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Webmasters and content providers started optimizing web-sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Originally, all webmasters needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page, extract backlinks to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The system involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts a variety of information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are residing, as well as any weight for distinct words, and all links the webpage contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to acknowledge the value of having their websites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, leading to an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the term search engine optimization in all probability came into use in 1997. The first noted use of the term Search Engine Optimization was John Audette and his company Multimedia Marketing Group as reported by a web page from the MMG web site from August, 1997.

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided data such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content material. Using meta data to index pages was discovered to be less than reliable, however, mainly because the webmaster's selection of keywords and phrases in the meta tag could possibly be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content material. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Web content service providers also manipulated a variety of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an effort to rank well in search engines.

By depending so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better ranking results to their end users, search engines had to adapt to be certain their results pages displayed the most pertinent search results, rather then unrelated pages stuffed with a variety of keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its capability to produce the most pertinent results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search options. Search engines responded by creating more complicated ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

Graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created "Backrub," a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates the possibility that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the world-wide-web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are more powerful than others, as a higher PageRank web page is far more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the rising number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation noticed in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already created link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of url spamming.

By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed considerations in their ranking algorithms to lessen the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals. The leading search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. SEO service providers, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Travis Safford, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.SEO practitioners may also analyze patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.

In 2005, Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users. In 2008, Bruce Clay said that "ranking is dead" as a result of personalized search. It would become meaningless to discuss how a web site ranked, simply because its rank would potentially be different for each user and every single search.


In 2007, Google announced a campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank. On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a renowned software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer deal with nofollowed links in the same way, in order to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting. As a result of this change the usage of nofollow leads to evaporation of pagerank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers developed alternative measures that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated Javascript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Additionally, several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, Flash and Javascript.
In December 2009, Google announced it would be using the web search history of all its users in order to populate search results.

Google Instant, real-time-search, was introduced in late 2009 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in recognition of social media sites and blogs the top rated engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results.

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