The history of the creation of “VKontakte” - the launch of the network
Together with his brother Pavel Durov in 2005, he began to develop the idea of the VKontakte social network. The idea of a correspondence site that would work all over the world appeared after a friend from abroad came to visit Pasha. The programmer realized how difficult it was for him to keep in touch with friends who live far away. You need to understand that previously people almost never corresponded or communicated on the Internet, and if this happened, it was only by email.
Inspired by the history of the social network Facebook, Durov decided to develop a similar site. Its main feature was that instead of a simple email address, information about users is stored there.
In 2006, Pasha Durov began developing VKontakte and within a few months the first visitor registered there. Initially, only a user who received an invitation from others could create an account online, because the site was closed. But after VKontakte began to grow, the founders decided to make it open and confirm the registration of everyone.
Initially, “VKontakte” was called “Students.ru”, but almost immediately the social network was renamed.
The developers said that the site will be completely free and will not contain advertising.
The easiest way to check the age of a page
1. Review the copyright information at the bottom of the web page
At the very bottom of the web page, take a look at the information available here. This usually contains notices or copyright information. Try to find the first date the information was published. Please remember that this may not be the time the content was posted, but rather an indication of when the site was last updated.
- Thanks to the update date, you can find out when the last time changes and additions were made to the site. The information you are interested in may have been added previously. In any case, you will see that work on the site is ongoing, which means that the information is checked and updated - the source is trustworthy.
- Try looking for the publication date in the section that contains information about the author. Sometimes the date is indicated there.
The copyright date consists of only the year (does not contain a specific day or month).
2. The date is hidden in the URL.
Note the URL in your browser bar. This is where some sites fill in the address, entering the date the content was created for the convenience of users. The name can contain either the full date or just the year.
- Remember that the date of publication must be found on the page of the publication itself. Sometimes users make mistakes when searching for information in indexes or archived pages.
- URLs are often adjusted to make them easier to find. Therefore, the date is not always contained in the browser line.
3. Search the source code
On the page you are interested in, right-click. In the window that opens, select “View page code”. After this, a separate tab will open with the source code of the page. There you will find the date you need.
- In some browsers you can see the “Page Source Code” item.
Remember: there is an easy way to open the source code: Ctrl + U on Windows and Cmd + U on Mac.
The search feature can be activated by pressing Ctrl + F on Windows or Cmd + F on Mac. Using “Find” you can easily find the date in the opened source code.
Remember: instead of the Find function, you can use the Edit function from the menu list. Next, select “Find on this page” from the list.
Pay attention to such combinations of words as “date published”, “publish date”, “published_time”. Enter these words one by one. Using the search function, the source code will be analyzed quickly. The cursor will move exactly to the location you are interested in if information is found.
- If your searches are unsuccessful, try shortening your query to the word “publish.” Perhaps then the date will be discovered.
- A query with the word “modified” will help you find information about the last time changes and updates were made to the page.
Pay attention to the date: it will be in the format YYYYMMDD. It will be found after the keyword you came by using the search function.
- Thanks to the date found, you can link to the site or determine whether the information in the resource is current.
Development of the largest social network in Russia
Pavel Durov perfectly understood the importance of proper advertising of the resource, so he connected new tools and technologies for website promotion. Literally a few months after the launch, the company had to transfer the social network to another platform and expand capacity, because the performance was not enough for the number of users.
At the beginning of 2007, VKontakte was included in the list of the 50 most promising sites on the Runet.
At the same time, the Durov brothers began to introduce technologies to make a profit. At first these were messages with which the user could increase his rating. These SMS were paid, and the profits went to the development of the company. Then they added the ability to send paid gifts to friends, after which online games appeared on the site in which it was possible to sell advertising.
How can you determine the age of a website page using technical methods?
First, let's look at the ways in which you can determine the moment when a page was created. You can check its age using a special HTML code, Sitemap or server response. A disclaimer (notice of disclaimer) may also help, but is not guaranteed. For example, a site may move - then the creation date will be updated, which in fact will incorrectly reflect the real age of the pages.
1. Using the “Site:” operator in Google and searching through dates
Using the “Site:” operator in the search engine, you will notice that the creation date of the FB page is not visible. You can clearly see it in the screenshot below. Sometimes, of course, miracles happen. For example, if the user takes a certain period of time to study. Let's take the period for the year from January 1, 2021 to January 1, 2019. We get the date - 09/28/2018.
Google's Brute force process when the "Site:" operator is replaced with "Allinurl:". There are cases when you don’t need to use operators: you can type the site address into a search engine.
Remember: for Google, the date the page was created is not always the date of the first crawl, as with the Yandex service. But we will talk about this below. If the Google bot notices some updates on the site pages, the system will change the date. Webmaster states that the date is determined based on various factors. One of them is the markup data presented on the site page.
2. Finding dates from Sitemap
Sitemap, or site map, is a program document that contains a list of links for search. Using a sitemap, you can determine the age of pages. However, looking at the screenshot below, we see that the search engine did not find anything.
Remember: sitemap generation occurs automatically. In this case, the attribute that shows the date the page was last updated may be incorrect.
3. Page Info in Firefox
In the screenshot below we can see that the meta tags did not give us any information about the creation date. The date in the “Last changes” line, according to the server, shows when changes were made to the resource. Thus, on large sites such as Facebook, the date and time of the last visit to the page will be equal to the date and time of the last changes to the site.
It looks like the page has been modified, but it hasn't:
In this case, Firefox shows more relevant information from the page. Google still shows 2021.
