HOW HAS SEO CHANGED OVER THE LAST 10 YEARS?
Long story short, SEO has changed through search engines changing their algorithms. The end. Now wouldn’t that be an awful article. Who remembers when all you had to do in order to perform well on Google was has a ton of links pointing to your site. ‘10,000 links for $20’ were regular unsolicited emails within ones inbox. Link farms were everywhere. But it was accepted. That’s what you had to do to get to the top. Google then decided this wasn’t great, so told everyone ‘WOH! Stop that now! We’ve changed our minds.’ (I’m paraphrasing of course). So, the world simply agreed, and born was Reciprocal Linking. A Reciprocal Link is an agreement between two webmasters to provide a hyperlink within their own website, and point it to the other. This was seen to provide users with quick access to related site, or to show a partnership of some sort. But again, webmaster started to abuse this rule, and so Google change it again. This time, back links had to be from relevant, reputable sources. This then stayed as the general rules for a number of years, with some even claiming that back links were the single most important technique for good SEO. Google then got a little wiser; they started evolving their algorithm a little more; they started introducing new rules, like keywords. If you wanted to get to the top now, you needed loads of back links and keywords. ‘Well, ok then’ everyone said, ‘we’ll just put a list of keywords in the footer and in our meta data’. Again, this was accepted, until Google evolved a little more. Keyword stuffing was quickly understood by search engines to be just a bit of a cheat. Good, quality content was then determined to be of high importance. This makes complete sense, and is today considered one of the most important factors for successful SEO – ‘content is king’ is no doubt a buzz word you’ve seen everywhere. A few huge algorithm updates have been rolled out over the years: Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird seem to be the big 3 from Google. All had different features, for example, rewarding websites with great content and punishing websites with bad and irrelevant back links. Loads of different thing to make the search engine what it is today have been introduced since Google’s launch. Even the name, did you know that Google was once called BackRub? Fun fact for you. You’re welcome. Thanks for reading our ‘How has SEO changed over the last 10 years?’ article – Be sure to visit our website digital marketing blog for all the latest happenings in digital marketing. We’re Digital Clicks, working with SEO in Cambridge and across the whole country. For more information, any help or advice for your campaign or to know more on how we work, don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of our SEO specialists. Error: Contact form not found.