I. 1994- 1997: the birth of Yahoo and the birth of SEO
1In August, 1993, Lycos launched a data discovery technology based on search robots to support the ranking of search results. This also enables search engines to automatically extract web pages for the first time.
1Alta Vista was launched at the end of 995. Because it has many new search functions, it is very popular with the public. Alta Vista is the first search engine that supports natural language search, has the ability of content analysis AND intelligent processing based on web pages, and realizes advanced search syntax (such as AND, OR, NOR, etc.). ). At the same time, you can also search the content in the news group and search for pictures.
This stage is also the primary stage of Yahoo's development. At this time, most people are not familiar with search and don't know much about the existence of search engines. But for Yahoo, most people know something about it. Go to Yahoo to find a website. Therefore, it is necessary to send your website to Yahoo. At this stage, as long as your website has a basic appearance and a certain popularity, as long as you submit the address to Yahoo, it will appear in the Yahoo directory within 72 hours. Yahoo classifies all websites manually, generally in alphabetical order. Naturally, the website starting with "A" comes before the "B", while the two websites starting with "A" come before the websites starting with "A" and "B". For example, the website of American Airlines is not only in front of Bank of America, but also in front of American Basketball Association. So a large number of websites are named after the pursuit of a word. This is the embryonic form of search engine optimization. This logic is the same as the ranking logic of telephone numbers in the yellow pages.
At this stage, Yahoo's column editors are also actively searching for new websites on the Internet to enrich their databases. Their searches are all manual. The most typical method is to visit another website from a link of another website. When they meet a good website, they send an email to the webmaster, and welcome the webmaster to log in, and they are all free.
The behavior of these Yahoo editors visiting websites is as tireless as the search engine spiders and robots we see today. It is unimaginable that a Yahoo editor cares so much about your website, is more anxious to log on to your website than you are, and doesn't charge a penny. After your website logs in, you can also change your login information at any time, usually once every 72 hours.
It is worth mentioning that although there were few Chinese websites in this period, and most of them were American Chinese websites and websites in Taiwan Province Province, Yahoo obviously noticed the future of Chinese websites and soon got a Chinese translation name "Yahoo", not only because its founder was Jerry Yang.
This stage is also the embryonic stage of SEO. Some papers appear online and offline, discussing text communication, data mining and interviewing search engine programmers. At first, people had a vague consciousness, that is, to make the content of web pages conform to the principles of search engine database. Similarly, websites are easy to be included by search engines. As long as keywords are used to a certain density, your web pages are also easy to arrange on search engines.
It is worth mentioning that the search engine InfoSeek is updated daily for the first time. You submit the website at eight o'clock in the morning, it will be included in the afternoon and will appear in the search the next day. It is precisely because of such rapid updates and such easy submission and inclusion that a large number of webmasters began to change their ways and frequently log in to different websites. The word Spam appeared in English to describe the irresponsible creation of rampant garbage by webmasters, which soon became unbearable for these search engines.
So SEO is black and white from the beginning. White, English is white-hat, which is to adjust your website reasonably according to the principle that search engines can achieve, so that search engines can include it and get good exposure. Mafia, whose English name is black-hat, looks like a hacker, looking for the weaknesses of search engines, trying to force the chaotic information to search engines, thus improving the exposure opportunities of real websites.
During this period, adult websites took the lead in "hacking" search engines because of the strong profit temptation. So SEO and search engines have a love-hate relationship from the beginning. During this period, paid website optimization services began to appear in the United States.
In the field of Chinese search engines, China started not too late. Sohu Company, founded in August, 1996, was the first website to participate in the classified navigation of management information similar to Yahoo, and once had the reputation of "going out to find maps and surfing the Internet to find Sohu".
At this time, no one noticed that in a dormitory of Stanford University, two smart students were slowly gestating a new search engine that attracted worldwide attention. They invented a new theory called PageRank to reshape the search engine. This new search engine is now Google.
Second,1998-1999: the emergence of Google and SEO theory.
At this stage, some articles about website optimization began to be published at the Internet conference in the United States. These articles began to pay attention to the popularity of links and the significance of directory lists. During this time, search engines also know that they should limit people's website submission and prevent the proliferation of junk websites, so they began to organize counterattacks.
Alta Vista began to eliminate web pages with the words "Let's optimize" or "Let's promote" on a large scale. SEO practitioners are beginning to realize that it is increasingly difficult to crack the principles of search engines. It is ten times more difficult for a website to reach the top ten in 1999 than in 1998. Search engines began to pay more attention to the significance of link popularity.
