Since the 1990s the World Wide Web has been a fixture not only of the internet but of the lives of nearly every human being in the modern world.
Though it didnt start out this way, the internet has become a place of tools, businesses and services that have touched all of us in unique ways and empowered many new exciting innovations which have affected us all smartphones, social media, Netflix!
Standing behind all of this (or tower over, if you prefer) are the search giants Google and to a lesser extent Microsoft.
The dominance of Google is unquestionably enormous, but they werent always the top company they are today, they were once a startup with some innovative ideas about how the internet should be organized.
The year was 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the founders of a search company with a goofy name, no track record and the internet is still considered a novelty by many.
Google was not the world first search engine, or even the first one put online that distinction would go to the WHOis database!
What Google did bring to the table though was relevance.
The internet prior to 1998 was a place where indexing and categorization were intentional actions taken by the internet community if you wanted to read about bonsai, you had to go to the usenet and go visit alt.bonsai.growers (or some name similar to that) and with the web, it was not much different for most of its first decade of existence.
It was not as if there werent attempts there were many, Excite, AskGeevs, Dogpile, Yahoo and then ISP based search engines for CompuServe, Prodigy, Delphi, AOL and many many more.
The field was crowded by small-scale, easily corrupted, limited utility search engines.
The reason these search engines had issues was pretty simple the results they generated to queries were based upon various forms of metadata and other falsifiable criteria.
This gave oxygen to the rise of nefarious bad-actors, causing almost immediate exploitation and cheating, leading to all kinds of dubious indexations of pages.
All of this early drama which plagued the web was set against the backdrop of an increasingly computer literate and service-hungry public who yearned for a user-friendly internet. All of this ultimately, would benefit Google tremendously.
Google didnt approach the search problem with the same old tired mentality, their plan was to implement a search engine responsive to user demands.
In 1998 when Google first launched, it wasnt just the launch of the worlds most advanced search engine, it was the beginning of a paradigm of democratized web-commerce that would power search from then to the present day.
What made Googles search engine special was the fact that it was based upon the Page Rank system (named after Google founder Larry Page) which treated links to web-pages as votes of confidence for those pages.
This system would assign a PR (Page Rank) score to each web-page it indexed, the more links to a given web page, the higher its PR score.
Backlinks which appeared on a web page with a high PR score, would pass more link-equity to the webpage they linked to.
Over time, as web pages got more (or lost) links, their PR would change and fluctuate, but the system would be overall self-balancing and, they hoped, self-policing.
Google was by no means the only search engine being actively developed around this time or the only one which used backlinking.
Excited was an early search engine that used a combination of ranking factors very similar to Google to rank web pages. One major factor that they used was backlinks, which were handled in a similar manner to the Page Rank system.
However, the excite system had a critical flaw it did not consider topical relevancy as a part of its ranking process. This is critical to understand the major impact of, because, this flaw, this lack of sophistication on the part of early search rivals helped to boost Google.
Google gave relevant results others did not.
To say that Googles search system was revolutionary for 1998 is really doing an injustice to how novel and genius this idea was.
Prior to the PR system and the organized methodology of Google, ecommerce itself was hampered by the inability to turn marketing dollars into clicks.
Then Google came along and changed all of this.
Basically, if you had a website that was topically focused with honest anchor text, and you filled it with good content and did a decent job of updating it, over time, your site stood a very good chance of ranking on Googles search engine.
The same was not true elsewhere, where nefarious practices and obsolescence paradigms reigned supreme.
This was also true for users who wanted to find things.
If you were a searcher trying to find something, Googles method and organization made their search engine the one which indexed the most websites in the world and therefore was capable of giving the best and most well categorized results.
This meant that users who went to Google saved time and got better results, this, combined with the advertiser and market friendliness of Googles early PPC offerings, meant that the stage was set for marketing to change forever.
And change it did! Along with explosive growth, here are a few quick statistics to grasp the significance:
In 1998 there were 147 Million worldwide Internet users and by 2020 this number had grown to over 4.7 Billion, with a further 3 billion expected to be online by 2030.
This is exponential growth and at least a huge share of it was made possibly, purely because of Google and the growth generated by the paradigm created through innovations on the web in this time.
All was not perfect in the early days of search for Google. Yes, they had explosive growth but they also had to deal with many of the webs first:
The first bot-farms!
The first black-hat SEO
The first link-farms
The first automated link generators
And more, and more.
