13 years(and counting) of Search Engine Marketing
After owning MichaelPellman.com for over 14 years, I have finally decided to put it to use. I have have been working in the search marketing industry since I was 21 years old, today I am 35. It’s been so long, I had to go find my old WebmasterWorld profile in order to find the exact date as I started lurking about a year before I created my username over there. That’s over 14 years worth of countless new search engines rising to prominence, only to watch each die a slow painful death. That’s 14 years worth of algorithm changes that have cost me countless hours of sleep, caused my hair to start turning gray in some spots while completely losing it in other spots. But, it’s not all bad, in fact, there’s more good than bad during those 14 years. Those 14 years included countless instances of waking up in the morning(for some reason, search engines love to adjust their algos at night, at least for us Americans), checking rankings and finding that I currently own the top spots across multiple search engines for phrases so competitive, that my servers have crashed from the large amount of traffic/visitors.
When I first started out, all it took was a good title and description, some heavily(and I mean heavily) optimized, keyword rich content and visiting each search engine’s submit URL, submitting your site and waiting a day or two before you saw the fruits of your “labor”. My have the times changed.
Right around the time I was finding my groove(1999ish), word began trickling down about a new search engine nobody could pronounce, called Google. At that point, there were several major search engines; Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Go, Altavista, and AllTheWeb just to name a few. Nobody really took Google seriously. We were all wrong. Folks started using this new engine that promised super relevant results. Before long, Google started garnering a larger slice of search market share and webmasters and optimizers, myself included, started paying attention. The tricks that worked with these other engines, simply finding the perfect keyword density along with keyword heavy meta tags didn’t have the same effect on a website’s position in Google’s results. Something else, an external factor, was playing a big part in Google’s ranking algorithm.
Soon, word started to travel, the old strategy webmasters employed for getting sites to the top of other engines would not work on this new engine. What else was in play here? It wasn’t long before folks determined that the external factor was LINKS! Links? Yes, Links! External links from other websites. What type of links? Didn’t matter, just get other websites to point links to yours and you were golden. They didn’t have to be relevant/on topic links from well established websites, all Google cared about was the fact that other sites were linking to yours and you had more inbound links then your competitor. It was time to get to work.
An SEO’s skill set went from basically building out keyword dense pages to now include what was then and still is now called, link building. Where would we get these links? Oh, you can only imagine. It started with directories, get your site listed in one of the many directories(DMOZ, Yahoo, Go Guides, Looksmart), to creating vast networks of our own sites and strategically linking them together(we thought we were so smart!) and evolved into referrer spamming. Get a couple hundred of these types of links and you were in business. It wasn’t long before I owned the top 3 spots for those coveted “money” terms every SEO and their mother targeted. This went on for a nice period of time, we were rolling, we were outsmarting the new search engine that bragged about their PHDs and their un-gameable search engine algo. Until one day, I woke up and it was gone, all of it. Did our server crash? Was the network down? Surely, something must be happening, you can’t lose all that traffic overnight. Right? WRONG! The search engine we thought we could game was learning, those engineers and their PHD degrees were hip to our exploits. They took the liberty to not only penalize my high ranking sites, but completely banned them. 100’s of thousands of monthly visitors and in some cases millions of visitors across 100s of sites were gone in the blink of an eye. Was this the end? Was it over? No!
Like any good search marketer, I evolved. Over the next couple of years, I dabbled in what many referred to as “black hat” techniques, some of these techniques worked, some for longer than others. I suffered through many highs and lows, the traffic would come, Google would patch their algo, the traffic would disappear and the circle continued. It took a few years of not sleeping, waiting for the so-called Google Dances(specific days when Google would make an obvious change to their algo and webmasters would either celebrate or head to the liquor store to drown their sorrows) and wondering if my sites would survive before I decided to stop trying to game the system and start playing by the rules.
I can proudly say, the days of waking up wondering if my sites or clients sites were going to disappear from Google’s results are long over. Have there been ups and downs? Oh, you better believe it. Sometimes, the baby does get thrown out with the bath water, but those instances are fewer and further between and I can live with them.
Organic search engine optimization is no longer my only focus. I have managed many pay per click accounts(Google Adwords/Bing Adcenter) and continue to hone my social media marketing skills to the point where I am comfortable handling all aspects of SEM for clients, big and small.
Here’s to another 13 years!