1998, Google also obtained the first venture capital of100000 USD, moved out of Stanford campus, and was officially named Google Company, and its domain name was changed from google.stanford. edu to Google. com。 This new search engine measures the importance of websites, and takes link popularity as one of the ranking criteria for the first time.
1999 In May, the British company FAST launched the ALLTheWeb search engine. Its web search can be automatically classified according to ODP, supports Flash and PDF file search, supports multilingual search, and also provides news search, picture search, video, MP3 and FTP search, which has extremely powerful advanced search function. Such a powerful function makes it one of the most popular search engines.
At the beginning of this stage, search engines also began to diversify and set up multilingual websites, such as AltaVista, which took the lead in starting the Latin version. GAIS Laboratory, led by Professor Wu Sheng of Chung Cheng University in Taiwan, established the Chinese search engine OpenFind in June1998+1October 2006. It is the earliest Chinese intelligent search engine, claiming to be able to crawl the most web pages in the world, and began to enter English search engines.
1999, Google got 25 million yuan and began to develop with all its strength. It has handled 500,000 searches every day. This investment also allowed Google to move to San Francisco, a city called Palo Alto in Silicon Valley. Google is also beginning to understand its partners. Shortly after AOL arrived at Netscape, Google moved to San Francisco, a mountain view city in Silicon Valley. At this time, search engines began to try to control the market, and advertisements appeared widely in search engines. This has aroused the resentment of many searchers, because everyone is still surfing the Internet with a 56KB modem, and a large number of advertisements make the website page look too slow.
Google discovered this fatal problem that affected the search speed. The simple web design makes everyone feel refreshed, and the fast search speed makes all webmasters tell each other. Every webmaster forum is full of excellent comments on Google, and magazine interviews are constantly recommending Google, and Google's comprehensive performance is officially staged.
Third, the innovation of Baidu and search engines.
Since 2000, it takes more and more time to log on to a website and search engine. Search engines are keen on charging services, from a new search engine Inktomi to Alta Vista, all of which are stained with money. Meanwhile, searchers hope that a search engine can really bring them useful information. Google did not live up to people's expectations, and its accurate search began to consolidate its position in search engines.
The first one out was InfoSeek, which was acquired by Disney Company with 1998 and became Go. com。 Since then, InfoSeek has been abandoned, and Go. Com switched to Yahoo search. 1999, a China engineer from InfoSeek left this search engine and went to Beijing. He tried to build a "China people's own" search engine, inspired by an old saying in China, "I looked for him in the crowd for thousands of Baidu, and suddenly I looked back, but the man was in the dim light", so he named the search engine of China people "Baidu". This engineer is Li Yanhong, one of the founders of Baidu.
Li Yanhong himself is a new generation of search technology experts. As early as 1996, he solved the problem of how to perfectly combine the ranking based on web page quality with the ranking based on relevance, and obtained an American patent. Baidu has developed a large-scale commercial Chinese search engine by combining the talents of Silicon Valley search engines and relying on the best software talents in Beijing. Since then, Chinese search and English search have stood on the same starting line. At the same time, Baidu search skillfully solved the bottleneck of data update, and the database of all Chinese web pages can be updated once a day at the earliest.
The year 2000 was also the year when Flash animation, JavaScript stunt flip and dynamic pictures became popular. These dynamic forms are very popular, but few people know that search engines can't recognize them. Search engines can only read words, but not the creativity of these senses, because they have been simulating people's reading methods, but they can't simulate people's perception. Until today, search engines have not solved this problem.
Starting from this year, in fact, you don't need to fill in "Add URL" on the search engine page to submit a new website to the search engine. Search engines have been able to find links to new websites from existing websites to access and include it. At this time, SEO practitioners began to know that if websites can be included in the directory, especially the open directory project project ODP(Open Directory Project), it will be of great help to improve the search ranking. The most famous ODP is DMOZ(www. dmoz。 Org), which was founded in 1998 by Nick Stenta and Bob Tourre, two engineers from Sun Company. Is a directory website that manually collects websites for classification. At this point, its composition is the same as Yahoo.
The difference is that it is maintained by global webmasters themselves, while Yahoo is maintained by professional editors. With regard to DMOZ, search engines favor DMOZ because the website credibility after manual analysis is naturally higher than the website information obtained by search engine spiders and robots.
