SEO History

Alan Emtage, a student at the University of McGill, created the first true "search" facility in 1990. It was called Archie (still in use at http://archie.emnet.co.uk), and was crested specifically to archive Internet documents. The next year, Gopher, an alternative to Archie, was created at the University of Minnesota, and the concept of search engines began to take shape. In 1993, Matthew Gray created the World Wide Web Wanderer (see article by Matthew Gray here), the earliest widely acclaimed robot. However, it was in 1994 that search engines as we know them were born. In that year Galaxy, Lycos , and Yahoo were all started, two of whom are still major search properties today.

It was also in 1994 that companies began experimenting with the concept of search engine optimisation; with the early emphasis begin solely on the submission process. However, within 12 months, the first automated submission software packages were released, and shortly afterwards the concept of spam reared its head for the first time, as eager webmasters quickly realised that (at this time) they could swamp search results pages by over-submission. Search engines soon realised this, and spammers began in earnest.

Soon, optimisers and search engines developed a "cat and mouse" relationship. As many web site optimisers discover new ranking techniques, the engines subsequently revise and enhance their ranking algorithms to respond to these strategies. Often this struggle is catalysed by a small portion of submitters abusing accepted practices in an unethical manner, and those SEO companies that know what they are doing are forced into two camps, those that work with the search engines to achieve rankings and thereby quality traffic, and those that work against the search engines to achieve high quantities of low-quality traffic.

The search engines quickly noted that SEO as an industry was here to stay, and in order to maintain useful indexes, they would need to at least accept the industry, if not embrace it, and soon many search engines were allowing proven ethical SEO companies to become partner sites.

SEO Ethics

This article was first published on 01 June 2002 and does not necessarily match current events or the current opinions and views of bigmouthmedia ltd.

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