Here is a brief history of SEO and how it has evolved.
1990
The first search engine was created by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
1991
The internet was born, invented by Tim Bermers-Lee.
1993
Aliweb was launched, this allowed users to submit the locations of the index files on their websites. Wanderer, the first web crawler, was created which measured the size of the world wide web. By 1993 there were already over 600 websites online and in excess of 10 million internet users.
1994
Web Crawler was launched, this was the first search engine to index full web pages and allow internet users to search with any word. Lycos search engine was also launched in this year.
1995
Yahoo was launched, at this time using a web directory. Alta Vista was launched and introduced a multi-threaded crawler that could cover many more web pages. Excite was also launched in 1995.
1996
This is the year when Alexa was founded, new search technology called Inktomi was founded and used by MSN and Hotbot. By this year the world wide web had grown rapidly to over 650,000 websites and there were over 74 million internet users online.
1997
SEO Terminology first used by John Audette and Bruce Clay. Yandex was launched which was Russia’s largest search engine and Ask Jeeves was launched founded by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen.
1998
Google Launched, the DMOZ directory was also launched. Getting a DMOZ listing was a very powerful SEO technique. The original PPC model was also created by Bill Gross and search engines started to look more towards off page ranking signals.
1999
Google and Yahoo begin to dominate the search engine market. By this year the world wide web had grown to over 2.2 million websites online and over 279 million internet users.
2000
Google launches the tool bar and SEO companies start using directory submissions in order to achieve high search engine rankings. Google Adwords was launched, this is Googles main source of revenue and totalled $28 billion in 2010.
2001
Search engine algorithms start to develop and improve the way they index dynamic URL’s. The reign of Google begins and many SEO’s start to realise its Google or bust.
2002
Directory submissions remain a common SEO tactic. Google announced the launch of Froogle, a product search engine. Google also became a Verb, the American Dialect Society chose it as the most useful word of 2002 and it was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary on June 15, 2006.
2003
Web 2.0 is born, Google launches the Florida algorithm in order to combat spam. The world wide web had now grown to over 38 million websites online and over 782 million users.
2004
Paid links become a common way of achieving high rankings. SEOMOZ was founded by Rand Fiskin and grew to be one of the largest provider of SEO Tools. Google also introduced local search in order to offer relevant neighbourhood business listings, maps and directories.
2005
Google Analytics launched, Google also launch another algorithm update what helps understand the linking relationship between websites. Google announced that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” would not influence the link targets PageRank.
2006
Search engines begin to understand XML sitemaps and Google acquires Youtube. Google also launches Webmaster Central which turned in to an essential tool for webmasters.
2007
Google fights back against paid links permanently banning Text Link Ads. Google launches product search. SMX was held, which was the first search marketing expo.
2008
Social Media starts to become a ranking signal as sites such as Facebook and Twitter take off. The search engine Cuil.com was created by ex-Google employees was launched but later shut down in 2010.
2009
Two more algorithm updates from Google, ‘Vince’ which factors in trust and ‘Caffine’ which speeds up indexing of websites. Windows Live Search was rebranded and became Bing. A new canonical tag was launched and supported by all three major search engines.
2010
Google launches the ‘May Day’ algorithm which limits to use of unoriginal content. Google also launched instant previews in its search results. Facebook launched open graph API which included the new ‘like’ button. Yahoo and Microsoft partnered to use Bing search technology and the world wide web had grown to over 240 million websites and over 2 billion users.
2011
Google launches the ‘Panda’ algorithm update which was to combat low quality sites and reward those with fresh unique content. Facebook received a patent on ‘Curated Search’ which involved ranking search results according to a links popularity with a users social graph. Google +1 was launched and is Googles attempt of moving in to the social market.
