Search engine optimization (SEO) is not a technology that suddenly appeared, but developed simultaneously with search engines. Although the relationship between the two cannot be said to be a "spear and shield" relationship, it is certain. Yes, because of SEO, search engine technology can become more perfect.
1. 1994-1997: The birth of Yahoo and the birth of SEO
In August 1993, Lycos launched data discovery technology based on search robots and supported the relevance ranking of search results. , it also enables search engines to use automatic summarization of web pages for the first time.
At the end of 1995, Alta Vista was launched. Because it had a large number of new search functions, it was well received by the public. Alta Vista was the first to support natural language search and had web page content analysis and intelligent processing. Ability, the first search engine to implement advanced search syntax (such as AND, OR, NOR, etc.), and can also search content in news groups and images.
This stage is also the initial stage of Yahoo’s development. Most people are not familiar with search at this time, and they don’t know much about search engines. However, most people have some idea about Yahoo. Understand, go to Yahoo to find websites. Therefore, it is very necessary to send your website to Yahoo. At this stage, as long as your website has a basic appearance and a certain degree of visibility, generally you only need to submit the address to Yahoo, and it will appear in the Yahoo directory within 72 hours. superior. Ya! For example, the website of American Airlines not only ranks in front of Bank of America, but also in front of the American Basketball Association. Therefore, a large number of websites are named after the pursuit of A. This is the prototype of search engine optimization. This logic is the same as the ranking logic of yellow page phone numbers.
At this stage, Yahoo's column editors are also actively searching for new websites online to enrich their database, and their searches are all manual. The most typical method is to search for new websites from a website. Go to another website. When they encounter a good website, they will send an email to the website owner and welcome the website owner to log in, and it is free of charge.
The behavior of these Yahoo editors visiting the website is the same tireless form as the search engine spiders and robots we see today. There is a Yahoo editor who cares so much about your website and is even more anxious to log in to your website than you are, and he doesn’t collect any money. This is unimaginable today. After logging in to your website, you can also change your login information at any time, and it will usually be updated within 72 hours.
It is worth mentioning that although there were very few Chinese websites during this period, and most of them were Chinese websites in the United States and websites in Taiwan, Yahoo obviously noticed the future of Chinese websites and quickly launched one The Chinese translation is "Yahoo", and this is not just because its founder is Jerry Yang.
This stage is also the embryonic period of SEO. A number of papers have appeared online and offline discussing word mapping, data mining, and interviews with search engine programmers. People have initially developed a vague awareness of making web content conform to the principles of search engine databases. Similarly, it is very easy to include a website in a search engine. As long as your webpage uses keywords to a certain density, it will be easily ranked on the search engine.
It is worth mentioning that the search engine InfoSeek is updated daily for the first time. You submit your website at eight o'clock in the morning, it will be included in the afternoon, and it will appear in searches the next day. It is precisely because of such fast updates and such easy submission for inclusion that a large number of website owners began to use different methods to frequently log in to different websites. The word Spam appeared in English to describe the irresponsible creation of a flood of garbage by website owners, which soon caused these searches to The engine couldn't handle it.
So, SEO starts with black and white from the beginning. White, which is white-hat in English, is to rationally adjust your website according to the search engine principles that you can understand so that it can be included by search engines and get good exposure. Underworld, called black-hat in English, this type of optimizer is like a hacker, looking for the weaknesses of search engines, trying to force confusing information into search engines, thereby increasing the exposure opportunities for real websites.
During this period, due to the strong temptation of profits, adult websites can be said to have taken the lead in "hacking" search engines. Therefore, SEO and search engines have had a love-hate relationship from the beginning. During this period, paid website optimization services also began to appear in the United States.
In the field of Chinese search engines, China’s start is not late. Sohu, established in August 1996, was the first website to participate in the management of information classification navigation similar to Yahoo. It once had the reputation of "looking for maps when you go out, and Sohu on the Internet."
At this time, no one noticed that in a dormitory at Stanford University, two smart students were slowly gestating a new search engine that attracted world attention. They invented a new theory called PageRank to reshape search engines. This new search engine is now Google.
2. 1998-1999: Google and SEO theory emerged
At this stage, some articles on website optimization began to be published at Internet conferences in the United States. These articles began to focus on the meaning of link popularity (Link Popularity) and directory website links (Directory Listing). During this time, search engines also learned that they needed to restrict people's website submissions to prevent the proliferation of spam websites, so they began to organize counterattacks.