200 1, charging login is booming. The search engine market has gone through a big cleaning, and people began to abandon the search engines Hotbot, Alta Vista and Excite. Alta Vista tried to follow Google's example and return to a smaller version of the search engine, but this desperate struggle failed painfully and was acquired by Yahoo in 2003. Inktomi also lost several application partners and went downhill sharply. Inktomi was also acquired by Yahoo in 2004, and now it has become the main core technology of Yahoo search.
Fourth, 2002-2007: sleepless nights of Google Dance and SEO.
In fact, at 200 1, sensitive webmasters and SEO practitioners felt an unprecedented phenomenon. Some people's ranking on Google disappeared overnight, and some people ranked first. This phenomenon occurs almost once a month. Later, people know that this is a distance activity that Google regularly updates its index, giving people the feeling of dancing, so it is called Google Dance by SEO practitioners.
It is precisely because of Google Dance that every SEO practitioner will stay up late to see if his SEO achievements can be realized on Google on Google update night. There are winners and losers in every update, and there are always thousands of discussions in online SEO forums, hoping to know what to expect in the next update or guess the specific date of the update.
Search engines encounter more serious flooding problems at this stage. SEO practitioners use portal pages, duplicate websites, hidden pages and hidden links to cheat Google. In addition, DMOZ is used by Google as an important channel to include new websites, and DMOZ has also been injected into many junk websites.
2002 was a year when a lot of SEO was abused. However, search engines continue to enrich their identification technology from these struggles with illegal SEO behavior, refusing to include the websites they have sealed up and excluding those that have been included. But this ban also wronged many honest SEO websites.
In China, Baidu began to provide public search service in September 20001year, and successfully let Sohu and Sina use its search technology. At the same time, it also provides news search services to rapidly expand the user base.
In 2003, more and more website designers were cautious about the application of Flash. This year is also a year when search engines continue to fight back against the proliferation of garbage. Many SEO practitioners understand that black hat technology is no longer feasible, and it is necessary to improve the quality of the website in a down-to-earth manner.
In 2003, Google even pushed out AltaVista and Inktomi to become the leading companies. Google was born in a complex search engine era. At that time, search engines such as Alta Vista were too confident in their market share to change. Google was promoted by various webmasters and SEO practitioners, thus coming from behind. Google began to fight back against the proliferation of garbage, directly targeting the webmasters and SEO practitioners who once supported it. These people have become victims of Google's success.
In 2003, Google's "Florida Update" really showed the webmasters all over the world the power of Google. If there is a strong hurricane, Florida update will make thousands of websites disappear from the search overnight, or scrape from the top ten to 100 pages. This update took place at 165438+ 10/6, which caused heavy losses, especially for e-commerce websites that hope to make a fortune in the coming Christmas. This update of Google is an important battle to crack down on junk websites and illegal SEO.
However, due to the imperfect filters used, many innocent websites are affected. It is called "Florida Update" because this update was initiated by Google's data center in Florida.
After that, the aftermath named "Austin Update" on June 5438+1October 2004 also hit many websites. In an instant, SEO practitioners suddenly became experts in Google Adwords, and everyone had to rely on Google advertising to maintain sales during this holiday season.
These two historic Google updates have taught many SEO practitioners quite a lot of lessons. Improving the quality of the website itself rather than opportunism is the only feasible way for SEO. PPC has also steadily become an important means of marketing strategy, and SEO has also become a part of search engine marketing (SEM).
Yahoo decided to formally part ways with Google at this time. For a long time, Yahoo has been using Google technology to provide online search in order to make up for the shortage of its manually included websites. Yahoo shows that it has successively acquired Alta Vista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi, which makes people realize Yahoo's mood-does it indirectly raise Google? It still owns 20% of Google! Finally, on February 16, 2004, Yahoo sold its shares in Google, officially bid farewell to Google and embarked on the road of developing its own search engine.
In the same year, on September 12, 2004, Google launched simplified and traditional Chinese versions of its search engine.
In 2005, the biggest change was that Google Update was no longer a routine activity, but gradually became a daily incremental update. We will never see drastic changes again. SEO practitioners can quickly see whether their efforts have paid off. It is the only way to ensure the stability of the website by following the discipline of search engines and adjusting and improving the structure and content of the website with reasonable methods. More importantly, websites optimized according to these specifications will not only rank well on Google, but also have good results on Yahoo and MSN. China website will also benefit from Baidu's ranking if it does a good job in website quality.