SEO Know-how – Old School, Popular Hits and Evergreens

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 present at its birth.

Lycos and Yahoo followed in 1994, but today they are a shadow of their former selves. Others like Infoseek, Architext, and AltaVista entered the scene in 1995. The web portal Yahoo has been a member of the Verizon group of companies since 2016, where it became part of "Oath" (since 2019: Verizon Media) in 2017.

Google launched rather late, but is now gigantically more successful. In the same year, MSN Search was launched, which was renamed Windows Live Search in 2006, Bing in 2009, and finally Microsoft Bing at the end of 2020.

For nostalgic reasons, I would like to mention a few other search engines such as Alltheweb, Altavista, Abacho, Excite or Fireball, which significantly shaped the development of search engines at the time.

I myself have been involved since 1998. The terms search engine optimization or SEO and similar concepts didn't exist back then. At that time, it was popular to be a hacker, trying to uncover and exploit the supposed secrets of the still-nascent internet. In retrospect, it was child's play, yet interesting how easy it was to rank in the top 10 search results. Many of those methods would inevitably lead to penalties and bans today, being considered black hat SEO.

With my domain SEO.AG [.working group], I was among the first commercial search engine optimizers. SEO was everything. SEO was the digital marketing of that time and still is today. Terms like online marketing, marketing automation, lead nurturing, and many others were still unknown back then.

Today's SEO is therefore no longer comparable to the SEO of the past. Today's SEO manages and edits their topics, whereas the early SEO focused on development, essentially engaging in digital business development.

I've looked at the earning potential for SEO professionals today and was shocked at how poorly monetizing their services has become. This is probably also due to the fact that many aspects of SEO work have been outsourced to other specialist areas.

Do you need to be able to manage an SEO server these days? Master Linux? Understand PHP or LAMP? And so on? The internet has become more complex. More than ever, we need all-rounders and generalists with a certain depth of knowledge. Unfortunately, nowadays, much is far too focused on marketing and sales. In my opinion, the technical depth and interrelationships have regrettably been neglected.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi – The king is dead, long live the king! But the fact is, these specialists and experts still exist. Their numbers haven't decreased. Only the internet has become a "sustained mass phenomenon." Just as a nation of 80 million football experts suddenly rises up during every World Cup, the number of people actually playing football doesn't increase over the years. In a noisy world, the loudest always push to the front, but they aren't always the best.

By far the most widely used search engine is Google, which holds a global market share of approximately 88 percent and has become synonymous with internet search. In the USA, Google's market share is around 81 percent, and in Germany, it's around 90 percent. However, Google is not the most used search engine in every country. With a market share of approximately 53.7 percent (2021), the search engine Sogou dominates the search engine market in China. Google also did not lead the market in Russia for a long time. There, the search engine of the Russian-Dutch company Yandex was the most popular. However, in August 2019, Google was able to take over the market leadership in Russia for the first time in a long while, becoming the second most popular search engine.

Based on global revenue figures, it's easy to see that Google is the undisputed market leader in internet search, generating more than seven times the advertising revenue of its competitor Baidu in 2018, for example. Around ten billion search queries were conducted via Google in August 2018, compared to approximately 4.1 billion for its rival, Microsoft. Google also holds the leading position when comparing search engine market shares based on mobile versus desktop usage. This dominance is particularly evident in mobile search: while Google holds a global market share of around 76 percent for desktop searches, this figure rises to approximately 93.5 percent for mobile searches.

 

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• Artificial intelligence in the field of renewable energies

 

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

SEO Library – SEM Knowledge Base (PDF)

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Xpert.Digital – Konrad Wolfenstein

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