This article isnt about the myriad of ways that early search was corruptible the point is, it was and it was in a huge way. In those early years, using backlinking as the backbone of search was both a genius move because it worked! and a problematic one, necessitating future updates too correct fundamental issues.
Backlinks were fantastic to use for ranking a website, because ultimately its a democratic model, you reward those who win peoples confidence and generate backlinks.
But its also a corruptible model whereby websites can cheat the system by generating links in nefarious ways and many did.
Google took steps with many small, incremental updates, careful not to destabilize their growth vector by being too aggressive in their rate of change.
Then Penguin happened!
Google had issued updates in the past, but none have ever had such a dramatic impact at cleaning up online search corruption than penguin.
Penguin penalized websites for manipulative search practices and ended many longstanding bad-practices such as using automated scripts to place backlinks into forums and comment sections, link wheels and a myriad of other things.
Beyond merely punishing the bad actors in this space, it established a new standard of best practices for all to follow, a new, relevance reinforcing model which reaffirmed backlinks and the PageRank system as a key ranking factor, but placed it amongst numerous other cofactors.
Websites would now be rewarded for producing high-quality, relevant content and publishing it on a routine basis.
This was a well received update and although it hit some seasoned marketers pretty hard the overall reception was not only positive, it was hailed by many industry leaders, such as Rand Fishkin from Moz:
The Google Penguin update is a wake-up call for businesses that have been relying on manipulative link building tactics. Its time to focus on creating high-quality, valuable content that naturally attracts backlinks. Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz.
Moz is a software development and marketing consultancy founded in 2004 by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig.
Through the years Moz has grown into one of the most well respected and prominent SEO consultancies and software companies in the world.
The widely regarded Domain Authority ranking system was fielded by Moz and is considered one of the most reliable overall ranking factors, used almost every day by marketers in the SEO field.
Moz is a company, along with Ahrefs, SEMRush and several others, whom collectively form the bedrock of the search engine marketing industry producing the tools and training resourced used by many every day.
But, enough about Moz, what about Googles competitors?
You sure do seem to focus on Google a lot, why is that? everyone reading this
The fact is that Google commands over 92% of global search and seems poised to remain so for many years to come.
This near total market dominance and lack of obvious competitors, has caused many industry analysts and consultants to write off other search engines entirely, to not even consider them a factor at all.
Through the years and domestically some search engines have become dominant in their respective countries Yandex and Baidu come to mind. However, for all intents and purposes, the history of backlinks becomes the history of Google at the point the Page Rank system is adopted with one exception, Microsoft.
The one true tech-peer rival that Google has seems to be Microsofts Bing, so a brief history of bings relationship with backlinks is in order.
Bing was launched in 2009 by Microsoft and has had the advantage of being integrated and/or pre-installed onto numerous successful Microsoft products such as the XBox, Surface tablets and Smartphones.
Bing has several unique features that Google doesnt feature as prominently or in the same manner, including visual search (image search), Deep learning driven search and several lesser prominent features.
Overall Bing has failed to achieve the kind of breakout success enjoyed by Google, instead Bing, Yahoo and all other search engines fight for a share of the 8% that Google doesnt currently have.
It can be hard to state Bings precise emphasis of backlinks as a ranking factor. Through study, one can glean the significance of backlinks through a technical analysis of Bings best practices.
Bing treats backlinks slightly differently than Google does, however its orientation is much the same an emphasis upon relevance and strict punishment for exploitative and misrepresentative practices.
Bing looks at linking websites reputations, social channels, contextual relevance and numerous other factors that are in direct correlation with backlinks.
The takeaway from Bing is that, while small in size, its a highly competent search engine with its technical ducks highly in order.
In this piece we examined the historical rise of Google and the importance of the PageRank system in their rise to prominence.
The important of understanding the recent past and how we got where we are today is absolutely critical to grasping the state of our industry now and, looking forward.
Backlinks and backlinking are a critical part of the way search functions and in early days of the original internet that was all that mattered because the economy of the world was not yet online.
Today, we live in a very different world, one in which SEO and search results can have more of an impact on a small business than nearly any other turn of fortunes.
This truism is what underscores the importance of backlinks as a topic, their power to influence search and searches power to influence business.
Whether youre a website owner or someone who runs an agency and outsources their marketing, the history behind the services you use may well become relevant once again as new technologies displace old and we enter a new era of the web.
In the next piece we will examine the present state of Backlinking, SEO and search and examine the mobile revolution and how it continues to be the dominant theme of our day.
