Rock n’ Google: How a psychedelic rock band gave birth to SEO
By Agustín Mastrorilli, Content & Media Manager
When the first search engines and websites appeared in the early 1990s, the order in which search results were displayed became incredibly important; and it became even more relevant as the Internet spread from scientists and the military to the general population.
It quickly became clear that, whoever appeared at the top of the search results list, was destined to win the click race, a race that today is extremely important.
Although file indexing had been commonplace since the early 1990s thanks to Gopher software, it wasn’t until the end of that decade that web developers began to understand search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
But, interestingly enough, there is a strong belief that the birth of SEO came from a very unlikely source: a rock band.
(Because before the web, it was Gopher; and before SEO it was Jefferson Starship)
JEFFERSON WHO?
Jefferson Airplane was a band formed in the mid 60’s in San Francisco, considered one of the first bands that pioneered the psychedelic rock genre. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, I invite you to click on White Rabbit or Somebody to Love (not to be confused with the Queen song) to listen to them on Spotify… I’m sure you’ll recognize them.
(White Rabbit was part of the soundtrack of “D’oh in the Wind”, episode number 6 of season 10 of The Simpsons, when it is known that Homer’s middle name is “Jay”)
After achieving international success, Jefferson Airplane gave way to Jefferson Starship. The new lineup folded in 1985 but decided to return in the early 1990s.
This return of Jefferson Starship, added to the beginnings of a new digital era, meant that the band had its own website. It was developed by a company called Cybernautic, a technology company that still exists today.
(This is what the official Jefferson Starship website looked like at the time, developed by Cybernautic)
While the band was on tour presenting their new album, Bill Thompson, Jefferson Starship’s manager, wanted to show an event promoter the band’s new website, but to his chagrin and embarrassment it didn’t appear on the first page of the search results and he had to keep looking.
So, one early morning in February 1995, Bill angrily called the VP of Cybernautic to ask why the band’s official site was appearing on page 4 of the search results.
HOW WAS SEO BORN?
The band’s site looked absolutely beautiful for what was 1995, but the search engines didn’t (and still don’t) take the look of the site into account when ranking a page.
“Why isn’t the f***ing band site showing up on the first page!!!?” (yeah… Bill wasn’t happy).
The problem was that the phrase “Jefferson Starship” wasn’t mentioned enough. Other sites were making much more use of the band’s name in their text and were, therefore, ranking higher.
To fix the problem, Cybernautic’s developers wrote “Jefferson Starship” all over the site and simply colored the text to match the background color. The website shot to number 1 immediately and, thus, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was born.
TIMES CHANGE AND SO DO TECHNIQUES
You could define that era as a sort of digital “wild west”, where search engines relied on keywords and metatags to rank sites. If you wanted to shoot up the rankings you only had to use one more keyword than your competitors. It was easy, all you had to do was type it in and change the color of the text to match the background so it wouldn’t show up… a technique that is now frowned upon.
Search rankings gradually began to include other things, such as content type, domain name and site structure.
It was Google in 2000 that changed everything. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University, started the company in 1996 and developed an innovative algorithm that took into account both links on a page and links to a page. In other words, if a page was linked to more frequently, it should be a more reputable page and, therefore, appear higher in the search ranking.
(The first demo of Google as a search engine)
Although there were other components within the algorithm, this one was the easiest for most people to work with and the easiest to understand. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a vast improvement over what was managed before then.
By 2003, keeping up with SEO was becoming increasingly difficult: waves of spam and stolen content were cluttering the Internet.
Many people were writing poor content, or simply stealing content from other authors, just to get it to rank in the top searches. Google began to combat these practices by prioritizing big brands on the basis that they were more trustworthy precisely because of their status as recognized brands.
Subsequent updates took into account site architecture and the time it took to load a page. At that time, the major search engines also began using their own data to help personalize their searches, as well as using tags to help combat spam.
There have been many changes in the last decade, not only in Google’s algorithms but also those of other search engines, but getting a website to the top of the rankings and keeping it there has never been more important than it is today.
The techniques have changed since SEO began, but the intent is still there and it’s still a never-ending process.
What will SEO be in 20 years and, more importantly, what band or artist will innovate with their techniques? In PSh, we bet on a modern band with oldschool vibes.
(The most immediate thing in SEO is voice and visual search optimization. Who knows, maybe it will be Greta Van Fleet who will take us to a new dimension of SEO)
