SEO History

Once upon a time, the search engines relied on META tags: keywords (especially keywords), titles and descriptions. There was no need to optimize a website, there was no need to hire professional content writers to create valuable web content, no one cared about keyword density on pages.

Once upon a time, being on the Web was not so costly. There was no such thing as "valid html"; no one tried to impress you with a Flash site... It was all simply the Web's Stone Age. Oh, the good old days! It used to be so easy to influence the search engines and get high placements in their result pages! And no one really cared about web standards, design techniques, or patterns. The prehistoric search engines were nothing more than word matching filters. All that, no longer than fifteen years ago!

From the very beginning of the search engine era, webmasters understood the importance of high rankings and some started using "black magic" approaches: keyword stuffing, doorway pages, adding text with the same color as the background and other unethical techniques.

Related SEO Tips

Nofollow Tags
Nofollow is an attribute that tells a search engine crawler not to follow a certain link on your web site.

Rankings History
Google will look at the historical ranking of a document to help determine the current ranking

History of SEO
The early days of search engine optimisation began to attract significant numbers of web sites and users