Hello everyone! I've been doing SEO since about 1995 (the era of white keywords on white background) and figured it's time to join this forum. I look forward to seeing you around.
Hello and welcome to DP. It sounds like you have a lot of experience, hope you can share your knowledge.
There sure was. I was a realtor back then and was too poor to hire someone to build a website for me, so I built my own. Once it was built I wanted it to be found so I did everything I could think to make it show up. Back then we didn't really know what we were doing, but that's OK, since the search engines were not at all sophisticated. It was funny back then, because you would go to a webpage and be looking at the entire page, but the scroll bar looked like it went on forever since you had twenty feet of white text on white background below the footer of the page. Basically we were trying to stuff as many keywords in there as we could, while still looking like a legitimate business ...which for me meant that the what space should not be longer than about half the length of the “real†content. After a year or so the engines started to figure it out so we started putting off-white text on white background, which worked for a while. When they figured that one out, we had to switch to white text on top of a black background with a white background images tiled so that you couldn’t see the black. That one worked for a long time. Fun ;-) It was definitely Black Hat SEO, but back then all SEO was black hat. With all the other Black Hat’s out there, you could not rank well using legitimate methods. Nowadays I build my sites for longevity. I don’t want to use some trick that works today, but will cause me to rebuild everything later or have to go trying to frantically remove a bunch of sketchy links from other sites. I would say that I’m 95% white hat today. I will admit, however, that it is next to impossible to get a new site up in running with only white hat tactics. That is where the temptation to visit the dark side comes in. Thanks for all your responses and warm welcomes.