The history of SEO

A brief history

The history of SEO from its beginnings to the way we know it today has taken a radical turn. Today we review some of the biggest milestones in the history of organic search engine optimization and how it has evolved to the present point.

The story of SEO told step by step

The early years of SEO

We can place the origin of SEO in 1994 with the birth of WebCrawler, the first bot aimed at indexing Web content. That same year, Lycos was born, the first search engine in history to use the page crawling system.

Only a year later, in 1995 Yahoo! was born, although it did not function as a search engine as we know it today, but rather as a directory; Other search engines like Altavista also appeared.

In the mid-90s the only task of optimizing websites with respect to organic search engine optimization was to work on the title, a key factor at that time.

SEO is taking shape

In 1996 SEO began to take shape gradually. Little by little, the websites began to work on other aspects besides the title, such as keywords; At that time, the higher the density of keywords a website had, the better it was positioned in search results.

Google, the main search engine today, was born in 1998 by the hand of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In parallel, Pagerank made its appearance, so that search engines evolved towards a model based on ranking in search results, which continues to be valid today.

It was in 1999 when meta tags made their appearance in the world of SEO, playing a key role in organic positioning On Page.

SEO becomes a fundamental aspect

With the entry of the new millennium, Google established itself as the main search engine. It was from the year 2001 when SEO Off Page began to gain strength, especially in relation to links as a fundamental factor to obtain better results in rankings and improve pagerank. In this way, link farms appeared.

In 2002 search engines began to give importance not only to the density of keywords, but also to their placement within a website. In that same year Google launched Adwords, its advertising service based on sponsored links.

2003 was a key year for Google: it launched Adsense and bought Blogger. Blogs began to take an increasing role in SEO strategies. Of course, with this the blogs were filled with spam in the comments of the articles; so much so that in 2005 the “nofollow” tag appeared to combat spam in blog comments.

The year 2006 was key in terms of web positioning with the appearance of XML Sitemaps; a protocol whose main function is to help bots crawl and index domain pages.

SEO is finally consolidated

Starting in 2010, Google became the leader in organic search engine positioning. In 2011, it launched Panda, a new organic ranking algorithm that was the biggest hit in history to fraudulent websites. No more and no less than 12% of search results were affected by Panda and a large number of link farms disappeared. Google started going after sites with keyword over-optimization and worthless content especially hard.

Just a year later, in 2012, Google launched Penguin as one more step in its fight against spam on the web. This algorithm update harshly penalized websites with low quality links.

SEO today

In recent years, organic search engine optimization has taken a radical turn. Currently, Google has its eye on two factors. On the one hand, the optimization of websites for mobile devices. And, on the other hand, Semantic SEO.