Tracing the history of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is somewhat like trying to trace the history of the handshake. SEO exists and is an essential element of any professional activity.

However, SEO is a relatively new concept, which evolves frequently. It appears to be from Millennials, with its origins usually being around 1991.

Moreover, during its relatively short existence, it has grown and evolved at a steady rate. To be convinced, it suffices to consider the number of modifications made by Google to its Algorithm.

So where does the history of SEO begin and how did it come to be so important? Take a journey through time to try and answer these questions, and discover a story worth its weight in gold.

The Appearance of Search Engines

The beginnings of the creation of a worldwide data archiving system have their origins in 1945. In July 1945, Vannevar Bush, then director of the now-defunct Office of Scientific Research and Development, published an article in The Atlantic, where he describes a system for collecting, extracting and inserting data, aimed at being shared. The description of this system corresponds to what Google has become today.

A few decades later, in 1990, Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University, developed Archie, whom some consider being the very first search engine. Even if the question is debated and this tool remains primitive, at the time it represented “the best way to access information on other internet servers”.

The following decade saw several crucial developments, with the advent of search engines as you know them today:

February 1993: Six Stanford students create Architext, which later became a search engine called Excite. Some experts, such as Search Engine Land, claim that Excite is “revolutionizing the way information is catalogued,” making searches easier through “SEO results, based on analysis of keywords found in crawled content.”.

June 1993: Matthew Gray launches World Wide Web Wanderer, renamed Wandex a few weeks later.

October 1993: Martijn Koster introduces ALIWEB, a search engine allowing webmasters to submit their web pages.

December 1993: There are now at least three search engines powered by crawlers (JumpStation, RBSE spider and World Wide Web Worm), which crawl both servers and published content online to provide better search results.

1994: Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos and Yahoo all introduce their search engine to the market.

1996: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin to develop a search engine they initially call BackRub.

April 1997: AskJeeves, which later became Ask.com, in turn, appeared on the market.

September 1997: Google.com is officially registered as a domain name.

Also note that, nearly 12 years later, in June 2009, Microsoft launched Bing, the successor to Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search. This is where SEO itself comes into play. With the use of search engines becoming more popular, webmasters are beginning to realize their potential.

The evolution of search and SEO

SEO in the 1990s

In the 1990s, search engines grew in popularity and the number of households with an Internet connection continued to grow. Access to information is therefore becoming easier and easier. However, there is a real problem with the low quality of this information.

Search engines were generally content to match the terms chosen by users with the results offered. A growing number of webmasters, therefore, decided to resort to keyword stuffing, to improve the SEO of their web page for this keyword.

However, it should be remembered that keyword stuffing is a so-called Black Hat SEO Technique, that is to say, penalized by Google’s directives because it makes it difficult to understand a text overall.

Thanks to this Black Hat SEO Technique, webmasters could generate more traffic and make more profits thanks to the paid advertisements present on their websites. In addition to keyword stuffing, webmasters used excessive inbound links to establish their authority.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin get into the development of Google, that’s one of the issues they want to solve. In 1998, they published an article in which they declared that “advertising is the dominant economic model for search engines”, but they admit that “the objectives of this economic model do not always focus on providing search results of quality. quality to users”.

It is in this same article that the two students mention for the first time PageRank, the technology used by Google to reference search results based not only on keywords but also on the quality of websites.

Some even believe that it is this technology that paved the way for SEO as we know it today.

SEO in the 2000s

The early 2000s also marked the beginning of Google’s hegemony. As the company develops less ad-centric technology, it is also starting to develop a guideline for White Hat Practices (those considered to be in line with Google guidelines), to help webmasters get their listings. sites without resorting to the questionable methods widely used in the 1990s.

From 2000 to 2002: The desire for quality Content

However, Google’s guideline does not yet have a real impact on on-site SEO and few webmasters are bothered by it. In the early 2000s, the use of inbound link creation techniques still made it possible to reference pages that did not match any search criteria.

