Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is mired in a thirty-year-old infrastructure that dictates how everything is handled even today. We call that Forces Academia. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee changed how the world operates both commercially and academically with his invention of the World Wide Web. Learning how that infrastructure works will help you understand how Digital Marketing works across the board, including Social Media Marketing, Video SEO, and paid advertising like Google Ads.

This is part two in a series of articles titled The Fundamentals of SEO. If you’re interested in learning more, I’d recommend you Start Here.

The Birth of the Web

1989, shocking to realize that’s about as far back in time for us as when Marty McFly went Back to the Future to his Mom’s time in high school in 1955. Either way, the year was a very important time in the history of humanity because technology shifted in a way that hadn’t been seen since the invention of the Gutenberg Press: the World Wide Web was born.

“The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.”

Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web, Weaving the Web

Academic Roots

Tim Berners-Lee worked at the CERN research lab, helping develop software and hardware for physics research. The invention of the World Wide Web was done as a simple way to quickly share and collaborate with other research institutes and individuals worldwide. The big takeaway was to make it so information on a subject could scale without having to rewrite or rebuild the current understanding but add to it.

But wait, if the World Wide Web didn’t exist, how did they connect with and share information with other research centers, universities, and individuals? Simple: the Internet existed. It was developed in the 1960s at ARPANET as a way of networking computers, but it wasn’t really developed in the way we think of it until 1983.

Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN were actively communicating via the Internet with other institutions that had it available to them (very costly at the time). Those organizations predominantly focused on building and sharing research and the standard for that research: academic research papers.

Relevance vs Authority

If you’re taking notes, it’s time to write down our first glossary term (it will be on the test), relevance. Relevance is a mechanism used to determine how closely two things are associated. In short, relevance was calculated by the number of times a search term, keyword, or keyword phrase (your next glossary terms) was used in the text.

For example, if I’m doing a research paper on Solar Energy (my first research paper topic), I would want the scholarly works related to my search term or keyword phrases to appear ahead of everything else. Furthermore, I’d want the works that used that search term to show up at the top. Why? If it’s the article that discusses my search term the most, then it must be the most relevant thing to what I’m looking for. That’s some pretty solid common sense.

As I stated before, this worked exceptionally well until commerce got involved. In 1991, when CERN and Tim Berners-Lee released the first public version of the World Wide Web or W3. When that happened, it didn’t take long for marketers to ruin the whole thing by realizing that if they added a specific phrase they wanted to rank on more than their competitors, they would rank first and get all of the traffic. I saw this first-hand when I did my first research paper.

I attended middle school and part of high school in the small town of Tupelo, Ok (remember Robert’s Bagels from our first article in this series? Not a real place, but a very real town). My school invested in a computer lab and access to the Internet. When it came time to learn how to write a research paper, the other 18 people in my class and myself (literally the entire 9th grade) were shepherded to the library to learn how to do research.

We learned about the Dewey Decimal System, how to write a bibliography, and build out citations, and we were shown how to use the web. That’s where I was introduced to fascinating but effectively extinct search engines like Lycos, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo!.

So, what happened when I tried to do a research paper using these tools? Trash. Just absolute garbage search results. I kid you not; I had Chinese and Arabic websites showing on the first page of Yahoo! search results. How many people do you think spoke Chinese or Arabic in Tupelo, OK, in 1999? Zero. So, why did these pages show for me? Because marketers had figured out they could manipulate relevance.

So, what was to be done to clean up the web? Well, there’s another very important part of writing a good research paper that we haven’t considered: citations.

Remember how I said that those other search engines were effectively extinct? That’s because a competitor emerged and revolutionized the way SEO works. This company agreed that we should focus on relevance when categorizing websites; however, we should rank them by their authority. What company am I referring to? Google.

Google’s Evolution: From Relevance to Authority

As I stated in the first article in this series, we often just refer to Google to reference all search engines. Why? Because they changed the game and no one has caught up to them yet. It starts with a small group of friends at Stanford University in California, a simple algorithm called PageRank (another glossary term), and an understanding of Forces Academia: how research papers work.

“Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality.”

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Brin (1998) The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

The PageRank Algorithm

So, what is PageRank? Over the last 15 years, as I’ve asked my clients this question (Rook Digital is an education first agency so we make sure our clients know what we’re doing and why), almost unanimously they assume it refers to where you rank in search engine results. That’s because no one talks about it but PageRank is one of the most important principles that makes our world function and it is absolutely vital for you to understand no matter where you are in your SEO journey.

PageRank is an algorithm that determines how authoritative every single page of every single website is. It’s defined by a scoring system from zero to ten and can go out to six decimal points in the score. We’ll cover this in more depth in the PageRank and Authority article, but just recognize that about 99% of the World Wide Web scores a zero out of ten.

In 2008, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, called the Internet a “cesspool” and stated that Google’s primary job is sorting through that mess to find the best content to serve to searchers.

