How SEO evolved throughout the years?
The early beginning before SEO became a thing
1991
Before SEO there was the beginning of world wide web. In on March 6th, 1991 the first ever website – info.cern.ch – was launched by Tim Berners-Lee.
1994
1996
1998
The Google SEO revolution
2003
2005
Google makes its first attempt to fight back linking exploitation and launches its “rel=nofollow” attribute preventing the authority of websites to be passed on. Following this update, Google launches the Jagger and Big Daddy algorithms just before the end of 2015 to prevent link farming and other suspicious SEO tactics.
2006
YouTube gets acquired by Google for the whopping amount of $1.65 billion. Eventually, it would become the second most used search engine in the world. In the same year, Google also launches Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools giving developers profoundly deep insight on how Google sees their websites.
2008
Suggestion Box is finally launched after four years of development and testing. Continuing its path of improving the user experience, Google focuses on understanding better how we surf the web and interact with content. It may seem like the most obvious Google feature these days, but back then showing related searches to automatically appear below, after you start typing in the search box, was a major hit.
2009
Bing goes online or rather Microsoft gives a new name to its Live Search tool. By then Google has nearly 70% of the search engine market in the USA.
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
The release of “Pidgeon” is all about better local search results. Google improves location and distance ranking parameters to provide relevant results to users based on proximity. Local businesses with strong organic presence showed higher in traditional search within the area of the searching person’s location. The “Local SEO” finally gets its own genre, now distinct from the general SEO.
AI & Machine Learning algorithms
2015
2015 Some would say a breakthrough year in which Google reported more mobile searches in comparison to desktop search. “RankBrain” – a self-learning AI search architecture is introduced as part of the Hummingbird algorithm. It determines the most relevant results to search engine queries. At first, it runs only on 15% of searches that the system had never encountered before, but eventually, it applies to all of them.
2016
Google confirms that the search engine’s top three ranking factors are: links, content, and RankBrain.
2017
2018
A year of Webmaster Tools modernisation. Google Search Console, Google My Business and, most notably for SEO, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tools receive their updates. There are of course multiple changes to Google’s ranking algorithm done almost every day, but there were three Broad Core Algorithm Updates that were actually announced. PageSpeed update becomes a significant player in ranking and slow sites with low optimisation score on mobiles are affected. Google announces nine factors that influence Optimisation Score.
2019
The 2019 is the year of many Broad Core updates. After small Valentine’s Update released in February that impacted rankings in mostly positive ways the March release was one of the most significant Google updates in years. It was a kind of rollback that caused previously penalised websites retrieving their traffic and positions in search results. In June core update seems to have boosted sites focusing on their content quality and September release affected links. The latter was most likely related to Google’s changes in nofollow links policy. However, the biggest change came with BERT Broad algorithm update introduced in October and rolled out worldwide in December, which was designed to understand search queries better.
2020
“(…)it seems that Google was working again on content factors combined with brand factors (…)”.
In October 2020, Google BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) became available worldwide for SEO purposes. This programme processed all search results on Google in English within a year of launch. It also translated search results into seventy more languages, which improved the accuracy of search results and SEO. December 2020 saw the final core update of the year, bringing with it a wider range than the smaller local rankings update in November. This affected businesses’ SEO rankings across all languages, with benefits being seen in the music, health, news and e-commerce sectors.
2021
May 2021 saw the largest and most significant update of the year- what would later be known as the Google Page Experience Update. This is the first time that Google has counted user experience in SEO page rankings for search results. One of the things this update took into consideration was the load time of a website and the possibility of intrusive ads disturbing the user experience.
In June/July 2021 there was a two-month core update that impacted rankings across all sectors of business in multiple languages. It was during this update that websites with spam links saw a huge drop in SEO rankings.
The Google November 2021 update was released just hours before Black Friday, impacting businesses at a prime time of the year. The largest benefits from this update were travel, real estate, vehicles and science industries.
The final update of 2021 was in December, which focused on Product Reviews. This aimed to promote product reviews in order to benefit businesses’ rankings, as originally seen in April of 2021 as well. Some businesses were more badly affected than others.
Come back if you want to know how the rest of 2022 progressed when it comes to Google Algorithm updates, as we will continue to update this article further once we analyse some more data in the upcoming weeks.