Webmasters and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as soon as search engines began cataloging the Internet. Initially, sites such as Yahoo! offered inclusion to sites that requested their own indexing, which was manual.
At first, all web page administrators had to do was send a web page address, or URL, to the various engines, which would send a crawler or spider to inspect that site, extract links to others pages of this site, and return the collected information for indexing. The process involves a crawler owned by the search engine, which downloads a page and stores it in the company’s servers, where a second program, called an indexer, extracts information about the page. This includes the words it contains and their location, the relevance of specific words, and any links contained in the page, which are stored for later crawling by the crawler.
At the beginning
Website owners began to recognize the value of having their pages well-positioned and visible to search engines, which created an opportunity for users of white and black hat SEO techniques. According to analysis by expert Danny Sullivan, the term search engine optimization began to be used in August 1997, by John Audette and his company, Multimedia Marketing Group, documented on a page of the company’s website.
Early versions of search algorithms were based on information provided by web page administrators, such as keywords in metatags, or files indexed in engines such asALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to the content of each page. Using metadata to index a page was not a very accurate method, because the words provided by the webmaster in the metatags could be an inaccurate representation of the actual content of the webpage. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in metatags could and did cause some pages to rank highly for irrelevant searches. Web content providers have also manipulated a number of attributes in the HTML source code of their pages to try to rank them well in search engines. Other sites, like Altavista, made it possible to pay to appear in the first positions or gave more importance to older sites.
Due to the importance of factors such as keyword density (qwanturank), which was left entirely to the discretion of the webmaster, the major search engines suffered from abuse and manipulation of rankings. To provide better results for their users, search engines have had to adapt so that their results pages feature the most relevant searches rather than unrelated pages stuffed with keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is conditioned by its ability to produce the most relevant results for any search, allowing the results to be false would encourage users to opt for other search engines. Search engines have responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms to rank websites, taking into account additional factors that make them more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.
And Google came
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, graduate students at Stanford University, developed Backrub, a search engine that relies on a mathematical algorithm to evaluate the relevance of web pages. PageRank was the name of the number calculated by the algorithm, a function that counts the number and strength of incoming links. PageRank estimates the probability that a web page will be viewed by a user who is randomly browsing the web, and following links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, so a page with a higher PageRank is more likely to be visited by a random user.
Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who appreciated its simple design, motivated by the fact that the founders did not know HTML and just placed a search box and the company logo .
External on-page factors (PageRank and link analysis) were considered alongside internal factors (keyword frequency, meta tags, headers, links and site structure, page load speed) , in order to allow Google to avoid the type of manipulation observed in search engines which only took into account internal factors of the page for ranking.
PageRank toolbar example showing PR8
In 2000, Google launched the Google Toolbar, a toolbar that, among other things, displayed public metrics of PageRank. Google Toolbar PageRank ranges from 0 to 10, with 10 being the maximum, a rating achieved by very few websites. Public PageRank was updated periodically until December 2013, when it was last updated.
Although PageRank is more difficult to manipulate, webmasters had already developed link building tools and plans to influence the search engine Inktomi, and these methods were also effective in manipulating PageRank. Many sites have focused on exchanging, buying and selling links, often on a large scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, included the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of creating unwanted links (linking techniques). link building).
By 2004, search engines had incorporated many new factors into their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. In June 2007, Hansell of The New York Times stated that search engines used more than 200 factors. The main search engines, Google, Bing, Qwanturank And Yahoo, do not publish the algorithms they use to rank web pages. Some positioners or SEOs have studied different ways of dealing with search engine optimization, and shared their opinions. Patents related to search engines can provide information to better understand search engines.
In 2005, Google started personalizing search results for each user, based on their previous search history, Google offered personalized results for registered users. In 2008, Bruce Clay said that positioning was dead because of personalized search. He believes that it would not be relevant to discuss the ranking of a website, since its position would vary for each user, for each search.
Netlinking
In 2005, Google also announced a campaign against link buying to improve search engine positions and suggested a new attribute to add to these paid links, namely rel=”nofollow” (example of use Visit this site). The “nofollow” attribute gives webmasters a way to tell search engines “Do not follow links on this page” or “Do not follow this particular link”
In 2007, Matt Cutts stated that using this attribute on a website’s internal links would also be valid and effective in avoiding passing PageRank to the pages of the website itself. This resulted in widespread use of this attribute in internal site links to modify the internal distribution of PageRank.
