The Changing Tides of SEO - The Birth of the Internet
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In 1994 the Internet came to the general public's attention with the public advent of the Mosaic Web browser and the nascent World Wide Web. Within two years, it became obvious to most publicly traded companies that a public Web presence was desirable.
SEO grew out of necessity as the search engines themselves became needed. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention; there will always be industries that capitalize upon those inventions and in the end, they become as commonplace as the invention they profit from. The SEO industry is no different.
The First "Search Engines"
The very first tool used for searching on the Internet was Archie. According to Wikipedia, it "was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of filenames."
Gopher, which indexed plain text documents, was created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota. Because these were text files, most of the Gopher sites became Web sites after the creation of the World Wide Web.
According to Wikipedia, "the first Web search engine was Wandex, a now-defunct index collected by the World Wide Web Wanderer, a web crawler developed by Matthew Gray at MIT in 1993. Another very early search engine, Aliweb, also appeared in 1993, and still runs today. The first 'full text' crawler-based search engine was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any web page, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public."
Words make up content, keywords, text, and names for everything. It is within words that we find one of the foundations of good SEO. Words will never be deprecated, nor will search engine relevance stop depending upon words, content, and text. Keywords provide the main concepts of our content, text should embody our navigation, and so on.
Yahoo was Created
Yahoo! was founded by Stanford graduate students David Filo and Jerry Yang in January of 1994 and incorporated nearly a year later in March of 1995. It was not a searchable index of pages, as were most of the other search engines at that time, but rather a web site which was a directory of other sites, organized in a hierarchical manner. It was not the first directory of its kind, but it was the first to become widely popular as THE directory of the infant Web.
The direct results of this today are the abundance of directories on the Web, from niche directories to directories of basically nothing in particular. They were once necessary because the organization of the Web was less than spectacular. Now, however, the directory is dying a slow death, as the need for them has passed away as well. In our SEO efforts, we must realize that the directory is no longer a resource for optimization.
Google was Born
Google began as a research project in January 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques which essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page or how many times that page was visited. It was originally nicknamed "BackRub," because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.
I don't think I need to dwell on the impact of the birth of Google, as it is the dominant search engine of all time. But the result I want to emphasize that changed the way that an SEO would forever do business is the introduction of backlinks into the all-important quality score equation.
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