Alta Vista began to remove web pages containing text such as "We will optimize" or "We will promote" on a large scale. SEO practitioners are beginning to realize that it is increasingly difficult to crack the principles of search engines. It was ten times harder to move a website into the top ten in 1999 than it was in 1998. Search engines are starting to pay more attention to the meaning of link popularity.
Google also received its first $100,000 in venture capital in 1998, moved out of the Stanford campus, and was officially named Google. The domain name also changed from google.stanford.edu to google.com. This new search engine measure of website importance includes link popularity as one of the ranking criteria for the first time.
In May 1999, the British company FAST launched ALLTheWeb search engine. Its web search can use ODP to automatically classify, support Flash and PDF file search, support multi-language search, and also provide news search, image search, video, MP3 and FTP search, and has extremely powerful advanced search functions. Such powerful features make it one of the most popular search engines.
In the early stages of this stage, search engines also began the process of diversification and began to set up multilingual websites. For example, AltaVista took the lead in launching a Latin version. The GAIS laboratory led by Professor Wu Sheng of National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan founded the OpenFind Chinese search engine in January 1998. It is the earliest Chinese intelligent search engine developed and claims to be able to crawl the most web pages in the world and start entering English search engines.
In 1999, Google received 25 million in funding and began to develop at full speed, and was already processing 500,000 searches every day. This investment also allowed Google to move again to San Francisco - the Silicon Valley area is called Palo Alto. city. Google also began to meet partners. Soon after moving from AOL to Netscape, Google moved again to its global headquarters in San Francisco, a city called Mountain View in Silicon Valley. At this time, search engines began to try to control the market, and advertisements appeared widely on search engines.
This has aroused the disgust of many searchers, because everyone is still using 56KB modem to surf the Internet, and a large number of advertisements make the website page appear too slow.
Google discovered this fatal problem that affected the pace of search. The simple web design is refreshing to everyone, and the fast search speed has caused various website owners to rush to tell each other. Every website owner forum is full of excellent comments about Google, and interviews in magazines are also recommending Google one after another. Google's The full performance officially takes the stage.
3. Innovations in Baidu and search engines
Since 2000, the time it takes to log in to a website and search engines has become longer and longer. Search engines are keen on charging for their services, from a new search engine called Inktomi to Alta Vista, which is all about money. At the same time, searchers want a search engine that actually brings them useful information. Google has lived up to people's expectations, and its precise search has begun to consolidate its position among search engines.
The first one to go out was InfoSeek, which was bought by Disney in 1998 and became Go. com. Since then, InfoSeek has been abandoned and Go.com uses Yahoo search instead. In 1999, a Chinese engineer at InfoSeek left the search engine and headed to Beijing. He tried to create a "Chinese own" search engine, and was inspired by an ancient Chinese saying: "Look for him in the crowd on Baidu, and suddenly look back, Inspired by "That Man in a Dim Light", the Chinese search engine was named "Baidu". This engineer is Robin Li, one of the founders of Baidu.
Robin Li himself is a new generation of search technology experts. As early as 1996, he solved the problem of how to perfectly combine ranking based on web page quality and ranking based on relevance, and obtained a U.S. patent. Baidu combined the search engine talents of Silicon Valley and relied on the best software talents in Beijing to develop a large-scale commercial Chinese search engine. Chinese search has since stood on the same starting line as English search. At the same time, Baidu search cleverly solved the problem of data updates. The bottleneck is that the database of the entire Chinese web page can be updated as quickly as once a day.
2000 was also the year when Flash animation, JavaScript stunt rollover and dynamic pictures became popular. These dynamic forms make people love it, but few people know that search engines cannot recognize these. Search engines can only read text, not the creativity of these senses, because they have always been simulating the way people read, but they cannot simulate people. Perception, until today, search engines have not solved this problem.
Starting from this year, in fact, submitting a new website to a search engine does not require filling in the "ADD URL" on the search engine page as before. Search engines can already start from an existing website. Discover links to new websites to visit and include. At this time, SEO practitioners also began to know that if the website can be included in the Directory, especially the Open Directory Project (ODP), it will be very helpful to improve search rankings. The most well-known ODP is DMOZ (www. dmoz. org), which was founded in 1998 by two Sun engineers, Nick Scanta and Bob Tull. It is a directory website that manually collects and categorizes websites. In this regard, its composition is the same as Yahoo.
The difference is that it is maintained by global website owners who edit themselves, while Yahoo is maintained by professional editors. Regarding DMOZ, search engines favor DMOZ because the credibility of websites that have been manually analyzed is naturally more reliable than the website information obtained by search engine spiders and robots.
