First of all, in 1991 Tim Berners-Lee published a paper online talking about the World Wide Web (WWW).
In 1993 this web was made free of charge to anyone who wanted to use it.
From 1993-94 people started to build web pages. So in order to find web page coders started to build search engines.
By the mid, the late 90s the most popular search engine was “Alta Vista”.
The Alta Vista search results generally depend upon “meta keywords tag”. Within the source code of a web page, the website designers include a list of keywords that they thought were relevant to each page.
But unfortunately, that was open to abuse. People started listing keywords that were not relevant to the pages. Therefore users didn’t get great quality results.
After Google Ranking Algorithm –
In 1998, hence Google came along with their ranking formula. They calculated that it would be higher rank if a web page had more links to it.
The higher number of links pointed to your site compared with the number of pages that you link to, then the better your page rank score.
So people were looking for thousands of links to point to their web pages. In early 2000 this worked very very effective for improving your ranking on Google.
So webmasters swap links with their friends and other website owners that they don’t even know and weren’t even relevant to their particular website.
And as long as they swapped links they had more links pointing to their site then this would ultimately increase their ranking.
It wasn’t going to last forever because this was deteriorating and value the quality of search results.
If people wanted immediate news Google wasn’t delivering what searchers looking for.
Just because something was published a few years ago and it has thousands of links pointing to it.
It doesn’t make it most relevant source on that particular topic nowadays.
Perhaps something just published two hours ago with only two links pointing to it, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s less relevant.
It could be more relevant for today’s audience.
In the last couple of years, Google has made more and more changes to its algorithm and finally find a “Google Panda”. Panda is about quality content.
This algorithm look for following thinks:
- volume of your content
- is website optimized for mobile
- determine whether or not the content is of good quality and much more