Before social media, before Google, before smartphones and tablets, there were search engines.
But they’re not the search engines we know today. They were a lot simpler, a lot more basic. They operated by an entirely different, less advanced set of rules. And the process of optimizing content for them was different too.
Here is a brief look back at the origins of search engine optimization (SEO).
The Web’s First Search Engines
“Eventually, as websites crowded the Internet, the first search engines filled a need for structure and accessibility.” – Thomas Stern, Search Engine Land
1990. That’s the year McGill University’s Alan Emtage created Archie — oddly, approximately one full year before the launch of the world’s first website. Short for “Archives,” Archie is believed by many to be the web’s first search engine (though there’s some contention on that front). It didn’t take long for people to realize the potential of these tools from a business perspective.
It took years for that potential to be realized and for commercial search engines, like today’s, to emerge. And in the interim, there was a lot of abuse.
Early search engines were simple word-matching tools, and some webmasters exploited this simplicity. Keyword stuffing throughout the 90s was common. Black hat tactics like excessive tagging and link farming were widespread.
The web was basically the wild west. Even as commercial search engines like Yahoo, Alta Vista, AskJeeves, and Lycos launched, spam ran rampant across all corners of the web. It wasn’t until 1998 that we saw change on the horizon.
That was the year that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at the time, both students at Stanford, published their paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.” That year we first saw the groundwork laid for what would eventually become the world’s largest search engine. The year SEO was truly born.
The Birth of Search Engine Optimization
While SEO has existed as a discipline since the 1990s, the actual term is a lot younger. While we’re not quite clear on who first coined the phrase, the earliest usage appears to have been in December 1997. It was, according to Search Engine Land Editor Danny Sullivan, in an advertisement that ran for Paul Bruemmer’s company ClientDirect.
Sullivan popularized the term in his August 1998 article, “Promoters Call for Certification.”. That month, he renamed a page on Search Engine World from ‘Search Engine Positioning’ to ‘Search Engine Optimization.’At this time, SEO was still pretty lawless.
As Google dominated the market, it pushed for ethical SEO, using algorithm updates to penalize black hat tactics. It was then, as it is now, all done in the interest of providing end users with as positive an experience as possible.
That’s one thing that’s remained constant through today and, I hope, the one thing that continues to underscore Google’s decisions well into the future.
