What do you think of this summary of the history; origin and evolution of the SEO industry? 1990 to 1993 The first search engines are developed. Apparently, the fist one on record is Archie. This work is done mainly at an academic level. 1994 to 1995 The first commercial search engines are developed: Galaxy, Lycos and Yahoo. There is already a research, analysis and experimentation on the best ways to submit and format a site so that it is found by the newborn search engines. It is highly probable that at this point the term SEO is coined. Eric Ward started the first “Web Promotion†business. 1996 Internet is already seen as a commercial phenomenon. Big corporations start to invest in Web Sites as a mean to promote their brands. Altavista led, by a small margin, a growing market of search engines that already gathered: MSN, Lycos, Excite, Yahoo, Netscape and Info Seek. The Google founders started work on their idea. 1997 to 1998 SEO starts to be an intrinsic activity for the promotion of Web Sites. PPC (Pay per Click) is born: Overture, the first PPC company is founded. 1999 The year Google comes out to the world, with venture funding and a lot of publicity and expectations. Payed ads and banners started to flood the Web, constituting the main means of on-line promotion. 2000 Flash, music, animated gifs; multimedia is the cool thing. Internet searching sees an explosion in traffic; and SEO turns more complicated and valuable. Heavy weight corps start to compete. Difficulties and confrontation of ideas of Web designers, webmasters, clients, users, CEO’s and SEO’s grow high. 2001 “Black Hat SEO†shows up. During this year, hackers found and developed lots of techniques to “manipulate†search engines, many times getting high positions in search results for pages with low value or dubious content. Google gains number one spot in Internet Search Market. 2002 SEO becomes a popular matter among hackers and Internet market leaders. There is a big proliferation of SEO forums. Google becomes, until this date, the search engine of excellence; practically monopolizing the market’s attention. This is the year of the biggest SPAM impact on search engines, propelled mainly by the black hat SEO’s. 2003 In November, 2003, an index actualization at Google shakes the positions of thousands of sites that seemed to be fixed, until that date, at the top positions. This works havoc among webmasters and SEO experts. 2004 to 2006 Google begins to win the battle against SPAM. Business start to invest great sums on the Internet, again. Even more than before the bubble. Google develops AdWords and Adsense: a 2006 over 6.000.000.000 US$ of profit business. 2007 There seems to be a consensus among experts: Rules and adequacy standards for SEO are set. Techniques to “manipulate†search engines are no longer effective. It takes brightness, professional work, and above all: a good Web Site. Today there is no bigger mystery than developing a site following the search engines rules (or simply Google’s), quality content, dedication, and good ideas. It is not a mystery, but nobody says it is easy. Resources bigmouthmedia.com highposition.net searchcircus.com search-marketing.info ericward.com This is extracted from a post at my blog, which has a lot of links to it.
You are right ron21, it is not a very entertaining narration. I'll try to put more 'funny' into it. Nevertheless, it was already picked up by a copyist blog. Thanks for the feedback.