106-555: Yoast SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) tool plug-in for WordPress . Yoast SEO created its first WordPress SEO plugin in 2007 - originally named WordPress SEO: it was developed as a WordPress plugin by SEO consultant Joost de Valk . In 2012, the plug-in was renamed Yoast SEO. In 2015, Yoast hosted the inaugural YoastCon conference at the Lindenberg Nijmegen Culture House in Nijmegen, Netherlands . In 2015,
212-567: A > . Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a web of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (in its original CamelCase , which was subsequently discarded) in November 1990. The hyperlink structure of the web is described by the webgraph : the nodes of the web graph correspond to
318-520: A home page containing a directory of the site web content . Some websites require user registration or subscription to access content. Examples of subscription websites include many business sites, news websites, academic journal websites, gaming websites, file-sharing websites, message boards , web-based email , social networking websites, websites providing real-time price quotations for different types of markets, as well as sites providing various other services. End users can access websites on
424-494: A web application . Consequently, a static web page displays the same information for all users, from all contexts, subject to modern capabilities of a web server to negotiate content-type or language of the document where such versions are available and the server is configured to do so. A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application server processing server-side scripts. In server-side scripting, parameters determine how
530-578: A web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of background communication messages to fetch and display the requested page. In the 1990s, using a browser to view web pages—and to move from one web page to another through hyperlinks—came to be known as 'browsing,' 'web surfing' (after channel surfing ), or 'navigating
636-537: A browser called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network) and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development he defined the first version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the primary document format. The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the whole Internet on 23 August 1991. The Web
742-694: A business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors. Search engines can change their algorithms, impacting a website's search engine ranking, possibly resulting in a serious loss of traffic. According to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt , in 2010, Google made over 500 algorithm changes – almost 1.5 per day. It is considered a wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic. In addition to accessibility in terms of web crawlers (addressed above), user web accessibility has become increasingly important for SEO. Optimization techniques are highly tuned to
848-432: A campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank. On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts , a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer treat any no follow links, in the same way, to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting. As
954-780: A claim upon which relief may be granted." In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. KinderStart's website was removed from Google's index prior to the lawsuit, and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California ( San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart's complaint without leave to amend and partially granted Google's motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart's attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google's legal expenses. World Wide Web The World Wide Web ( WWW or simply
1060-491: A flaw was discovered in version 1.7.3.3 and earlier versions. The flaw could have left users of Yoast SEO open to hackers and was discovered by a security consultant. Yoast SEO can trace its origins to 2005, when Joost de Valk launched a website named "joostdevalk.nl". After moving to and eventually selling the domain "css3.info", de Valk created the Yoast platform in 2009, launched the first version of WordPress SEO in 2010 and founded
1166-611: A frenzy for the Web and started the dot-com bubble . Microsoft responded by developing its own browser, Internet Explorer , starting the browser wars . By bundling it with Windows, it became the dominant browser for 14 years. Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which created XML in 1996 and recommended replacing HTML with stricter XHTML . In the meantime, developers began exploiting an IE feature called XMLHttpRequest to make Ajax applications and launched
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#17328482848621272-434: A higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random web surfer. Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags , headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid
1378-479: A network, a web browser can retrieve a web page from a remote web server . The web server may restrict access to a private network such as a corporate intranet. The web browser uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to make such requests to the web server . A static web page is delivered exactly as stored, as web content in the web server's file system . In contrast, a dynamic web page
1484-604: A new system that punishes sites whose content is not unique. The 2012 Google Penguin attempted to penalize websites that used manipulative techniques to improve their rankings on the search engine. Although Google Penguin has been presented as an algorithm aimed at fighting web spam, it really focuses on spammy links by gauging the quality of the sites the links are coming from. The 2013 Google Hummingbird update featured an algorithm change designed to improve Google's natural language processing and semantic understanding of web pages. Hummingbird's language processing system falls under
1590-407: A paid submission service that guaranteed to crawl for a cost per click ; however, this practice was discontinued in 2009. Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by search engines. The distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled. Mobile devices are used for
1696-627: A particular topic or purpose, ranging from entertainment and social networking to providing news and education. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web, while private websites, such as a company's website for its employees, are typically a part of an intranet . Web pages, which are the building blocks of websites, are documents , typically composed in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language ( HTML , XHTML ). They may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors . Web pages are accessed and transported with
