You know, when I tell people I started designing websites in 1996, sometimes it doesn’t occur to me that way back then, the Internet was a very different animal. Most people were connected through AOL, on these noisy 28.8 modems. We thought we were cool when we got 56k modems and learned how to shotgun them to get ISDN speeds. These days, you couldn’t load a landing page through that speed.
I remember way back in 1999 a small group of us discovered a whole bunch of ways to “aggressively index” websites to dominate search results. This included keyword packing, and even cloaking techniques. Once we figured this out, we could literally index any web page for any keywords. We thought this was cool.
There was literally less than a handful of people like me in the USA who even knew this existed or was possible. We even began communicating with each other and infiltrated DMOZ as ‘administrators’ where we traded favors secretly. DMOZ was the largest, most comprehensive, human-reviewed directory of the web that powered Yahoo, AOL and many leading search engines. They had a function called “Cooling a Site” that would give editor’s choice status to a site–basically flagging it as the best site. We even figured out that Google was using DMOZ as a comparative, and “Cooled” sites would get huge bumps in Google rankings.
I started a company called GreatRank.com in the year 2000 and made a bunch of money manipulating search engine algorithms and DMOZ site status for my clients’ profit. (screenshot of my original site attached)
My first client was Steve Polk of Pinit Motorsports, Salinas, CA selling GoPed scooters out of his garage. He was working as a delivery driver for Aramark at the time and after we achieved #1 and top 20 rankings on all internet search results just before Christmas, sales were pouring in and he used it as a launchpad to begin his motorsports business.
SEO wasn’t called SEO until 2007 when the practice became widely known and is now a science taught in many universities. Today SEO is an $80 billion industry.