A Decade in Search – 2002

Optimisation in 2002

Optimising a web site was as easy as adding your chosen search terms into the page title, include a few instances in the body copy, alt tags, and internal links, then submit your site to Yahoo using their $299 express submission and you could start ranking within 7 days in Yahoo.

At the time Google was the second most popular search engine and SEOs realised that this search engine was much harder to influence/fool as PageRank was playing an important factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. Content relevance such as keywords search terms used on the web pages was used to decide which web pages should be served for a search particular query. However Google were also ranking these sites based on how many optimised text links the webpage had from external sources too, SEOs also knew that search rankings could be boosted if inbound links were coming from web pages with high PageRank.

Other search engines such as Alta Vista, AOL, iWon, LookSmart, Microsoft and Terra Lycos were offering a service where companies could pay to be featured at the top of the listings, however these “paid for listings” were placed above the regular results which were ranked based on an algorithm.  The Federal Trade Commission sent out letters of warning to the these websites stating that they that they needed to disclose all paid listings that were feature in their search engines. These engines were under a yearlong investigation as rankings were not calculated according to content relevance, but who paid the most money for the submission. The offending search engines worked around this by added the label of “Sponsored link” or “featured listing”. Some would say that these engines were ahead of Google as it wasn’t until 2 years later when Google allowed advertisers to start bidding on a wide variety of keywords.

Other Search Engine News

May 2002, 36% of worldwide search referrals came from Yahoo and 32% came through Google and MSN in third place with 13% of search referrals.

The BBC launched their own search engine in May to compete against Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and Alta Vista.

In June “All the Web” announce that their database holds 2.1 billion web pages one week after Google announced that they had indexed 2.07 billion web pages.