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Did you know that Webmasters and internet content providers first started doing SEO back in the mid-90′s? Since then SEO has changed quite a bit. In the early days, webmasters needed only to submit their page addresses or URLs to the various search engines, who would then send spiders to crawl through and index the sites. Soon after people started looking for ways to manipulate the search engines indexing algorithms in order to achieve first page results.

The first algorithm crackers appeared around 1997. This was the year that several SEO providers decoded all 35 parameters of Excite’s algorithm. No wonder that Google and the other major search engines guard their selection criteria with tremendous effort and expense. If people were allowed to manipulate the search engines then said search engines lose all credibility!

The arrival of Google ushered in a new way of ranking pages … search engine results now depended on value and search relevance. More complex algorithms started being developed that took into account off-site factors. At this point Alta Vista was ahead of the pack with Lycos , Yahoo, MSN and Infoseek capturing the rest of the market. Google was founded in 1998. Google’s algorithm, PageRank, determines site rankings by measuring the quantity and quality of their outbound links. Google had superior relevant search results and quickly captured market share.

In my next post I will write about the “Google Age”

Stay tuned!