The History of SEO

Greenlight, a UK-based SEO and PPC consulting firm, recently published an interesting article about the history and evolution of SEO.

Briefly, we can say that there are 5 major steps in terms of SEO.

1. SEO began with search engine submission in the early days due to the fact that search engines had limited crawling capabilities.
2. Then, it turned into on-page SEO, meaning the art of ensuring a website is technically accessible to search engines and relevant to the targeted keywords.
3. Since Google – which quickly became the major search engine from 2000 – introduced its notion of PageRank, the acquisition of quality back links the dominant factor in the early years of the decade.
4. In order to face link spam, Google algorithm began to take into account contextual information of a backlink and especially its  anchor text.
5. In the same logic, the notion of TrustRank appears meaning that the more a backlink comes from a trusted sources  the more it is valuable. Domain authority mainly came from the age of the domain name.
6. Link context became more and more important mainly because link exchanges. Google started to consider that the placement of links on a page and, more importantly, the context of the page and the site the link is on is of utmost importance .
7. Additionnaly, user signals – such as click through rates, bounce rates and search patterns – became to be taken into account by search engines to assess the level of trust search engines have in a site.
8. Finally, major search engines – among which Google is the more advanced – decided to include multimedia and real-time content to match better user’s needs.

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