Reading between the lines, you can clearly see he’s referencing PageRank. So, if you have a PageRank score of zero, you’re part of the cesspool; if you have a PageRank of one, you’re in the top 1% of all web pages on the planet. That’s the top one percent of trillions of pages on the web. Think about that. They’re saying they truly think that most things don’t deserve to be served to searchers, and they reserve the right to score you based on quality signals that they control.

So, what is authority, then? Authority is often used interchangeably with PageRank and for a long time people have suspected that Google has retired the PageRank algorithm all together. That’s true in a sense, specifically retiring the first version of their PageRank algorithm, however leaked Google documents in May 2024 show that PageRank is still an active part of their internal algorithm.

All of this is fascinating, but what does it mean for someone doing SEO? It means you need to get PageRank and there’s really only one factor that increases PageRank: backlinks.

The Importance of Backlinks

What are backlinks, and why do they matter? Well, going back to our discussion of Forces Academia and the infrastructure of the web, it’s important to recognize that we should be treating every page of our websites like a unique research paper.

In the world of scholarly research papers, which document is more authoritative: the research paper itself or the citation validating the research paper? The answer: the citation. But it isn’t a one-sided relationship. The research paper citing the work becomes more authoritative because of its association with the cited work. This is a longer conversation about Internal Backlinks and External backlinks (more glossary terms), but we’ll cover that in our Backlinks article.

For our purposes, we will focus on the only way you receive PageRank: Backlinks. A backlink can be defined as a one-way backlink from one webpage to another. If the linking page has PageRank, it passes PageRank back to the linked page, making it more authoritative.

The really simple version of why this matters and works so well: you wouldn’t link to something that wasn’t valuable, would you? So, checking a page’s total links, where those links are coming from, and the authority of those backlinks directly reflects how the World Wide Web was founded. Furthermore, Google’s terminology for backlinks is citations.

As you can see, Forces Academia are still live and well in the world of SEO and all of Digital Marketing for that matter. If you treat everything you create as a research paper and seek out backlinks from relevant and authoritative sources, you will rank better. It’s that simple, however, because of it’s simplicity, marketers have ruined this as well. Google has looked beyond just backlinks as the primary ranking signal including major pushes looking at User Experience (The Google Panda Update of 2011), SPAM signals from bad backlinking (The Google Penguin Update of 2012), Geographical signals (Google Opossum and Google Pigeon algorithms), Social Signals like shares and likes, etc.

It’s far more complicated than ever, but if you ignore the infrastructure of the web, you’re going to have a bad time.

The Problem with Chasing Algorithms

During my career, I’ve seen major algorithm shifts, changes in technology, shifts in the way people use the web, and throughout that entire time I’ve watched marketers blow up their progress by chasing the algorithm.

“The success behind Google Search Engine is PageRank algorithm. Many PageRank algorithms exist in the literature for ranking web pages. However, determining the optimum PageRank algorithm is an optimization problem.”

Kumar, S., & Singh, S. (2020). Evaluation of Iterative PageRank Algorithm for Web Page Ranking

A System Built for Academia

“The algorithm changed, and now I’m not ranking anymore,” I hear marketers bemoan. “That’s it, SEO is dead!” they cry. The reality is that if they’d built a proper foundation, they wouldn’t have to worry. As an agency managing hundreds of websites over the past ten years, we’ve seen clear patterns in why people get penalized and others don’t.

Want to know what the big difference is? Following the Forces Academia foundation and avoiding the tips and tricks or the latest hack will ensure your website continues to rank and weathers the storms of algorithm updates.

Seriously, our SEO process has basically remained the same, with continued and ongoing success for every single client we work with. Why? Because we practice the fundamentals and execute them as perfectly as possible, everyone else who chased the latest shiny algorithm change ends up tanking when it shifts again. Our clients rise to the top and replace those who drop because they didn’t build a strong foundation.

Don’t get me wrong, we review changes in technology, user behavior, and emerging trends and adjust our approach as things shift, but we aren’t looking for a quick win; we’re looking for long-term success online, and that’s why our clients win and win big.

Accept it; you’ll have to write research papers every day of your SEO career. That’s all there is to it. Sorry to break it to you, but the thing you hated doing in college is still a major part of your life, and if you paid attention to how to write a good research paper, you’ve got a head start on those of us who would played Grand Theft Auto IV instead.

The Algorithm Arms Race

In this article, you’ve heard me reference marketers ruining the web on a few occasions. A fun saying I heard early in my career is, “Everything’s great until marketers ruin it.” The problem with chasing the algorithm is that eventually, it gets ruined, and Google has to adjust what they consider to be a quality signal. Why? Marketers ruin everything!

You and I may be honest business people with integrity as a key value in our lives, however, we aren’t the norm. Remember a PageRank of 1-10 reflects the top 1% of the pages on the web? Well, that’s a pretty strong reflection about marketers: most of them are looking to get rich as fast as they can and are okay blurring the lines between right and wrong.

