The first search engines were cataloging in early 1990s when Web Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines. In the beginning, webmaster needed to submit a web site to the search engines which run spiders, programs to "crawl" the site, and store the collected data. Search words or keywords were the buzz that time. The search bracket used to scan the entire webpage for the words and this used to match maximum searches. If you have a site with words gorged then you will be placed in top. The default search-bracket was to scan an entire webpage for so-called related search words, so a page with many different words matched more searches, and a webpage containing a dictionary-type listing would match almost all searches. The search engines categorize information by topic after the search crawlers submit them the details. Gradually the whole scenario was changed with the arrival of more websites everyday. After this, some search engines started categorizing websites for better organic search engine results.
Initially, webmasters used to guide search engines and this had influenced the search results. Search engines were dependent upon the webmaster provided information which included the category, keywords, index files and Meta tags. Meta-tags are the words or phrases that provided a guide to the content of the website. Very soon webmasters learned the art of misusing these Meta tags for irrelevant search results. Hence, search engines start avoiding Meta tags and developed more complex algorithm for search engine ranking. The new algorithm included the text within the title tag, domain name, URL directories and the file names. HTML tags like heading, emphasized, strongly emphasized text were inserted. Image attributes were essential. Gradually it became a total keyword game where you need to be careful about the keyword density, adjacency, keyword sequence and the Content development.
Ranking manipulation had become quite common those days as a major role was played by the webmaster for search engine ranking. Suddenly numerous attributes arose within the HTML source. This made search engines suffer for the loss of authentic report. Most of the search engines were busy facing the ranking manipulation. It was a problem for search engines so search engines wanted to have the most relevant search results in their SERPs. With the growing manipulation for ranking search engines started using a different algorithm to get rid of the unwanted results. This culminated as the beginning of a new search engine.
With the advent of search engines, in a small span of time there were various search engines were present in the Internet. Google had brought a new concept that is the PageRank which is still continued. PageRank became essential for search engines as it showed the worth of the website. If you have more page rank then you are more popular. This PageRank relied heavily on the incoming links. More links means more page rank. Higher PageRank varied as per the number of incoming links and the less number of outgoing links.
Google created PageRank which later became a savior for those who were just bored of irrelevant search results. This made Google an instant hit. With help from PageRank, Google proved to be very good at serving relevant results. Google became the most popular and successful search engine.
By this time, webmasters had developed link building strategies to influence the search engines. This was quite compatible method which was easily used in Google also. Since, the link exchange was considered as the prime factor for PageRank, many webmasters started exchanging links in a massive scale. This way they found an easy way to get into Google SERPs. Though here links were not that relevant and again the irrelevancy factor rose in front of Google.
Search results were influenced by the fake linking and irrelevant keywords. Webmasters started using dictionary - type listing where they add every possible word so that for any search their site appeared. These content manipulation and link building were vulnerable for search engines as these results were utterly ineffective.
Then came the time where Google and other search engines started looking at a broader range of off-site factors to tackle PageRank manipulation. They desperately needed some more search engine algorithms. The challenge with search engines was they cannot afford to be too technical. As the Internet was reaching every household, the bigger market belong to the non-technical group, so search engines had to be simple yet very intelligent to stop manipulation. Google PageRank is visible in the tool bar but this round figure is just a proxy estimation conducted by Google. More and more SEOs now ignore PageRanking, because the ranking algorithm is not that reliable.
Search engines work for users and strive to provide the most pertinent results. Hence now, most search engines don't disclose their methods and ranking algorithms. Search engine algorithms vary from engine to engine and there isn't any hard and fast rule for an infallible algorithm. Sometime a single website can have different rank in different search engine.
All the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, nver disclose the algorithms they use for PageRanking. But, SEOs continually try to find ways to decipher the search engine algorithm. You can easily find out the various discussions about the search engine algorithm in online forums, blogs and SEO chats. The topic here often revolves around the search engine algorithm and the search engine strategy.
With research and experience some of the SEOs widely believe that there are five most vital things which influence the search engine ranking which are the title tag, the link point to the site, content, link popularity and site relevancy.
SEOs widely agree that the top signals that influence a page's rankings include: