of writers low fees to produce content. For a time, such methods worked.
Era 3: Quality Strikes Back (2011 – present)
Several significant changes to Google’s search engine starting in 2011 changed the SEO industry forever. In particular, Google updates began targeting (and penalizing) spam and low-quality websites.
Here are some of the most important changes:
The Panda Update (February 2011). This uae phone number update caused content mills and many other low-quality websites to disappear from the top ranking positions. Some companies lost significant revenue as their traffic declined. Indirectly, this update rewarded higher-quality websites with a better user experience A very brief history of SEO.