1802-467: A public Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as the Internet , or a private local area network (LAN), by referencing a uniform resource locator (URL) that identifies the site. Websites can have many functions and can be used in various fashions; a website can be a personal website , a corporate website for a company, a government website, an organization website, etc. Websites are typically dedicated to
1908-422: A range of devices, including desktop and laptop computers , tablet computers , smartphones and smart TVs . A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser ) is a software user agent for accessing information on the World Wide Web. To connect to a website's server and display its pages, a user needs to have a web browser program. This is the program that the user runs to download, format, and display
2014-418: A result of this change, the usage of nofollow led to evaporation of PageRank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers developed alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated JavaScript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Additionally, several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes , Flash , and JavaScript. In December 2009, Google announced it would be using
2120-428: A search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank , is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links . PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as
2226-686: A search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish to crawl. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login-specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam. In 2020, Google sunsetted
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#17328482848622332-503: A shift in their focus towards "usefulness" and mobile local search . In recent years the mobile market has exploded, overtaking the use of desktops, as shown in by StatCounter in October 2016, where they analyzed 2.5 million websites and found that 51.3% of the pages were loaded by a mobile device. Google has been one of the companies that are utilizing the popularity of mobile usage by encouraging websites to use their Google Search Console ,
2438-421: A site and want to stay once they find it. When people bounce off a site, it counts against the site and affects its credibility. Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrases so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to
2544-444: A sitemap and web feeds, allows users to determine the "crawl rate", and track the web pages index status. In 2015, it was reported that Google was developing and promoting mobile search as a key feature within future products. In response, many brands began to take a different approach to their Internet marketing strategies. In 1998, two graduate students at Stanford University , Larry Page and Sergey Brin , developed "Backrub",
2650-439: A translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Use of the www prefix has been declining, especially when web applications sought to brand their domain names and make them easily pronounceable. As the mobile Web grew in popularity, services like Gmail .com, Outlook.com , Myspace .com, Facebook .com and Twitter .com are most often mentioned without adding "www." (or, indeed, ".com") to
2756-429: A web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering "microsoft" may be transformed to http://www.microsoft.com/ and "openoffice" to http://www.openoffice.org . This feature started appearing in early versions of Firefox , when it still had
2862-429: A web page on the user's computer. In addition to allowing users to find, display, and move between web pages, a web browser will usually have features like keeping bookmarks, recording history, managing cookies (see below), and home pages and may have facilities for recording passwords for logging into web sites. The most popular browsers are Chrome , Firefox , Safari , Internet Explorer , and Edge . A Web server
2968-490: A web page's metadata, including the title tag and meta description , will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic. URL canonicalization of web pages accessible via multiple URLs, using the canonical link element or via 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the URL all count towards the page's link popularity score. These are known as incoming links, which point to
3074-442: A webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. This meant moving away from heavy reliance on term density to a more holistic process for scoring semantic signals. Since
3180-498: A year. Mosaic was a graphical browser that could display inline images and submit forms that were processed by the HTTPd server . Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Netscape the following year and released the Navigator browser , which introduced Java and JavaScript to the Web. It quickly became the dominant browser. Netscape became a public company in 1995 which triggered
3286-617: Is a web page formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This markup language supports plain text , images , embedded video and audio contents, and scripts (short programs) that implement complex user interaction. The HTML language also supports hyperlinks (embedded URLs) which provide immediate access to other web resources. Web navigation , or web surfing, is the common practice of following such hyperlinks across multiple websites. Web applications are web pages that function as application software . The information in
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3392-441: Is delivered with the page that can make additional HTTP requests to the server, either in response to user actions such as mouse movements or clicks, or based on elapsed time. The server's responses are used to modify the current page rather than creating a new page with each response, so the server needs only to provide limited, incremental information. Multiple Ajax requests can be handled at the same time, and users can interact with
3498-403: Is generated by a web application , usually driven by server-side software . Dynamic web pages are used when each user may require completely different information, for example, bank websites, web email etc. A static web page (sometimes called a flat page/stationary page ) is a web page that is delivered to the user exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by
3604-446: Is not required by any technical or policy standard and many websites do not use it; the first web server was nxoc01.cern.ch . According to Paolo Palazzi, who worked at CERN along with Tim Berners-Lee, the popular use of www as subdomain was accidental; the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page; however
3710-459: Is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalised, with no intervening hyphens. Nonetheless, it is often called simply the Web , and also often the web ; see Capitalization of Internet for details. In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng ( 万维网 ), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net",
