How search engines (and SEO) have evolved - Part 1

In this series of blogs, we do a deep dive into a very important aspect of content.

How is the content that we write being viewed by the most important search engine of our time - Google.

The content we write may be of the highest quality and be valuable for our target audience. But unless, we as writers, have an understanding of how search engines are crawling and indexing the content that we write and publish, the content may not even be ranked and shown to our intended audience.

Remember that unless someone knows and types the full web address of your blog or website in their browser, they are almost completely dependent on search engines to find your content. So, it's imperative that we optimize our content to convince the search engines that it is relevant content for the audience that we are targeting.

First, we go through a quick history lesson to learn how the Google search engine has evolved since inception.

Google is constantly changing their algorithm. For webmasters it's important to know, when and what the search engine changed with the newest algorithm update. But why does Google change its algorithm? The basic aim of the search engine’s algorithm changes is to make search results better and more relevant for users (ranking of the websites), but it isn’t known in advance which parameters Google plans to change, or which steps webmasters have to take.

Below is a timeline that highlights the key milestones in how Google interprets and ranks content:

1. Early Days of Search Engines: Keyword-Focused Indexing (1998–2005)

In its infancy, Google’s search engine primarily relied on a keyword-based indexing system, which was designed to match the words users typed into the search bar with the same words found on webpages. This process, known as exact keyword matching, formed the foundation of Google’s search results during this period.

Google would scan webpages and match the exact keywords in the user’s query with the text on the page. Content was assessed based on the frequency of keyword appearances, often ignoring context or relevance. Simple Boolean operators like "AND," "OR" and "NOT" were used to refine search results. Content creators realized that including specific keywords in titles, headings, and body text could significantly improve a page's ranking. The percentage of times a keyword appeared relative to the total word count became a critical metric. Many aimed for 3-5% density. Meta keywords and descriptions in the page's HTML were heavily relied upon, as Google indexed these to understand the page's content.

While this system worked initially, it had significant loopholes, leading to exploitation.

Keyword Stuffing: Webmasters began excessively repeating keywords in unnatural ways, stuffing them into page titles, headings, and content, regardless of whether it made sense. Pages with higher keyword repetition ranked better, even if the content lacked quality or relevance.

Hidden Keywords: Some websites hid keywords by using the same color for the text and background, making them invisible to users but still readable by Google’s crawlers.

Duplicate Content: Many webmasters copied and duplicated content across multiple pages, sometimes slightly tweaking keywords, to dominate search results.

Doorway Pages: Websites created pages optimized for specific keywords, which would then redirect users to unrelated or low-quality pages, tricking both the search engine and users.

The above system and its loopholes may lead you to think “Why would a pioneer such as Google build such an inefficient system?”

But you have to remember that these were the early days of search, and the keyword-focused system was groundbreaking at the time. Of course, it encouraged content creators to focus solely on optimizing for search algorithms rather than producing user-centric, valuable content. Content writing became more about "gaming the system" than educating or engaging audiences. The search results often felt cluttered with irrelevant, spammy pages, making it harder to find useful information.

So, Google got better.