Nevertheless, during a television interview in 2001, journalist Charlie Rose asks Larry Page and Sergey Brin the reasons for their success, the latter insisting that at the time Google was nothing other than a search engine, which considers “the web as a whole, and does not limit itself to determining which terms appear on each page”.

This interview paves the way for the first major updates to Search Engine Algorithms, which then begin to analyse these terms more carefully.

From 2003 to 2004: The First SEO Penalties

It was in November 2003, with the Florida update, that this approach to the web that was no longer limited to the simple analysis of terms took shape. The number of sites whose SEO is suffering from this update is very high, but it is important to note that it is also beneficial for many sites. This is the first time that websites have been penalized for using techniques like keyword stuffing, signifying Google’s desire to put the user’s interests first, mainly by offering them quality content.

Also, in 2004, one of the first versions of Google voice search appeared.  This invention nevertheless announces the future importance of SEO on mobile devices.

2005: Year of Numerous Launches

2005 represents a pivotal year in the history of search engines. In January, Google, Yahoo and MSN teamed up to develop the Nofollow attribute to, among other things, reduce the number of spammy links and comments posted on websites, especially blogs.

Then Google launches a personalized search in June, which takes into account a user’s search and browsing history to provide more relevant results. In November, Google Analytics was launched, which is still used today to measure traffic and campaign return on investment.

2009: Turning Point

The year 2009 bears witness to a desire for restructuring in the world of search engines. Bing was founded in June and Microsoft launched an aggressive marketing campaign to position it as the search engine that produced significantly better results than Google. However, Bing is a long way from leading Google to decline, and its advice on Content Optimization doesn’t contrast with that of its competitor.

In August, Google is offering a preview of Caffeine, its new algorithm update, and is asking for user input to help it test this new infrastructure. Moz says it’s “intended to speed up the crawling process for bots, grow the index, and integrate near real-time indexing and SEO.”

It will take almost a year for Caffeine to be fully implemented, as the algorithm must also help the search engine to improve the speed of execution.

However, in December, a real-time search tool allowing Google to include tweets or last-minute information was launched. This position confirms therefore that SEO is no longer exclusively the business of webmasters, and that journalists, web editors or community managers must now also optimize their content for search engines.

SEO in the 2010s

When you do a Google search, sometimes it’s fun to watch the suggestions offered as you type. They are the result of the implementation, in September 2010, of Google Instant technology.

2010 also marks the advent of the importance of Social Content for SEO. In December, Google and Bing add Social Signals to their Arsenal. These initially make it possible to display any post published by a user’s Facebook network, for example, corresponding to a search that he/she is performing.

2011: The Panda Update

The policy of penalizing sites seeking to misuse Google’s algorithm is still in its infancy. Some incidents are more notorious than others, such as the one involving Overstock.com in 2011. At the time, the Wall Street Journal argued that domains ending in .edu generally showed greater authority with Google, which Overstock uses to its advantage. The site then targets keywords such as “vacuum cleaners” or “bunk beds” and asks educational institutions to provide it with inbound links by offering discounts to students and faculty members. These links allow Overstock to improve its ranking for searches that include the targeted keywords until the company stops using this method, which Google penalizes shortly after.

It was also in February of that year that Google launched Panda, updating its algorithm to crack down on content farms, sites offering large amounts of low-quality content that is often updated and developed in the sole purpose of generating more search results. These kinds of sites tend to have a high ad-to-content ratio which Panda was designed to detect.

The Panda algorithm has been updated many times: there were 28 Panda updates up to July 2015, although the impact of most of them remains difficult to measure.

2012: The Penguin Update

In April 2012, Google took a new step in the process of rewarding quality sites and launched the first of many updates to Penguin.

Penguin targets sites that show ingenuity in their use of black hat SEO practices, for example, those offering mostly informative content interspersed with hyperlinks of a spammy nature and unrelated to the title of the content in question.

