Birth of Search Engines

Meta engines

Keyword tag spam

Manually submitting

Introduction of

Google is a play on words of a Googol

Originally called Back Rub

Born in 1998

A Googol is 1 followed by a hundred zeros (10100)! To show Google’sclaim to index mass amounts of information

Introduced links into search algorithms

Google’s only 14 years old!

Crawling web to index websites

Google follows links from one website to anotherto discover new pages and websites

Same technique as ‘surfing the web’before search engines

Google ignores manualsubmissions if no linksto the site

Directories

These were THE places to be found on the internet

Google saw these as trusted sourcesGoogle said to be found you should put your website on directories

Within a month, there were 20,000 directories

Then the creation of Link Farms were madeThese were incredibly spammy versions of directories

On-page elementsTitle Tag If a webpage was a book, this would be it’s main title

The SEO Title element in WPS controls this

H1 Tags

Content

Images

Meta Information

Following the book reference, think of these as the Chapter Title

Bread and butter of everything SEO

Alt and Title Tags

Image Name

Recently started reading text within images

Description & Keyword tags

Keyword tag was dropped long ago

Description tag no longer has any weight but is a good‘hook’ to users

PageRank is actually named afterco-founder Larry Page who made it

Based on a scale of 1-10 fromquality and quantity of links

Only updated once every 3 months then the toolbarwould only update 3 months after that!

Article Spinning

Paid Links

On-page Elements Off-page Elements

Ghost Writing

Introduction of Black Hat SEO

Cloaked Pages

Hidden Elements Three Way Links (and then some)

NoFollow Tag

Google created the NoFollow tag

<a href=http://website.com rel=“nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>

So you could still link to a website but not pass any value

Quickly adopted by Bing and Yahoo

Became overusedextremely quickly

All Wikipedia links are Nofollowresulting in a Black Hole effect

Site Speed

Google looks at website loading speedas a ranking metric

No one likes a slow website

Slow websites actually get punished! Like ours….

Websites loading under 1.5 seconds receive a ranking boost

http://gtmetrix.com/

Panda UpdateGoogle punishing ‘thin pages’

A thin page is a website with little or no content

These included a sites search results page

Our own unclaimed listings

Lots of websites tanked with this updateFocused on a few good pages, having good authority and lots of thin pages

PenguinGoogle punishing bad link structures

Links from bad websites i.e. link farms, bad directories

Even more websites tankedDue to people participating in poor linking ideas

at a previous time and/or continuing to

Where we are nowSocial Metrics

You wouldn’t spam your friends, right?

Allowing Google easier access to categorise your data

Knowledge Graph Google Local

Jet Li

Google Glass

Google Now