6 ms·

How would you have been able to get people to see your great unique website 20 years ago? I don't remember it being easy to get a large audience at any point in

How would you have been able to get people to see your great unique website 20 years ago? I don't remember it being easy to get a large audience at any point in the internet's history.

lmm 6y ago
You could join a webring, or link to related people and ask them to link back. Given that there was no financial incentive to get traffic (if anything the opposite), there weren't so many pages with duplicate content (or no actual content at all) competing for attention.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  There were are also far fewer person-minutes in front of an Internet-connected screen.
spurgu 6y ago
Word of mouth. Post in some relevant chats/forums. Get a handful of other people interested, have them spread the word (links/chat) for you.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Posting in a subreddit will likely get you more traffic than you would have gotten back then.
  - spurgu 6y ago
    For a couple of hours, then it's forgotten.
ricardo81 6y ago
You build a site with unique content, decent layout, design. Email other website owners "Hi, I think this would be would be a decent resource for your 'other resources' page / your visitors might like this". (as opposed to ... what other means do you discover new content?) Only, no one does link pages anymore, because they're fearful of platform algos deciding that their inbound/outbound link profile is toxic. What I'm after is a more decentralised Internet, less black box algo, where people link to whatever they want without cutting off their oxygen, or having to pay for exposure. Might be idealistic, but FB/Google have certainly been diagnosed as part of the problem. In my case, getting a good link from harvard.edu really helped wrt search. And obviously a great link from Harvard drived traffic by itself. Just a hint for the downvoters, that's how it was done 20 years ago. Nowadays due to systemic link building spam, perhaps not. I'm addressing the above reply is all.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Linking liberally to a wide range of domains is seen as a net positive in SEO. SEO isn't as complicated as anyone makes it out to be. It's really simple.
  - ricardo81 6y ago
    Not sure where you're coming from wrt SEO. Get 100 SEOs in a room together and you get 100 different opinions. But when it comes to linking, people generally link out less. I can't source anything right now, but the information is available, perhaps through Majestic that shows that over time, people are more shy about linking out to the wider web, anecdotally, from fear of being penalised for doing so. The threat of having a bad outlink meaning your inbound organic search traffic disappears means people err on the side of caution.
    - waheoo 6y ago
      I'm not saying they don't. I'm saying they're wrong to do so. [1] The amount of links you can shove into a page before it makes any negative impact is very high. 1. https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-outgoing-link-experiment/ https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-outgoing-link-ex...
- wpietri 6y ago
  I think this has stopped working not because of platform fear, but because it no longer solves a problem. Back in the day, good content was scarce and discovery was hard. These days neither is true. If my to-read list weren't already overflowing, 30 minutes poking around on Twitter would fill it right up.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    +1. Twitter's timeline """solved""" [0] the content recommendation and scalability problems in forums and mailing lists. The large newsgroups in the late 90s Usenet were already unreadable (unless you have an elaborate filter), but all Twitter needs is to ask their users to follow people relevant to their interests. [0] Of course only partially "solved" with many limitations. Just like how Twitter's predecessors Reddit and Hacker News "solved" the same problem by voting with their respective limitations.
cratermoon 6y ago
I had a website back in the late 90s/early 2000s that was one of the most popular sites for its niche (at the time) topic. It was on several topical Webrings and got noticed enough to get several of those silly thinly-veiled advertising "<company's> choice on the web" award badges. If I brought that site up today as it was then I doubt it would show up on the first 3 pages of a Google search for the topic. But hay, at least you could view it with noscript turned on.

How would you have been able to get people to see your great unique website 20 years ago? I don't remember it being easy to get a large audience at any point in the internet's history.

lmm 6y ago

You could join a webring, or link to related people and ask them to link back. Given that there was no financial incentive to get traffic (if anything the opposite), there weren't so many pages with duplicate content (or no actual content at all) competing for attention.

tshaddox 6y ago
There were are also far fewer person-minutes in front of an Internet-connected screen.

spurgu 6y ago

Word of mouth. Post in some relevant chats/forums. Get a handful of other people interested, have them spread the word (links/chat) for you.

cortesoft 6y ago
Posting in a subreddit will likely get you more traffic than you would have gotten back then.
- spurgu 6y ago
  For a couple of hours, then it's forgotten.

ricardo81 6y ago

You build a site with unique content, decent layout, design. Email other website owners "Hi, I think this would be would be a decent resource for your 'other resources' page / your visitors might like this". (as opposed to ... what other means do you discover new content?) Only, no one does link pages anymore, because they're fearful of platform algos deciding that their inbound/outbound link profile is toxic. What I'm after is a more decentralised Internet, less black box algo, where people link to whatever they want without cutting off their oxygen, or having to pay for exposure. Might be idealistic, but FB/Google have certainly been diagnosed as part of the problem. In my case, getting a good link from harvard.edu really helped wrt search. And obviously a great link from Harvard drived traffic by itself. Just a hint for the downvoters, that's how it was done 20 years ago. Nowadays due to systemic link building spam, perhaps not. I'm addressing the above reply is all.

waheoo 6y ago
Linking liberally to a wide range of domains is seen as a net positive in SEO. SEO isn't as complicated as anyone makes it out to be. It's really simple.
- ricardo81 6y ago
  Not sure where you're coming from wrt SEO. Get 100 SEOs in a room together and you get 100 different opinions. But when it comes to linking, people generally link out less. I can't source anything right now, but the information is available, perhaps through Majestic that shows that over time, people are more shy about linking out to the wider web, anecdotally, from fear of being penalised for doing so. The threat of having a bad outlink meaning your inbound organic search traffic disappears means people err on the side of caution.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    I'm not saying they don't. I'm saying they're wrong to do so. [1] The amount of links you can shove into a page before it makes any negative impact is very high. 1. https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-outgoing-link-experiment/ https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-outgoing-link-ex...
wpietri 6y ago
I think this has stopped working not because of platform fear, but because it no longer solves a problem. Back in the day, good content was scarce and discovery was hard. These days neither is true. If my to-read list weren't already overflowing, 30 minutes poking around on Twitter would fill it right up.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  +1. Twitter's timeline """solved""" [0] the content recommendation and scalability problems in forums and mailing lists. The large newsgroups in the late 90s Usenet were already unreadable (unless you have an elaborate filter), but all Twitter needs is to ask their users to follow people relevant to their interests. [0] Of course only partially "solved" with many limitations. Just like how Twitter's predecessors Reddit and Hacker News "solved" the same problem by voting with their respective limitations.

cratermoon 6y ago

I had a website back in the late 90s/early 2000s that was one of the most popular sites for its niche (at the time) topic. It was on several topical Webrings and got noticed enough to get several of those silly thinly-veiled advertising "<company's> choice on the web" award badges. If I brought that site up today as it was then I doubt it would show up on the first 3 pages of a Google search for the topic. But hay, at least you could view it with noscript turned on.