That’s where terms like Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO (more pesky glossary terms) come into play. White Hat SEO reflects search engine optimization practices that align with Google guidelines and are used to showcase why your content deserves to rank highly in Google. Black Hat SEO represents Search Engine Optimization practices that blur the lines and very often ignore best practices for the quick win.

Too often, what works today (the hack, trick, or hot tip) becomes Black Hat SEO because it represents a SPAMMY or negative practice, and Google will aggressively penalize and demote websites that engage in them.

At Rook Digital, we believe in what I call the Hippocratic Oath of Digital Marketing: First, do no harm. If you were practicing SEO in 2011-2013, you lived through some volatile times for most of the web. Remember the Google Panda and Google Penguin algorithms I referenced earlier? We’ll cover them in more detail in the On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO articles, but these algorithms wrecked businesses. It was a major crackdown on people doing SPAMMY Black Hat SEO.

Google Penguin, often called the Web SPAM Sheriff, looked at and laid traps for people doing shady backlinking. Link Farms, Blog Networks, Link Wheels, etc., all left strong digital footprints back to websites that engaged in these shady practices, and Penguin destroyed them for it.

It wasn’t uncommon at the time for people to shut down their domains and start fresh. Why? Because they had done so much shady outsourced link building and SPAMMY stuff, there was no chance of recovering their domains.

Don’t chase the algorithm; build a strong foundation safely laid upon Forces Academia, and you will be just fine.

Building a Solid SEO Foundation

So, how do we build a strong SEO foundation? That’s the point of the series of articles, but there are really two sides to this SEO coin: On-Page and Off-Page SEO. We’ll cover both, but the first place to start is with On-Page SEO.

“SEO is like a resume, you polish it so you have your best foot forward.”

Matt Cutts, Former Head of Google’s Webspam Team

Infrastructure Matters

For those of us who went to high school or college, you learned how to write a research paper. What happens if you copy sections from someone else without a citation, borrow sections from friends, or even purchase research papers from others? You got in big trouble. Plagiarism, or theft, is hugely frowned upon in the academic world, and in many institutions, you will be expelled immediately if you’re caught.

In the world of Generative AI, my friends and colleagues who teach at Universities (Rich Henrich, a Co-Founder at Rook Digital, has taught at many Universities and can attest to this), describe the bulk of the work in grading student papers is finding and tracking down those students who used AI to write their entire paper.

Technology might have changed the way students try to get away with lazy, quick, and unethical work, but the results and the consequences are still the same: penalization. It’s no different in the world of SEO. If you want to win, you have to be willing to put in the work. That starts where you can control ever single factor: your website.

Before you even think about building external authority like PageRank, you must ensure you have a research paper worthy of citation. Polish your website and make unique, authoritative, and helpful content. Provide as much value as possible, and a funny thing happens: people organically link back to you! That’s right; you don’t have to manipulate, buy, cheat, or steal to get backlinks; your good work will attract social media shares and citations and build its own PageRank.

When you’ve done everything you can do, then go chase down PageRank. The authority and quality of your content will magnify the authority you get from PageRank passing through backlinks into your website.

Authority Signals Done Right

You’ve polished your website and every page on it, now what? Time to fetch some backlinks and build your PageRank. I discuss this in more depth in my Backlinks article; however, you can damage your online reputation in an instant if you do this wrong.

For the purposes of this article I want to give you a few guidelines:

• Find industry-relevant websites to seek backlinks (associations, blogs, forums, agencies, vendors, partners, etc.)
• Build relationships of trust and share value to entice backlink opportunities.
• Do not pay, rent, or borrow backlinks.
• Does the backlinking opportunity sound too good to be true (I recently saw an ad for 10,000 SEO backlinks for $100)? It is. Run for the hills and drag your women and children because that offer is spewing toxicity.
• Avoid bad neighborhoods: poker, pills, pornography.
• Avoid reciprocal links: I’ll link to you if you link to me.
• Be weary of guest posting opportunities.
• Use Anchor Text where it matters.

For now, know you need a strong foundation with authoritative citations validating that you are who you say you are. If you do those things, you will rank well and survive the daily algorithmic volatility. Avoid the algorithm game and focus on high-quality, valuable work; you will win.

Conclusion

You can’t avoid the fact that we are stuck in the past, but most people try to. If you embrace the web’s infrastructure (Forces Academia), you will see success and dominate anyone who ignores it. Focus first on what you can control and ignore what you can’t. When your foundation is sure, you can test new things, try new tools, and expand your understanding, but until then, you’re building your house upon the sand, and we all know how that ends when the rainstorms come.

What’s next? Checkout the other articles related to this series:

• PageRank and Authority
• Backlinks
• Helpful Content

Want some help understanding how this applies to your specific situation? Schedule a No-BS Audit, and let us show you exactly where to focus your time, energy, and attention for maximum results.