Alan Emtage, a student at the University of McGill, made the first true “search” facility in 1990. It was called Archie (still in use at Archie.emnet.co.uk), and was crested particularly to archive Internet documents. The next year, Gopher, an alternative to Archie, was made at the University of Minnesota, and the concept of search engines began to take shape. In 1993, Matthew Gray made the World Wide Web Wanderer (see article by Matthew Gray here), the earliest widely acclaimed automaton. However, it was in 1994 that search engines as we know them were born. In that year Galaxy, Lycos, and Yahoo were all started, two of whom are still major search properties today.

It was also in 1994 that companies began experimenting with the concept of search engine optimization; with the early importance begin solely on the submission course. However, within 12 months, the first automated submission software packages were released, and shortly afterwards the concept of spam reared its head for the first time, as eager webmasters quickly realized that (at this time) they could swamp search results pages by over-submission. Search engines soon realized this, and spammers began in earnest.

Soon, optimizers and search engines developed a “cat and mouse” relationship. As several web site optimizers discover new ranking techniques, the engines afterward revise and enhance their ranking algorithms to respond to these strategies. Often this struggle is catalyzed by a small portion of submitters abusing established practices in an unethical manner, and those SEO companies that know what they are doing are forced into two camps, those that work with the search engines to get rankings and thereby quality traffic, and those that work against the search engines to attain high quantities of low-quality traffic.

The search engines quickly noted that SEO as an industry was here to stay, and in order to maintain useful indexes, they would need to at least accept the industry, if not embrace it, and soon many search engines were permitting established ethical SEO companies to become partner sites.

More Search engine optimization resources from here.

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