3816-527: Is the best known of such efforts. Many hostnames used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts according to the services they provide. The hostname of a web server is often www , in the same way that it may be ftp for an FTP server , and news or nntp for a Usenet news server . These hostnames appear as Domain Name System (DNS) or subdomain names, as in www.example.com . The use of www
3922-435: Is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications . With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript , it forms a triad of cornerstone technologies for the World Wide Web. Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for
4028-431: The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption ( HTTP Secure , HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user. The user's application, often a web browser , renders the page content according to its HTML markup instructions onto a display terminal . Hyperlinking between web pages conveys to the reader the site structure and guides the navigation of the site, which often starts with
4134-814: The Search Engine Results Page . The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine-indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. The Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ , two major directories which closed in 2014 and 2017 respectively, both required manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Search Console , for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that are not discoverable by automatically following links in addition to their URL submission console. Yahoo! formerly operated
4240-487: The Web ) is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to
4346-694: The Web 2.0 revolution. Mozilla , Opera , and Apple rejected XHTML and created the WHATWG which developed HTML5 . In 2009, the W3C conceded and abandoned XHTML. In 2019, it ceded control of the HTML specification to the WHATWG. The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet . Tim Berners-Lee states that World Wide Web
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4452-578: The web browsing history forward of the displayed page. Using Ajax technologies the end user gets one dynamic page managed as a single page in the web browser while the actual web content rendered on that page can vary. The Ajax engine sits only on the browser requesting parts of its DOM, the DOM, for its client, from an application server. Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is the umbrella term for technologies and methods used to create web pages that are not static web pages , though it has fallen out of common use since
4558-490: The Czech Republic, where respectively Baidu , Yahoo! Japan , Naver , Yandex and Seznam are market leaders. Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address . Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially
4664-470: The DNS records were never switched, and the practice of prepending www to an institution's website domain name was subsequently copied. Many established websites still use the prefix, or they employ other subdomain names such as www2 , secure or en for special purposes. Many such web servers are set up so that both the main domain name (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to
4770-559: The Duplicate Post plugin, which had over 3 million users. Also, the original developer of Duplicate Post, Enrico Battocchi, joined Yoast as a senior developer and remains one of the leading developers on the plugin. Yoast was acquired by Newfold Digital (the company that owns the hosting provider Bluehost ) in August 2021. In September 2024, Yoast added AI features that will automatically improve sites SEO performance. Michael David,
4876-452: The HTML and the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML since 1997. Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. In the underlying HTML, a hyperlink looks like this: < a href = "http://example.org/home.html" > Example.org Homepage </
4982-423: The HTTP service so that the receiving host can distinguish an HTTP request from other network protocols it may be servicing. HTTP normally uses port number 80 and for HTTPS it normally uses port number 443 . The content of the HTTP request can be as simple as two lines of text: The computer receiving the HTTP request delivers it to web server software listening for requests on port 80. If the web server can fulfil
5088-549: The Mobile-Friendly Test, which allows companies to measure up their website to the search engine results and determine how user-friendly their websites are. The closer the keywords are together their ranking will improve based on key terms. SEO may generate an adequate return on investment . However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. Due to this lack of guarantee and uncertainty,
5194-470: The SEO industry and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, webchats, and seminars. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with website optimization. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Bing Webmaster Tools provides a way for webmasters to submit
5300-472: The URL and can count towards the page link's popularity score, impacting the credibility of a website. SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engine companies recommend as part of good design ("white hat"), and those techniques of which search engines do not approve ("black hat"). Search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing . Industry commentators have classified these methods and
5406-508: The URLs of other resources such as images, other embedded media, scripts that affect page behaviour, and Cascading Style Sheets that affect page layout. The browser makes additional HTTP requests to the web server for these other Internet media types . As it receives their content from the web server, the browser progressively renders the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML and these additional resources. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
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#17328482848625512-622: The US at that time, there were only about five in Germany. As of June 2008, the market share of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise . That market share is achieved in a number of countries. As of 2009, there are only a few large markets where Google is not the leading search engine. In most cases, when Google is not leading in a given market, it is lagging behind a local player. The most notable example markets are China, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and
5618-404: The US. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) was another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing, but this time in order to better understand the search queries of their users. In terms of search engine optimization, BERT intended to connect users more easily to relevant content and increase the quality of traffic coming to websites that are ranking in
