Early SEO

The Rise of Search

Internet growth quickly outpaced human indexing efforts, highlighting the need for automated indexing. However, many of the earliest search tools were primitive and did not track any information beyond the website title. This all changed in 1994 when WebCrawler was born. WebCrawler was the first crawler to index entire pages and proved to be wildly successful. A few months later a search engine, Lycos, entered the scene. They ranged search results by relevance by leveraging prefix matching and word proximity. As it grew, Lycos indexed more and more of the internet, quickly scaling up from 54 thousand documents upon release in mid-1994, to 60 million documents by the end of 1996.

The Birth of SEO

There is a story about a band in the mid-90s called Jefferson Starship. They had a website made for them that they just loved to show off. One day, a problem came up when they wanted to show off their site but could not remember the URL. They looked it up on Lycos and Alta Vista, the search engines of the time, and were horrified to discover that their site appeared at the bottom of page two of the results. They called up their website maintainer to fix it.

After some research, they determined that the search engines ranked webpages based on how many times the search keyword appeared in the homepage of the website. The solution was to fill the page with invisible text containing the search term. The invisible text would still be seen by the search engine, thereby boosting their visibility in search results; a technique that became known as “keyword stuffing.”

Early SEO Techniques

We already discussed keyword stuffing, the technique which involved hiding the keyword in the homepage as many times as possible. There were a handful of other techniques as well. Directory listings were still relevant, so manual submissions to these sites helped bolster visibility. The other common technique was meta tag manipulation. Similar to keyword stuffing, meta tag manipulation involved overloading meta keywords to attract clicks. Often times the keywords added were irrelevant or high-traffic terms to artificially boost visibility. However, search engines improved over time, and these early SEO methods became relics of the past.