Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [21]
How Search Engines Used to Work
Most of the confusion about search engines and how they work comes from the drastic changes that happened in the search engine industry around 1999–2000. Prior to that time, search marketing was a very different process than it is today. Articles written about gaining rankings in the 1990s reflect a different market from today’s; however, those articles and documents are still floating around online, providing an endless source of both frustration and amusement to online marketers. If you have ever searched using a search engine for information about search engine optimization, then you know what I mean. For a search engine, relevance is everything; however, a search for content about search engine optimization yields very unsatisfactory results. The information is outdated, conflicting, sometimes dangerous, and rarely cohesive.
With the distinct change in search engines around the turn of the millennium, there was a change in tactics. In addition, there was a change in mentality. It crept in silently, as SEO specialists realized that rankings weren’t the pinnacle of success. When analytics started being used to measure business goals, the point of getting a site to rank well became secondary. Business goals and increased sales or leads quickly became the desired metric for success.
When I started to understand search engine optimization, it was because of a website that I was operating and marketing, and it was my primary source of income. When I had the time to work on this website, I was faced with a choice. Do I work on all of these techniques that my users won’t see and may help my rankings? Or, do I spend my time on the content that the users will see? When your time and resources are limited, you find out very quickly which activities lead to increased revenue, and you work on those activities. That was the choice that I made, and in looking back, it was the right one. It taught me that regardless of all the shortcut techniques and advice that SEO specialists shared, the longest-lasting and most rewarding thing you could do to your website was to build quality content that searchers actually wanted to see and provide a compelling reason for them to take action on your website.
All of the old-school techniques had something in common. They were shortcuts at gaining rankings, and one-by-one they all fell out of favor with the search engines. It became easier for search engines to discover these techniques as the technology improved, and your website could be penalized and possibly dropped out of the rankings for utilizing some of these techniques. The sites that focused on their message and the user maintained their rankings and their profitability and survived.
The following are some of the “old-school” optimization and search engine tactics that used to be employed. When you see an article about these tactics, simply laugh and remember the good ol’ days of search engine trickery—or, as we in the business call these tactics, “partying like it’s 1999!”
Old-School: Submitting to Search Engines
Back in the mid-1990s—or in Internet terms, the “caveman days” of search engine optimization—the search engines did not use spiders (bots, crawlers) as the primary means of finding new websites on the Internet. Because of this, webmasters had to submit their URLs or even all the URLs of their entire website in order to be included in the search engine’s database of websites.
To complicate matters even more, some search engines would give you a boost in the rankings based on how recently you submitted your website into the index. Simply based on this premise, you can imagine the activity that resulted. Webmasters flocked to these engines and continually submitted their pages so as to maintain their rankings. In short order, software was developed that would enable a program to automatically submit all the pages on a