5 ms·

You mean they tried to make a useful site. During that period search engines were new, and people didn't yet start search result optimization hacking. Which mea

by mola 6y ago

You mean they tried to make a useful site. During that period search engines were new, and people didn't yet start search result optimization hacking. Which meant ranking was still a good proxy for site quality and not for optimization hacking. The conscious choice to leave the money on the table is exactly the same. Instead of optimizing for cash value which is just a proxy for real value, wikipedia optimized for quality encyclopedic knowledge distribution.

aerosmile 6y ago
I hate to disagree, but SEO as an industry was booming pretty early on. I remember going to a conference in 2001 that was massively popular. The type of stuff you'd learn there was pretty outrageous and very very black hat (so much so, that people sharing those tips were too self-conscious to reveal their identities, hence the term black hat). My point is - you could very much do very well back in those days regardless of your content quality (which consequently trended down and gave rise to content farms). It's only in the last 10 years (and particularly starting in 2014 based on my experience with my own content) that the content quality became a true proxy for ranking, and vice versa. As a side note, these days, you still have SEO conferences, but the stuff you learn there is so diversified that people have started calling it content marketing and other names. The perhaps most useful gathering is SEOktoberfest, it's invite only and they admit only 30 attendees. Never been there, but I've heard it's worth the six grand that it costs to get in as a first-time attendee (I am not affiliated with it in any shape or form).
- ghaff 6y ago
  I agree. You go back 10 years and SEO was pretty much synonymous with black hat SEO. These days, there still are a fair number of mostly low quality content farms. But there's also high quality content marketing. The latter still definitely is aware of things like page views, how far people read through an article, what type of headlines seem to be most effective, and so forth. It starts with good content that readers are interested in though.

by mola 6y ago

aerosmile 6y ago

I hate to disagree, but SEO as an industry was booming pretty early on. I remember going to a conference in 2001 that was massively popular. The type of stuff you'd learn there was pretty outrageous and very very black hat (so much so, that people sharing those tips were too self-conscious to reveal their identities, hence the term black hat). My point is - you could very much do very well back in those days regardless of your content quality (which consequently trended down and gave rise to content farms). It's only in the last 10 years (and particularly starting in 2014 based on my experience with my own content) that the content quality became a true proxy for ranking, and vice versa. As a side note, these days, you still have SEO conferences, but the stuff you learn there is so diversified that people have started calling it content marketing and other names. The perhaps most useful gathering is SEOktoberfest, it's invite only and they admit only 30 attendees. Never been there, but I've heard it's worth the six grand that it costs to get in as a first-time attendee (I am not affiliated with it in any shape or form).

ghaff 6y ago
I agree. You go back 10 years and SEO was pretty much synonymous with black hat SEO. These days, there still are a fair number of mostly low quality content farms. But there's also high quality content marketing. The latter still definitely is aware of things like page views, how far people read through an article, what type of headlines seem to be most effective, and so forth. It starts with good content that readers are interested in though.