4. Tracking by date of publication of pictures
It is not always possible to determine the date of creation of the page by the date of the pictures. Pictures may be closed for indexing. Often the pages also contain other people's content. In this case, it will be impossible to determine the correct age.
The date the picture was published can be determined using a saved copy of the page. However, we do not recommend using this method. Google saves the page after the bot crawls it. For large sites with huge traffic, the age of the pages will be young, although in fact this is not the case. Yandex has another problem: an old copy of the page may be saved, which no longer corresponds to reality.
As you can see in the screenshot, the age of the Facebook page is significantly different from the date that the “Site:” operator showed us.
Conflicts and Durov’s departure from VKontakte
In 2008, more than 20 million users registered on VKontakte, and in 2021, almost a billion people visit the site daily.
Problems with the social network VKontakte appeared at the end of 2010, when its popularity reached its maximum. The Mail.ru Group company constantly tried to buy out the network, and they announced that they intended to buy 100% of the shares and then merge it with the Odnoklassniki platform. There were rumors that users were willing to pay about $2 billion for this deal.
After several months of unsuccessful negotiations, Pavel Durov posted a photo on Instagram, which he signed “Official response to the trash holding Mail to its latest attempts to absorb VKontakte.” In the photo, the programmer shows his middle finger.
Partners and shareholders of VKontakte supported the idea of merging the company with the holding, so Durov’s sharp response caused a negative reaction. Mirilashvili and Leviev sold their shares (in total less than 50% of the company) to United Capital Partners. This fund took ownership and began to manage its share of the VKontakte company. They sued Pavel Durov for allegedly spending the company's money on his own projects. We are talking about Telegram. Despite the fact that the programmer proved that this messenger was created with his personal money, they continued to sue him.
In 2014, Pavel Durov sold his 12% stake and on April 1 announced that he was leaving the VKontakte company.
Following Durov, many programmers and analysts left the social network, whom he took with him to the new company. He left Russia and received a St. Kitts and Nevis passport.
Why is it important to know the age of a website page?
Indicators such as site age and page age are of great importance for search engine ranking. They influence the place in the search results.
The age of a website page is recorded starting from the date it is indexed by a search engine.
This parameter must be taken into account for SEO optimization. Pages that are older have more prospects for ranking in the top results. It is for this reason that it is much more difficult for SEO optimizers to promote young Internet resources. It is believed that the minimum age for successful promotion of a resource is approximately six months.
Websites have multiple pages. For a resource to get to the top, one of its pages needs to be in the top positions of search results for a specific user request. In this case, the search engine independently selects one of the resource pages that best matches a specific request. There are often examples where Google offers users several pages of one site that are relevant to what the user is looking for.
Taking into account the age of the page, SEO specialists determine the required duration of promotion for a specific request. For the most competitive keywords, the average age of resources that appear in the top search results is from 2 to 3 years. In order to draw up a promotion plan, in parallel with other important activities, an analysis of the age of the pages should be carried out.
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“The age of the site and its impact on the promotion of the resource in search” More details
Optimizers have access to such a tool as resource aging (actions to replace content on the page with information that is “older in age”). It allows you to increase the position of a page in search results for a fairly long period of time. Initially, after replacing content with an older site, it will drop in the rankings for a specific request, but then it will begin to gain weight much faster in comparison with new pages.
Content replacement needs to be carefully considered. This measure should improve the provision of useful information to resource users. If the new content does not meet this requirement, then the search engine may regard its replacement as swapping (changing an indexed page to deceive users).
Aging of pages can be regarded as a useful measure only if the new content will be useful to site visitors.
Changing the policy and work of VKontakte
After the Mail.ru Group holding company completely absorbed the social network and came under the management of Alisher Usmanov, many changes happened to the platform. And despite the fact that many employees work there, as during the leadership of Pavel Durov, innovations are subject to serious criticism.
- The ability to embed videos from a social network site on other resources has disappeared.
- The beginning of cooperation with Channel One, which began actively publishing its videos. They can be monetized using built-in advertising.
- If someone publishes a video that was on this channel (that is, creates pirated content), then the site immediately deletes it.
- Users who want to watch a movie are sent to the Amediateka resource, and the network receives a percentage for the transitions.
- “VKontakte” is essentially turning into an advertising platform.
- More mobile and video advertising is appearing.
- The site becomes more convenient for business, rather than user communication.
- The metric is enabled for posts in groups that have more than 10 thousand users.
- Changing the appearance of the social network.
- The emergence of paid music.
These changes are both positive and negative, but the main reason for criticism is that the network is constantly “falling”. In addition, the resource significantly reduced the level of user security by disclosing personal information to the authorities... Trust in the site has fallen, so many decide to switch to other social networks.
Why know this?
The age of the resource will help you with search engine optimization. I think you know that the oldest trust domains are highly respected within search engines. That is, if the domain already has a white history, then when creating a new site it will be easier for you to promote it in search engines.
However, there is also the opposite effect. If the content of the old resource, which was previously located at a given address, did not comply with any specific rules, then most likely you will experience problems with promotion. You will have to contact the search engine technical support with a request to remove filters or pessimization.
In theory, all filters will be removed, but this does not guarantee that promoting a site with such a domain will be more effective than with a new one. It's a matter of chance. It will only work in some specific moments.
This indicator is very often used on resource sales exchanges. People want to know how relevant a particular project will be after a certain time. Based on this data, they will be able to understand whether they need to buy or whether it is better to find something else.
Typically, information is parsed automatically. That is, you will not be able to deceive buyers if you want to sell your resource. All information will be available, if not on the site itself, then in the same web archives. They will be able to see the whole story, and if any suspicious moments are detected, they will refuse in time.
