CT Web Marketing Blog

SEO has existed ever since the introduction of the Yahoo search engine back in 1995. It was much different at the time and in the early days getting ranked was much less of a science due to the primitive search algorithms used by Yahoo and other early search engines. As time went on the algorithms became more advanced and getting ranked became more about technique and strategy than luck.

The Golden Age of SEO
With the advancement of search algorithms, came the exploits. Since these early algorithms had parameters that were set in stone it was possible to generate #1 ranking at will if you knew all of the parameters and implemented them on your website and web pages. This was the birth of on-page SEO a golden age for those who enjoyed gaming the system (and had the technical skill to do so) and “bait and switch” type websites were prevalent. Search engines began to catch on to this rampant abuse and modified their algorithms to not only weed out these types of sites but to also make it so that SEO could be implemented by those who weren’t highly skilled at cracking SEO parameters. This began the golden age of SEO for ordinary people looking to rank their site however SEO as a business tool hadn’t quite caught on yet.

Dark Ages of SEO
These golden ages of SEO quickly came to an end however as search engines became littered with spam due to how easy it was to manipulate the rankings. This could be considered the dark ages of SEO as many once powerful search engines such as Hotbot and AltaVista became practically worthless. Search engines frantically searched for a way to combat this problem and once again modified their algorithms. This gave rise to off-page SEO and the importance of backlinks. In addition to this, search algorithms also began to become much more complex to deter crackers from discovering the parameters and gaming the system.

2012: Google Goes Business
Up until this point Google, has always been considered to be on the side of the people of the Internet. Their policy has always been to help ensure that people doing searches get quality content in the search results and those who build websites get rewarded for having a quality site. Some questionable decisions on Google’s part this year has left some business owners and online marketers wondering if Google has “sold out.”
One such change was the fact that Google Analytics will now refrain from showing keyword data of users who are logged into Google. Since this keyword data was invaluable for website owners many are understandably upset, especially since most people are in fact logged in now thanks to the rise of mobile devices.  Another change that has left many site owners bewildered is the fact that the Google search algorithms not only find websites to match search queries now but also search through the info within the website to find useful info.  For example, if you type in “How old is George Clooney” the first thing that comes up in the search results is Google telling you he’s 50 years old. While this may not seem like a big deal, and isn’t rampant yet, the implications are startling. If Google begins giving away a website’s info before people click on the site the loss of traffic (and revenue) could be monumental.

Here is an insight on two of the major changes that transformed the world of SEO in 2012
1.Google panda
First off, you might be wondering where the Panda update came from or better yet why it’s killing so many Internet Marketers and their businesses. You see back in early 2011, Google started a series of updates which were specifically based on internet user’s opinions instead of on numerical data. The things that were not accounted for were the number of backlinks a website had, the quality of them, how many pages had content and how many did not, keyword density of these content pages and Meta data.

Your successes and failures will still depend on these aspects, but if you don’t utilize them correctly, you might end up being tossed aside like so many of the other businesses and websites out there. Panda was not and is not based on numerical data and instead was collected by a bunch of data which was collected by humans who evaluated certain websites. For more detailed information regarding Penguin and Panda there is a great detailed breakdown of all of Google’s updated here http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change#2012