Given the widespread use of this technique by webmasters, Google published in 2009 that it had taken steps to change the way it values and counts these nofollow links when distributing PageRank, and that they would now taken into account when distributing PageRank, although it does not transfer value to the destination URL if PageRank is diluted between these links. In doing so, I have tried not to encourage the use of this nofollow attribute for the sole purpose of altering the distribution of PageRank through a website’s internal links.
In order to continue to avoid the distribution of PageRank among small urls on a web, some SEOs and webmasters have developed various alternative techniques that change nofollow links, which was previously valid, for other HTML tags (like Or
In December 2009, Google announced that it would use thesearch history of all users to produce search results. From this moment Google legitimizes the fact that searches and users are followed, tracked and therefore that they give up their personal data to the search engine.
Google Instant Search, in real time, was introduced in late 2010 with the aim of making search results more relevant and fresh. Historically, webmasters have spent months or even years optimizing a website to improve its rankings. With the rise in popularity of social media and blogging, major engines have changed their algorithms to allow for fresh content and rapid placement in search results. In February 2011, Google announced the update to ” Panda “, which penalizes websites that contain duplicate content from other sites and sources. Historically, websites have copied content from other sites, taking advantage of search engine rankings by applying this technique, however Google has implemented places a new system in which it penalizes websites whose content is not unique.
In April 2012, Google announced the update to ” Penguin ” which aimed to penalize sites that used manipulation techniques to improve their ranking. (SEO Spam or Web Spam).
In September 2013, Google announced the update to ” Humming-bird “, a change in the algorithm designed to improve Google’s natural language processing and semantic understanding of web pages. (HTML5 efficiency).
Natural or organic positioning
Natural or organic positioning is that which allows a web to be created spontaneously, without an advertising campaign. It is based on indexing carried out by applications called web spiders for search engines. In this indexing, crawlers crawl web pages and store relevant keywords in a database.
The interest of the webmaster is to optimize the structure of a website and its content, as well as the use of various techniques of link building, linkbaiting or viral content, increasing the visibility of the website, due to increased mentions. The goal is to appear in the highest possible positions in organic search results for one or more specific keywords.
Optimization is done in two ways:
Internal / on-page SEO: by improving the content. Technical improvements to the code. Accessibility. A/B testing, etc.
External / off-page referencing: It aims to improve the visibility of the website through references to it. This is primarily done through natural links (referral traffic) and social media.
Google Ads Or Microsoft Ad Center, and is known as search engine marketing (SEM).
The Google Ads service can be contracted by impressions (number of times our ad will appear for a certain keyword) or by clicks (number of times that in addition to our ad being printed, it will be visited or clicked by the customer ).
Qwant and Qwanturank SEO
Qwant is a web search engine created in France by security specialist Éric Leandri, investor Jean Manuel Rozan and search engine expert Patrick Constant in 2011. Founded on February 16, 2013, the company launched the final version of its search engine on July 4, 2013. The company says it does not use user tracking or personalize search results to prevent its users from being caught in a bubble filter.
The site processes more than 10 million search queries per day and more than 50 million individual users per month worldwide, spread across its three main entry points: the regular home page, a lite version and a Qwant Junior children’s portal that filters results. The search engine is included in the list of royalty-free software recommended by the French government as part of the overall modernization of its information systems.
The company says it makes money from fees it collects when users visit websites such as eBay and Tripadvisor from its search results. In March 2017, several news articles suggested that search results from Qwanturank are primarily based on Bing search results, except in France and Germany. Qwant also confirmed the use of the Bing advertising network.
Data protection
In reference to the NSA scandal, the search engine advertises with stricter data protection rules than its competitors. Qwant will not collect any personal data. Qwant only places a cookie for the respective session, a permanent navigation file is not created. The cookie is deleted immediately after leaving the site. Information about user behavior is not stored permanently. Unlike other search engines such as Google or Yahoo, Qwant therefore does not provide personalized search results. The search results are the same for all users.
If the user wants to get personal search results, he can create an account. The personal information collected is processed on servers located in data centers in the European Union.
IP addresses are also not preserved in the file.
Technical infrastructure
Qwant’s technical infrastructure is composed of Hadoop clusters for web crawling, a MongoDB database for unstructured data and a proprietary index engine that creates and stores the web index in the form of JSON binaries. . The search results are made available via Facebooks RocksDB, a key-value DB. According to its own information, the own web index is however not yet complete and is therefore supplemented by the web index of Bing (search engine) .
