This is the first piece of new public link building strategies content I’ve published on my own site in many years. I figure I better give the bots (and people) some fresh food, before they think I died.
Today I’ll probably be knee-deep in research/outreach within the social media world. Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin. The founders of these companies were probably in diapers when I wrote the below column. And as much as I will enjoy what I do today, part of me loves what I used to do. It’s impossible not to remember the early days of the web when you lived through them. When you built links for people and not engines. Like this one from 1996. That’s a post I did to announce the launch of The American Medical Association’s web site. Nineteen years ago.
And once upon a time you could write a column about search engines for a print magazine and not have to mention Google because Google was unknown. I wrote the column below for Ad Age Magazine’s BtoB, in April of 1998, several months before Google officially Incorporated.
Note the engines I mention as being the key players of that time: AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Webcrawler, Lycos, OpenText, Northern Light. Yahoo! isn’t mentioned because back then Yahoo! was not a search engine. It was a searchable directory. Selecting the right Yahoo! category and writing the perfect site description was often the difference between success or invisibility on Yahoo! Today, all that’s left of the once epic Yahoo! Directory is this.
Time marches on…
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