SEO know-how – old school, popular song and long-running hit

When the commercial Internet began its journey in the early 1990s, the first search engines such as Archie (1990), Gopher (1991) and Wanderer (1993) were already there at birth.

Lycos and Yahoo followed in 1994, and are now a shadow of their former self. Others such as Infoseek, Architext and Alta Vista came on the scene in 1995. The web portal Yahoo has been a member of the Verizon group of companies since 2016, where Yahoo became part of “Oath” (since 2019: Verizon Media) in 2017.

Google started quite late, but much more successfully today. In the same year, MSN Search was launched, which was renamed Windows Live Search in 2006, Bing in 2009 and now Microsoft Bing at the end of 2020.

I would like to mention a few other search engines such as Alltheweb, Altavista, Abacho, Excite and Fireball here for nostalgic reasons, which had a significant influence on the development of search engines at the time.

I myself have been there since 1998. The terms search engine optimization or SEO and the like did not yet exist. At the time, it was popular to be a hacker who tried to figure out and trick the supposed secrets of the fledgling Internet. Looking back it was a kindergarten and yet interesting how easy it was to stand out in the top 10 search results. Many of the methods today would inevitably lead to punishment and banishment as black hat SEO.

With my domain SEO.AG [.Arbeitsgruppe] I was one of the first commercial search engine optimizers. SEO was everything. SEO was digital marketing then and now. Terms such as online marketing, marketing automation, lead nurturing and many others were not yet known back then.

Today's SEO can therefore no longer be compared with the SEO of yesteryear. Today's SEO manages and edits his topics, while the early SEO developed, i.e. operated digital business development.

I looked at the SEO earning potential today and was shocked at how poor performance monetization has become. This may also be due to the fact that many areas of SEO at the time were outsourced to other departments.

Does an SEO server have to be able to manage today? Master Linux? Understanding PHP or LAMP? And and and? The Internet has become more complex. Today more than ever we need all-rounders and generalists with a certain depth. Unfortunately, a lot of things these days are too focused on marketing and sales. In my opinion, the technical depth and connections have unfortunately been pushed into the background.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi – The king is dead, long live the king! But the fact is that these specialists and experts still exist. They haven't decreased either. Only the awareness of the Internet has become an “ongoing mass phenomenon”. Just as a nation of 80 million football experts suddenly stand up at every World Cup, this means that as the years go by, they no longer play football. In a noisy world, the loudest always push forward, but the best are not always there.

By far the most widely used search engine is Google, which has a global market share of around 88 percent and has now become synonymous with Internet searches. In the USA, Google's market share is around 81 percent and in Germany it is around 90 percent. However, Google is not the most used search engine in all countries. With a market share of around 53.7 percent (2021), the search engine Sogou dominates the search engine market in China. Google didn't lead the market in Russia for a long time either. The search engine from the Russian-Dutch company Yandex was the most popular there. However, in August 2019, Google was able to take over market leadership in Russia as the second most popular search engine for the first time in a long time.

Based on global sales, it is easy to see that Google is the undisputed market leader in Internet search and, for example, achieved more than seven times the sales of its competitor Baidu with advertising in 2018. Around ten billion search queries were made on Google in August 2018. The rival company Microsoft recorded around 4.1 billion inquiries. Google is also the market leader when comparing the market shares of search engines based on mobile and stationary usage. Google's market leadership is particularly clear when it comes to mobile usage: while Google has a global market share of around 76 percent in desktop searches This share for mobile searches is around 93.5 percent.

 

Suitable for:

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Further and interesting figures, data and facts can be found here in our SEO library or SEM knowledge database:

SEO Library – SEM knowledge database (PDF)

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Xpert.Digital – Konrad Wolfenstein

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