SEO News

Up until now search engine optimization has largely followed one of two philosophies. Let us call the older philosophy in situ optimization and let us call the younger philosophy prima facie optimization. In situ optimization originally called for little more than publishing text on a page and embedding some comments (these were originally crawled and indexed by several search engines) and meta tags (especially keywords). Some early search engines, including Alta Vista, attempted to analyze on-page structure (techniques for which were developed decades ago for large document management systems). Prima facie optimization called for placing links on other Websites to expedite crawl and confer sufficient trust and value that a search engine index would prefer the link destination over less frequently linked destinations. Inktomi was heavily influenced by prima facie optimization but other search engines, including Alta Vista, incorporated it into their second and succeeding generation algorithms. When Google came along they worked with both in situ optimization (ignoring the keywords meta tag) and prima facie optimization. Google attempted to limit the effectiveness of prima facie optimization by using PageRank to impose a hierarchical order on linking documents. From 1998 to 2003, while Google was still competing for market share, […]