5724-535: The Web is transferred across the Internet using HTTP. Multiple web resources with a common theme and usually a common domain name make up a website . A single web server may provide multiple websites, while some websites, especially the most popular ones, may be provided by multiple servers. Website content is provided by a myriad of companies, organizations, government agencies, and individual users ; and comprises an enormous amount of educational, entertainment, commercial, and government information. The Web has become
5830-402: The Web'. Early studies of this new behaviour investigated user patterns in using web browsers. One study, for example, found five user patterns: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation and targeted navigation. The following example demonstrates the functioning of a web browser when accessing a page at the URL http://example.org/home.html . The browser resolves
5936-671: The World Wide Web and web browsers . A web browser displays a web page on a monitor or mobile device . The term web page usually refers to what is visible, but may also refer to the contents of the computer file itself, which is usually a text file containing hypertext written in HTML or a comparable markup language . Typical web pages provide hypertext for browsing to other web pages via hyperlinks , often referred to as links . Web browsers will frequently have to access multiple web resource elements, such as reading style sheets , scripts , and images, while presenting each web page. On
6042-535: The announcement). Google indicated that they would regularly update the Chromium rendering engine to the latest version. In December 2019, Google began updating the User-Agent string of their crawler to reflect the latest Chrome version used by their rendering service. The delay was to allow webmasters time to update their code that responded to particular bot User-Agent strings. Google ran evaluations and felt confident
6148-543: The appearance of the document. HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links , quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags , written using angle brackets . Tags such as < img /> and < input /> directly introduce content into
6254-449: The assembly of every new web page proceeds, including the setting up of more client-side processing. A client-side dynamic web page processes the web page using JavaScript running in the browser. JavaScript programs can interact with the document via Document Object Model , or DOM, to query page state and alter it. The same client-side techniques can then dynamically update or change the DOM in
6360-494: The author of WordPress Search Engine Optimization (2015) book, referred to it as "the granddaddy of all SEO plugins". Brian Santo, editor of EE Times , uses Yoast for estimating the ranking of articles on Google by using analysis results (e.g. keyphrase , keyword density , links , readability ), but criticizes the negative effects SEO has had on journalism and suggests Google use more human or artificial intelligence to improve search. In September 2020, Yoast announced it became
6466-419: The background, in an invisible div , or positioned off-screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking . Another category sometimes used is grey hat SEO . This is in between the black hat and white hat approaches, where the methods employed avoid the site being penalized but do not act in producing
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#17328482848626572-402: The best content for users. Grey hat SEO is entirely focused on improving search engine rankings. Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black or grey hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms or by a manual site review. One example
6678-614: The common tree structure approach, used for instance in the existing CERNDOC documentation system and in the Unix filesystem , as well as approaches that relied in tagging files with keywords , as in the VAX/NOTES system. Instead he adopted concepts he had put into practice with his private ENQUIRE system (1980) built at CERN. When he became aware of Ted Nelson 's hypertext model (1965), in which documents can be linked in unconstrained ways through hyperlinks associated with "hot spots" embedded in
6784-680: The company Yoast BV in 2010. Initially, Yoast focused on SEO consultancy, and developed both the Yoast SEO plugin and a Google Analytics plugin, both for WordPress. In 2012, a premium version of the plug-in was launched. In April 2016, Yoast BV sold the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. In 2018, Yoast had a total turnover of €10 million. According to Yoast, as of September 2018, they had almost 100 employees, of which 85 are based in their HQ in Wijchen , Netherlands . In June 2020, Yoast acquired
6890-533: The computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers. Webmasters and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines in
6996-752: The creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming . By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. The leading search engines, Google, Bing , and Yahoo , do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Some SEO practitioners have studied different approaches to search engine optimization and have shared their personal opinions. Patents related to search engines can provide information to better understand search engines. In 2005, Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users. In 2007, Google announced
7102-656: The domain. In English, www is usually read as double-u double-u double-u . Some users pronounce it dub-dub-dub , particularly in New Zealand. Stephen Fry , in his "Podgrams" series of podcasts, pronounces it wuh wuh wuh . The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for". The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used without much distinction. However,
7208-515: The dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches. In markets outside the United States, Google's share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007. As of 2006, Google had an 85–90% market share in Germany. While there were hundreds of SEO firms in
7314-414: The impact would be minor. To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots (usually <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> ). When
7420-508: The kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game , webmasters had already developed link-building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focus on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms , involved
7526-468: The leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results. In February 2011, Google announced the Panda update, which penalizes websites containing content duplicated from other websites and sources. Historically websites have copied content from one another and benefited in search engine rankings by engaging in this practice. However, Google implemented
