How scraping changed SEO - Techradar

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SEO has always stood as a unique endeavor. Not only are the participants pitted against one another as they wrestle for the first place of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), but, in nearly all cases, data-driven guesswork is the best tool they have.

Well, nowadays it might not be as much guesswork as it used to be. Since the advent of web scraping, SEOs have gained the ability to gather tons of data - something that is constantly being converted into the much-celebrated thing called “organic channel strategy”. Hopes of reaching #1 in SERPs are usually included.

Unsurprisingly, having tons of data helps a lot if your primary source of work is reverse engineering a close-to-magic black box. Today we could scarcely imagine starting SEO from scratch. It’s now an intertwined web of data, practical experience, and assumptions. Mostly data, though.

But how did we get here?

According to the Search Engine Journal, SEO, as a practice, began sometime in the late 1990s. The fun genesis story is that the manager of Jefferson Airplane (a rock band) was unhappy that their website was on the 4th page rather than the 1st. The boring genesis story is that the words “search engine optimization” were first used by John Audette, the owner of Multimedia Marketing Group, as part of some marketing strategy.

Whichever we choose to believe, SEO back then wasn’t all that similar to its current form. Search engines had yet to achieve dominance and the landscape...

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