https://webitmd.com/blog/seo/throwback-thursday-how-was-seo-in-2010-compared-with-2020/

 

The fight for the top positions in Google is one that has been going on for a long time, but the search engine results page landscape has continued to evolve over time. In this blog we’re going to look at how SEO has changed over the past 10 years, and what we can learn from this evolution.

 

Search Engines

 

When looking back at SEO over the past decade, one of the first things worth comparing is the search engines. We have all heard of Google, but is Google still number one, and are there new kids on the block? 

Well, according to Statista, Google is still the number one search engine that massively outranks competitors. However it has lost overall market share. It held 90% of the worldwide desktop market back in 2010, compared to 85% in 2021. And its main competitor Bing has slowly grown its own share from 3.4% to 7.61% over the same period.

 

In terms of new competition, DuckDuckGo is now considered the 7th largest search engine of the global market, known for its lack of tracking or ads. Other search engines like Ecosia and OceanHero may not be big, but they are pushing ecological goals like tree planting and cleaning up the ocean via their search revenue and donations and may be ones to watch in the future.

 

So overall in the last 10 years, Google may have lost a little bit of market share, but the majority of your SEO efforts should still go here as it still holds over 80% of the global market for search.

Was SEO easier back in 2010?

 

If there’s one thing we’re sure of, it’s that Google is getting smarter by the year. And this means SEO is getting harder. Before the implementation of a whole list of algorithm updates starting in 2010 (which we’ll get onto shortly), optimising for SEO was pretty straight forward. You just had to include the keyword you were trying to optimise for, basically all over the page. You could repeat it again and again and it would be a bad experience for the user, but Google would lap it up as it had a more primary way of assigning relevance from a keyword to a page.

 

However this all changed when Google started to set some rules via its algorithm updates, that would roll out continuously, some bigger than others. This would change how Google reads pages, indexes search results, and how SEO specialists should write their content.

 

Algorithms

 

Google uses algorithms to index the millions of web pages it has to index everyday. As the algorithms got smarter, so did the SEO optimisation experts. Long gone are the days where you could spam a page with one keyword. Now your content must be user friendly, useful and within context. This is due to a range of algorithm updates that were rolled out between 2010 and 2020 that changed the way Google:

• Ranks pages with poor content or high ad-to-content ratios (Panda update, 2011)
• Treats keyword stuffing (Penguin update, 2012)
• Understands local search results (Pigeon update, 2014)
• Indexes mobile search results (Mobile update, 2015)
• Evaluates if certain websites are trustworthy e.g. medical and healthcare sites (Medic update, 2018)
• Interprets natural language searches and understands context (BERT update, 2019) 

There have also been a few major core updates in between and since which solidify any changes.

 

In general, over time, Google has moved towards making sure the results it shows are relevant to what the user is looking for, provides useful and easy to understand information, and is trustworthy. This has meant that a lot of black hat tricks used by SEO specialists no longer work, and a move towards the light has been required.

 

Backlinks and dark arts

 

On this topic, a major area of shift over the last decade in SEO has been the change in how backlinks are evaluated. Back in 2010, you could get backlinks (a link from an external website that points to yours) by creating ‘link farms’, a website that is used only to link to other websites, or other blackhat tricks like spamming your website links across comment sections on many blogs or forums. Back then, a link was just a link, no matter where it came from or the context. 

 

However, since the rollout of the Panda update of 2011, Google started to penalise websites that had a majority of backlinks from what it considered ‘spammy, toxic’ domains. The advice then became that your backlinks should come from trustworthy websites, who themselves have a good domain authority. At the time this was universities or government type sites.

 

But in 2022, the latest advice from Google is that the sites that are linking to yours should be relevant to your industry. This latest change is pretty new and shows another point in the direction of relevancy and context over all else.

 

So now the best strategy for gaining backlinks and improving your backlink profile is to find sites that are relevant to your content, and do good old school outreach. Email them or ask them if they can link to your site, or go one step further and provide them with some data, infographics or blog copy that they can use and link back to you with.

 

So all in all, SEO may now have a few more rules and regulations about what you should and shouldn’t do to rank, however the main advice that will always hold true is: make content that is helpful for the user, that is relevant, that is digestible and shareable, and you should do well.