Just wondering how was seo for search engines to work for you guys between 1990 and 1995 and a bit after when google started. I did not get the chance to be a webmaster at the time Just wondering, how hard was it and was the success rates higher than now?? could you share your memories for history
Well for a start Google wasn't around back then, neither were any other search engines. The concept of SEO didn't really come into being until after the turn of the century. Back then the issues weren't getting into the search engines, or getting links. Getting links was easy, you just emailed people and they were more than happy to link to you because the problem was that there weren't ENOUGH links to go around. You had people asking you for permission to link to your site. Someone was cool if if they had a site with a hundred links. Yahoo was ultracool because they had so many links. Work-wise, the big questions were, how do you get people to use their credit cards online? How do you get micropayment to work? That issue hasn't really been solved, come to think of it, though AdSense did solve the monetization problem to a considerable degree. Man, takes me back... *wheez* now where's my pipe and my rocking chair?
I don't think Google was around then. I thought google came in the late 90's. But before that there were a lot of search engines. Yahoo was there, excite, altavista, lycos, netscape, bigfoot, and many more. I got into it very early and it was very easy to get top 10. Most of it was html pages back then, so meta keywords, descriptions and title. Keywords worked well back then. But there were a fraction of the sites like there is now. It is quite a bit different now. We didn't have all the fancy software to edit and create some of the things we can now. Dialup was the standard, sites were slow, computers were slow, web hosting was in megabytes instead of gigabytes like we have now. I remember like 10mb's of space and 50 mb's of bandwidth or something like that. Almost nothing, and it was much more expensive than what I pay now for tons more. Network solutions was the only place to register a domain at the time. It was $35 per year, but you had to pay for 2 years minimum at the time. So basically $70 just to have a domain name. Anyway it was a whole different ball game then.
yup, like monosodium states, it was all about link exchanges back then, i remember a question asked in my 98 MIS class, the answer was....LINK EXCHANGES! would get you #1 result... lol
Gameutopia, $35 per domain is not too much but the hosting is horrible at comparing to right now, thanks for sharing the nice moment with us.
Lol! So true.. Very old school. I still run into clients that mention link exchanges and I have to educate them on current SEO tactics to ensure their site isn't penalized.
I used to have a popular site on geocities. Back then, not many people cared about monetizing websites - it was a hobby just to make websites. It was very easy to get visitors, and I didn't care about search engines at all back then - it was all through word of mouth and people linking to my site because they liked it. The clip art sites were BIG and people used a lot of linkware. No one was stingy when it came to giving away links. Instead of search engines, I depended more on "rings" to get traffic - it was like a small network of sites connected to each other via a big banner with arrows on either side. Site Fights was quite popular.
Oh, those were indeed the days. Site frames were a big thing back then. If you couldn't write frames, then you didn't need to be in the business .. or so it was said. We had Aliweb in '93, and Yahoo was still just a "human edited" directory in '95 (roughly a million pages in size). I remember site submissions though, and not fondly. Today, when you click to submit a site, you are taken to a nice form on a separate page, where you fill in all of your website details (i.e. address, site name and so forth) In 1996, when you clicked to submit a site, your email client popped up, and you had to quite nearly write a letter to get submitted. Then you had to wait .. months. When someone like Alta Vista got your email, they would hand it off to a "human", who then, when he had time, would put it into the bot cue. Bots ran a few times a week for a few hours a day back then, and when the bot got to your site, it would list it into the index. Keep in mind, that humans actually had to visit your site in order to see if it was worth their time putting it into the cue in the first place. Then, we had porn ... lots and lots of porn ... if you could get past that, you were lucky. Browsers never kept up with things like meta refresh, pop-ups, or redirects .. you took your chances when you surfed the web in those days. 28kbps was all the rage as far as connection speed too ... Ah yes .. those were indeed the days.
I built my first site in 1995. There was no such thing as a WYSIWYG editor then. You wrote HTML code, period. Then you switched to a browser to view it, make edits and view it again. I used something called HotDog by sausage software, which was a great little editor. Ultimately, I left it and started using M$ FrontPage 1.0. Life was simple then... /*tom*/
That's an intereting question I wonder if it was harder to get noticed because SEO didn't exist or whether it is actually harder now because there are too many people doing it
Second part of now, there by so many so called SEO's lurking around, it means more difficult, of course yesteryears there were not many seo tools to make your life easier either
thanks for all your wonderful posts. makes me wonder, what will be happening after 10 years Good Luck to all
1996 is the start for me of being an IT specialists and search engine is still new to me and even the software use for web design. it is a microsoft frontpage and adobe photoshop. but for ten years my skills in this field upgraded into more easy way
I joined this field in 2002. We did only link exchange in bulk to get better rank. The clients deal on page rank not on traffic. They demanded for the page rank. Now the thing changed.
I think around that time you would be lucky to get 10 people a month, as many of the search engines had not even started yet