History and Evolution of SEO

What is SEO?

         SEO can be elaborated as Search Engine Optimization, it simply means, the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's results. SEO covers an incredibly broad spectrum, but essentially, search engine optimization is the name given to any activity that exists to improve search engine rankings for search engines like Google. For instance, Google ranks or references pages it considers to be relevant and authoritative. Authority is measured by analyzing the number and quality of links from other web pages, quality of content, and overall relevance to a search term.

Elements of seo 

Crawling:In the seo world, crawling basically means following your links and “crawling” around your website. When bots come to your website (any page), they follow other linked pages also on your website.

Catching:cache is a snapshot of a web page that Google creates and stores after they have indexed a page. When pages are indexed, they are categorized and filed within Google's indexers, but they do not actively search though millions of web pages every time that page is called up.

Indexing:An index is another name for the database used by a search engine. Indexes contain the information on all the websites that Google (or any other search engine) was able to find. If a website is not in a search engine's index, users will not be able to find it.

 SEO Techniques

1.White Hat:White hat SEO utilizes techniques and methods to improve the search engine rankings of a website which don't run afoul of search engine (mainly Google) guidelines.Some white hat SEO techniques include: high quality content development, website HTML optimization and restructuring, link acquisition campaigns supported by high quality content and manual research and outreach.

2.Black Hat: Black Hat SEO exploits weaknesses in the search engine algorithms to obtain high rankings for a website. Such techniques and methods are in direct conflict with search engine guidelines.Some black hat SEO techniques include: link spam, keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, and hidden links.

Onpage Optimization:

Onpage optimization refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings.

Offpage Optimization:

Offpage optimization refers to all the measures that can be taken outside of the actual website in order to improve its position in search rankings.These are measures that help create as many high-quality backlinks as possible.

Updates

Panda: February 24, 2011

         Google panda update is a search filter.Its aim was content farming, content spinning. It also checks for content duplication, grammatical errors, spelling mistake to lower the rank of low-quality sites or thin sites, in particular.

 A content farm, also called a content mill is a Web site whose content is written for search engine bots instead of human readers. Topics on a content farm are chosen specifically for their ability to rank highly in search engine results.

 content spinning makes it possible for users to republish other people's content without concern about copyright  issues or SEO devaluation for duplicate content.

          Panda is the official name of an algorithm update developed by Google to reduce the prevalence of low-quality, thin content in the search results, and to reward unique, compelling content.At the time Panda launched, user complaints about the increasing influence of “content farms” were growing rampant.

             Google’s Panda algorithm assigns pages a quality classification, used internally and modeled after human quality ratings, that is incorporated as a ranking factor.

penguin: April 24, 2012

                   It is a link spamming update. Link spamming include  link exchange, paid link, link farming, comment spamming, wiki spamming, guest blogging. 

Link exchange: A link exchange is a confederation of websites that operates similarly to a web ring. Webmasters register their web sites with a central organization, that runs the exchange, and in turn receive from the exchange HTML code which they insert into their web pages.

Paid link: Advertisements are sometimes also known as "paid links" because someone is paying you (the website owner) to place a link on your page that points to another page. That link might be an image ad or a text ad, but it will virtually always be something on your page that links to another page.

 Link farming: A link farm is a website (or a group of websites) created only for the purpose of increasing the link popularity of another site by increasing the number of incoming links. 

Comment spamming: Trying to get links to their websites by posting links to their websites by posting links to their sites everywhere. They also give the links in the comment space.

Wiki spamming: Wikipedia is a site where everybody who can access the internet can edit the content. It is a very popular site since they are big non-profit sites. Before 2005, wikipedia.com never had added nofollow tag, so all links from it are counted as a valuable link to any site.

Guest Blogging: It also known as guest posting, it is the practice of contributing a post to another person's blog in order to build relationships, exposure, authority, and links.

              Google Penguin’s objective is to down-rank sites whose links it deems manipulative. Since late 2016, Penguin has been part of Google’s core algorithm; unlike Panda, it works in real time.

               The Google Penguin updates primarily seek to prevent various types of search engine spam  from being successfully rewarded in the form of higher-placed search engine results. Search engine spam can include activities such as keyword stuffing link spamming, the use of invisible text on web pages, duplication of copyrighted content from high-ranking web sites and more.

Hummingbird: August 22, 2013

                    Hummingbird helps Google better interpret search queries and provide results that match searcher intent (as opposed to the individual terms within the query). While keywords continue to be

important, Hummingbird makes it possible for a page to rank for a query even if it doesn’t contain the exact words the searcher entered. This is achieved with the help of natural language processing that relies on latent semantic indexing, co-occurring terms and synonyms.

  

Pigeon: July 24, 2014

                 It is a local seo based updation. Pigeon affects those searches in which the user’s location plays an important part. The update created closer ties between the local algorithm and the core algorithm: traditional SEO factors are now used to rank local results.

Mobilegeddon: April 21, 2015

                Google’s Mobile Update (aka Mobilegeddon) ensures that mobile-friendly pages rank at the top of mobile search, while pages not optimized for mobile are filtered out from the SERPs or seriously down-ranked.

Rankbrain: October 26, 2015

              RankBrain is part of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm. It is a machine learning system that helps Google understand the meaning behind queries, and serve best-matching search results in response to those queries. Google calls RankBrain the third most important ranking factor. While we don’t know the ins and outs of RankBrain, the general opinion is that it identifies relevance features for web pages ranking for a given query, which are basically query-specific ranking factors.