It is also interesting to note that 2012 is characterized by a return of the original anti-advertising policy of Google with the update “Above The Fold”, whose first objective is to alter the SEO of sites with too much advertising space. consistent above the waterline or in the top half of their pages.

Google decides to adjust its SEO system to remove spam from its results, and while this adjustment does not necessarily impact the SEO efforts of legitimate sites, it does take into account the efforts made to deliver results from authentic research.

In the tradition of updating algorithms named after animals, Google is launching the Pigeon Algorithm, which will have a significant impact on local search results.

The Algorithm seems to have been designed to improve searches on Maps, which then begin to be processed with the same technologies as those of other search functions, such as the Knowledge Graph, spell checking or synonyms. At the time, local research was on the way to becoming essential and has continued to be so.

2015: Focus on User Experience

The most important SEO announcement after 2010 is undoubtedly that of Google’s mobile update in April 2015. Downgrading the SEO of sites that do not have a user-friendly and functional mobile version, they announced the end of ‘an era where SEO focused exclusively on keywords and content to also take into account the notion of adaptive design.

Google announces this update in advance, starting in February, and offers a mobile usability and functionality test, which allows webmasters to identify and rectify possible problems before its official launch.

2016: Final Adoption of Updates

2016 is the year of validation of certain Google updates which are definitively integrated into Google’s core algorithm. In January 2016 and September 23, 2016, the Panda and Penguin updates are integrated into Google’s main algorithm to work in real-time.

In August 2016, Google attacked mobile pop-ups and penalized their too frequent use.

Finally, in November 2016, Google announced the deployment of its Mobile-First Index algorithm.

2017: Propensity to Favor Mobile

The latter program began to index websites according to their mobile version in 2017.

As a reminder, the use of mobile devices is on the rise. According to a study, 51% of digital media are consumed on mobile versus 42% on desktop. So it seems logical that SEO continues to explore this area.

This is already reflected in Google’s propensity to develop a user-friendly mobile user experience. We also predict that voice search will be one of the next big things in SEO.

The use of this process, which has its history, is on the rise and today represents 20% of searches on Google and 25% of those carried out on Bing. It is likely to develop further with the advent of voice-activated personal assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa.

Although there is not yet a clearly defined process applicable to optimization for voice search, partly due to a lack of data, this area is expected to grow rapidly and become another essential pillar of SEO.

At the same time, and during the same year, Google encouraged webmasters and website owners to lengthen their meta descriptions with the arrival of the Snippet Length Increase update. Formalized in November 2017, it consisted of doubling the number of displayable characters, from 155 to 300 characters.

2016 to 2019: SEO and Social Networks

While the introduction of Google’s real-time search in 2009 had some social ramifications, social networks are now an essential part of any SEO strategy.

When Google begins, for example, to index tweets in 2011, the phenomenon portends a future where the search for information on Social Media Platforms will be carried out under the same conditions as traditional searches. This indexing may also represent the future of Google, a time when the use of search engines will be different from what we know today.

If you type a celebrity’s name into Google, for example, Barack Obama, the first page of results will include their Facebook and Twitter profiles. Indeed, it is one of the first things that a user seeks to obtain when performing this kind of research.

Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even LinkedIn, the social network profiles of individuals and professionals, but also companies have seen themselves increasingly highlighted since 2016 within the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

The future of SEO

Natural referencing will evolve towards ever more interactivity and readability for Internet users, according to the SEO trends planned for 2020. First of all, site design will become a major issue, with responsive design imperative in the face of End of the Mobile Index First program in September 2020. Besides, changing expectations in terms of load times and 0-click trends make technical optimization crucial.

Besides, the notion of request and response will become increasingly important in the future. Whether it concerns the BERT update, contextualizing the keywords included in the query, or the growing share of voice search, the engine’s understanding of the user’s intention will be greatly improved. Likewise, for the Internet user, the experiences offered will always be more intuitive, with even more relevant results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vast and interesting topic that can help you grow your business. It is up to you to take your first step. And believe me, you won’t regret it.

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