In 2001, paid login was very popular. The search engine market went through a major purge, and people began to abandon search engines Hotbot, Alta Vista and Excite.
Alta Vista tried to follow Google's lead and get back to a smaller version of the search engine, but this death-flight failed miserably and it was acquired by Yahoo in 2003. Inktomi also lost several application partners and declined sharply. It was also acquired by Yahoo in 2004 and has become the main core technology of Yahoo search today.
4. 2002-2007: Google Dance and SEO’s sleepless nights
In fact, in 2001, sensitive website owners and SEO practitioners felt an unprecedented Phenomenon. Some people are concerned that their website's ranking on Google disappears overnight, while other websites are ranked at the top. This phenomenon occurs almost once a month. Later, people learned that this is the distance activity in which Google regularly updates its index (Index). It feels like dancing, so it is called Google Dance by SEO practitioners.
It is precisely because of Google Dance that every SEO practitioner stays up late on the night when Google updates to see if their SEO results can be realized on Google. There are winners and losers with every update, and there are always thousands of discussions on online SEO forums, hoping to know what to expect in the next update, or guessing the specific date of the update.
Search engines encounter more serious flooding problems during this stage. SEO practitioners use a large number of doorway pages, duplicate websites, cloaked pages, hidden links, etc. to try to deceive Google. In addition, DMOZ is used by Google as an important channel for collecting new websites, and DMOZ has also been injected into many spam websites.
2002 was a year when a lot of SEO was abused. However, search engines have continuously enriched their identification technology from these struggles against illegal SEO practices, refusing to include websites that have been caught, and excluding those that have already been included. But this blockade has also wronged many honest SEO websites.
In China, Baidu began to provide public search services in September 2001, and successfully enabled Sohu and Sina to start using its search technology. At the same time, it also provides news search services and rapidly expands its user base.
In 2003, more and more website designers became cautious about the application of Flash. This was also the year that search engines continued to fight back against the proliferation of spam. Many SEO practitioners understand that black-hat technology (black-hat) no longer works, but they must truly improve the quality of the website in a down-to-earth manner.
Google even squeezed out AltaVista and Inktomi in 2003 and became the dominant player. Google was born in an era of complicated search engines. In that era, search engines such as Alta Vista were too confident in their market share and were too lazy to change. Google is promoted by various website owners and SEO practitioners, thus catching up from behind. Google began to fight back against the proliferation of spam, directly targeting the website owners and SEO practitioners who had supported it. These people became victims of Google's success.
Google’s “Florida Update” in 2003 really taught webmasters around the world how powerful Google is. If it were like a strong hurricane, Florida Update would cause tens of millions of websites to disappear from searches overnight or drop from the top ten to below 100 pages. This update, which occurred on November 16, caused heavy losses to e-commerce websites that were hoping to make a fortune during the upcoming Christmas. This update from Google is an important battle against spam and illegal SEO practices.
However, due to the imperfect filters used, many innocent websites have been affected.
It's called the "Florida Update" because the update started at Google's data center in Florida.
Afterwards, the aftermath of the January 2004 so-called "Austin Update" also impacted quite a few websites. In an instant, all SEO practitioners suddenly turned into Google Adwords experts, and everyone had to rely on Google ads to maintain sales during this holiday period.
These two historic Google updates have taught many SEO practitioners considerable lessons. Improving the quality of the website itself rather than taking advantage of opportunities has become the only feasible way for SEO. PPC has also steadily become an important means in marketing strategies, and SEO has also become a part of search engine marketing (SEM).
Yahoo decided to officially part ways with Google at this time. For a long time, in order to make up for its shortcomings in manually collecting websites, Yahoo has been using Google's technology to provide web searches. Yahoo showed that it has successively purchased Alta Vista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi companies, which makes people aware of Yahoo's mood - has it indirectly raised Google? It still holds 20 Google shares! Finally, on February 16, 2004, Yahoo sold its shares in Google, officially bid farewell to Google, and embarked on the path of developing its own search engine.
In the same year, on September 12, 2004, Google launched two Chinese versions of its search engine, Simplified and Traditional.
In 2005, the biggest change is that Google Update is no longer a regular activity, but gradually becomes a daily progressive update. Dramatic changes are no longer seen. SEO practitioners can quickly see whether their efforts are paying off. Following the discipline of search engines and using reasonable methods to adjust and improve the structure and content of the website has become the only way to ensure the stability of the website. More importantly, a website optimized by following these specifications will not only rank well on Google, but will also have good results on Yahoo and MSN. Chinese websites, if they improve the quality of the website in a down-to-earth manner, will also benefit from Baidu's ranking.