7632-743: The main sponsor of a professional basketball club Yoast United , which plays in the BNXT League . Search engine optimization Search engine optimization ( SEO ) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines . SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or " organic " results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic . Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search , video search , academic search , news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work,
7738-408: The majority of Google searches. In November 2016, Google announced a major change to the way they are crawling websites and started to make their index mobile-first, which means the mobile version of a given website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index. In May 2019, Google updated the rendering engine of their crawler to be the latest version of Chromium (74 at the time of
7844-416: The mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web . Initially, all webmasters only needed to submit the address of a page, or URL , to the various engines, which would send a web crawler to crawl that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed . The process involves a search engine spider/crawler crawls a page and storing it on
7950-503: The new system to documents organized in other ways (such as traditional computer file systems or the Usenet ). Finally, he insisted that the system should be decentralized, without any central control or coordination over the creation of links. Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN in May 1989, without giving the system a name. He got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including
8056-599: The newly recognized term of "conversational search", where the system pays more attention to each word in the query in order to better match the pages to the meaning of the query rather than a few words. With regards to the changes made to search engine optimization, for content publishers and writers, Hummingbird is intended to resolve issues by getting rid of irrelevant content and spam, allowing Google to produce high-quality content and rely on them to be 'trusted' authors. In October 2019, Google announced they would start applying BERT models for English language search queries in
8162-426: The online "spider" algorithms, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical. Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines or involve deception. One black hat technique uses hidden text, either as text colored similar to
8268-427: The page while data is retrieved. Web pages may also regularly poll the server to check whether new information is available. A website is a collection of related web resources including web pages , multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name , and published on at least one web server . Notable examples are wikipedia .org, google .com, and amazon.com . A website may be accessible via
8374-485: The page. Other tags such as < p > surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page. HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript , which affects the behaviour and content of web pages. Inclusion of CSS defines the look and layout of content. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), maintainer of both
8480-437: The phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997. Sullivan credits Bruce Clay as one of the first people to popularize the term. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag or index files in engines like ALIWEB . Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using metadata to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because
8586-542: The popularization of AJAX , a term which is now itself rarely used. Client-side-scripting, server-side scripting, or a combination of these make for the dynamic web experience in a browser. JavaScript is a scripting language that was initially developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich , then of Netscape , for use within web pages. The standardised version is ECMAScript . To make web pages more interactive, some web applications also use JavaScript techniques such as Ajax ( asynchronous JavaScript and XML ). Client-side script
8692-423: The practitioners who employ them as either white hat SEO or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. An SEO technique is considered a white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As
8798-418: The primary listings of their search. A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend upon building high-quality web pages to engage and persuade internet users, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure results, and improving a site's conversion rate . In November 2015, Google released a full 160-page version of its Search Quality Rating Guidelines to the public, which revealed
8904-419: The public in 1991. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system". Documents and other media content are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers . Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through character strings called uniform resource locators (URLs). The original and still very common document type
9010-454: The request and response. The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web, and the added encryption layer in HTTPS is essential when browsers send or retrieve confidential data, such as passwords or banking information. Web browsers usually automatically prepend http:// to user-entered URIs, if omitted. A web page (also written as webpage ) is a document that is suitable for
9116-431: The request it sends an HTTP response back to the browser indicating success: followed by the content of the requested page. Hypertext Markup Language ( HTML ) for a basic web page might look like this: The web browser parses the HTML and interprets the markup ( < title > , < p > for paragraph, and such) that surrounds the words to format the text on the screen. Many web pages use HTML to reference
9222-421: The same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites. The use of a subdomain name is useful for load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers. Since, currently , only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root. When a user submits an incomplete domain name to
9328-420: The same way. A dynamic web page is then reloaded by the user or by a computer program to change some variable content. The updating information could come from the server, or from changes made to that page's DOM. This may or may not truncate the browsing history or create a saved version to go back to, but a dynamic web page update using Ajax technologies will neither create a page to go back to nor truncate
9434-428: The same, regardless of language. On October 17, 2002, SearchKing filed suit in the United States District Court , Western District of Oklahoma, against the search engine Google. SearchKing's claim was that Google's tactics to prevent spamdexing constituted a tortious interference with contractual relations. On May 27, 2003, the court granted Google's motion to dismiss the complaint because SearchKing "failed to state
