Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

Blog Homepage : Category - Miscellaneous

What does over 4 years in the SEO/SEM business feel like?

I thought I’d write this, my first article more as an introduction into who I am, and some of the things I’ve seen in my time in the industry.

My name is Rob and I started in the SEO industry almost 4 and a half years ago.  When I started there was no such thing as SEM (Search Engine Marketing) or PPC (Pay Per Click).  The buzzwords were SEO (Search Engine Optimization), sitemaps, doorway pages and later on, link building.

When I started in the industry, the engine you just had to be in was Altavista.  If you weren’t in Altavista you weren’t anywhere.  Similarly, Inktomi, while not a search engine, commanded a fair chunk of search engine traffic through partnerships with the likes of Yahoo! and AOL.

Google was the new kid on the block – only geeks and techies were using it.  But they had the best results and boy were they quick!

When I started, it was common to see 3 or 4 page websites.  And if you properly optimized the site, you could achieve top rankings in Altavista in a few days.  However it wasn’t too long after I started that it began to take longer and longer to get into Altavista. Near the end, as Google began to gain in popularity, it was taking 6 to 8 weeks to even get a visit from Altavista’s crawler.

A short time later, this company called Goto came out and they had a novel idea – forget about optimizing and hoping for top rankings – let’s just sell the top spots to the highest bidder.  Of course there were those of us (I’ll admit, I was one of them) who thought it would never work.  Why would you pay for listings (sometimes as much as 15 cents per click no less!) when you could easily optimize your site to rank highly and get tons of referrals for mere pennies a click?

But lo and behold, Goto took off, and soon changed its name to Overture.

Also, during this time, Microsoft continued to say that the internet was a fad and search was a flash in the pan, while Yahoo! was still trying to find itself, after nearly falling victim to the market crash.

It was indeed around this time that the technology bubble has just burst, so many investors were too scared to invest in any company that ended its name in .com.  Google couldn’t even sell itself to Yahoo! although they tried, but Yahoo! wasn’t making enough money to purchase the relatively new startup.

It was probably early 2001 when Google achieved the critical mass it needed to become the search engine of choice among more advanced search users.  The techies and geeks had gotten their less technological friends/family/spouses onto Google and there was no turning back.

Google then introduced this cool new thing called PageRank where they would count the number of links to you and the links would be considered votes which would ultimately help positively influence your rank.

Of course many SEO’s and other soon figured out that high volumes of links were better, so you began to see sites set up strictly for building links to sites.  This soon became known as link farms and Google quickly began to penalize these types of websites.

It was also around this time that we began to see an influx of niche type engines – services like Teoma, AskJeeves and more began showing up.  AskJeeves was unique because they had figured out a way to answer questions – something no other search engine had figured out yet.  You could literally go to AskJeeves and say something like “What is the population of Chicago” and get the correct answer.

Over time, Yahoo! began to re-establish themselves, and began hiring many non-search types.  Former TV and Print executives became the driving force behind Yahoo! (I’ll talk about this in future articles).

Of course Google continued to grow, and gain in popularity.  Rumors began circulating on Google’s massive data centers with tens of thousands of cheap servers hosting the Google service.

In the past year we’ve seen many changes. Microsoft finally jumped into the search ring, which of course led to speculation of a war unlike any other between the “Big 3” or as they are more commonly known – Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Google has gone public and has made obscene amounts of money on the initial offering.  I remember thinking I wouldn’t pay more than $20 or $30 per share and when they opened at $85 I was sure they’d drop like a brick thrown off the top of a building.  If I’d only polished my crystal ball a little more, I’d be rich now (Google’s shares have hovered at around $300 for weeks).

As always, we in the industry continue to speculate on the mergers and acquisitions which happen seemingly on a daily basis.

It is these deals which I plan to report to you on a regular basis.  If I have time (which I expect I will) I will bring you my opinion on some of these purchases.  I will attempt to answer such questions as:  Why did Google invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a company which is developing technology that will allow access the internet through the power lines?

I won’t necessarily answer these questions because I have the time.  No it’s more a matter of HAVING to answer these questions for myself.  because if I don’t try and get my thoughts on paper, they’ll continue rattling around in my brain, consuming energy which I could put towards something better – like speculating about why Yahoo! bought Konfabulator :) (yet another future article topic I’m sure).

In any case, I hope you continue to come back to this site on a regular basis.  Not only to find out what the best techniques are for optimizing your website, or what the most effective way to build links is, but also because we will try to help make sense of this industry.  After all, we are the first to admit that within the search marketing industry there are just as many opinions out there as there are questions.

So be sure to bookmark this site, or subscribe to its feed (yet another article topic) and return regularly.  I’m sure you won’t be dissappointed.

And don’t forget, you can always suggest topics to us.  If you have questions for which you can’t find answers, or something you’ve always wondered, be sure to submit it, and we’ll do our best to answer it – you guessed it – in the form of an article.