9540-448: The search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to
9646-553: The search engine's own server. A second program, known as an indexer , extracts information about the page, such as the words it contains, where they are located, and any weight for specific words, as well as all links the page contains. All of this information is then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date. Website owners recognized the value of a high ranking and visibility in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan ,
9752-513: The search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power , which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban. Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients. Some search engines have also reached out to
9858-415: The server name of the URL ( example.org ) into an Internet Protocol address using the globally distributed Domain Name System (DNS). This lookup returns an IP address such as 203.0.113.4 or 2001:db8:2e::7334 . The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request across the Internet to the computer at that address. It requests service from a specific TCP port number that is well known for
9964-433: The site operator's goals. Search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of designing, running, and optimizing search engine ad campaigns. Its difference from SEO is most simply depicted as the difference between paid and unpaid priority ranking in search results. SEM focuses on prominence more so than relevance; website developers should regard SEM with the utmost importance with consideration to visibility as most navigate to
10070-449: The software engineer who announced Caffeine for Google, "Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index..." Google Instant , real-time-search, was introduced in late 2010 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs,
10176-427: The standard (and open-sourced their code) and now treats it as a hint not a directive. To adequately ensure that pages are not indexed, a page-level robot's meta tag should be included. A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results. Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to important pages may improve its visibility. Page design makes users trust
10282-485: The success and popularity of a search engine are determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, poor quality or irrelevant search results could lead users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms , taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate. Companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from
10388-625: The text, it helped to confirm the validity of his concept. The model was later popularized by Apple 's HyperCard system. Unlike Hypercard, Berners-Lee's new system from the outset was meant to support links between multiple databases on independent computers, and to allow simultaneous access by many users from any computer on the Internet. He also specified that the system should eventually handle other media besides text, such as graphics, speech, and video. Links could refer to mutable data files, or even fire up programs on their server computer. He also conceived "gateways" that would allow access through
10494-441: The two terms do not mean the same thing. The Internet is a global system of computer networks interconnected through telecommunications and optical networking . In contrast, the World Wide Web is a global collection of documents and other resources , linked by hyperlinks and URIs . Web resources are accessed using HTTP or HTTPS , which are application-level Internet protocols that use the Internet transport protocols. Viewing
10600-465: The web pages (or URLs) the directed edges between them to the hyperlinks. Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a phenomenon referred to in some circles as link rot, and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called "dead" links . The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive websites. The Internet Archive , active since 1996,
10706-434: The web search history of all its users in order to populate search results. On June 8, 2010 a new web indexing system called Google Caffeine was announced. Designed to allow users to find news results, forum posts, and other content much sooner after publishing than before, Google Caffeine was a change to the way Google updated its index in order to make things show up quicker on Google than before. According to Carrie Grimes,
10812-904: The webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Flawed data in meta tags, such as those that were inaccurate or incomplete, created the potential for pages to be mischaracterized in irrelevant searches. Web content providers also manipulated some attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines. By 1997, search engine designers recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engine and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Altavista and Infoseek , adjusted their algorithms to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings. By heavily relying on factors such as keyword density , which were exclusively within
10918-417: The working title 'Firebird' in early 2003, from an earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx . It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices. The scheme specifiers http:// and https:// at the start of a web URI refer to Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP Secure , respectively. They specify the communication protocol to use for
11024-487: The world's dominant information systems platform . It is the primary tool that billions of people worldwide use to interact with the Internet. The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN . He was motivated by the problem of storing, updating, and finding documents and data files in that large and constantly changing organization, as well as distributing them to collaborators outside CERN. In his design, Berners-Lee dismissed
11130-499: Was a success at CERN, and began to spread to other scientific and academic institutions. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created . CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free in 1993, enabling its widespread use. After the NCSA released the Mosaic web browser later that year, the Web's popularity grew rapidly as thousands of websites sprang up in less than
11236-495: Was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for the use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's search engine results page. SEO is not an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be more effective, such as paid advertising through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, depending on
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