Google Dance rolled on.

2001- Then one day we walked into the office and realised that we owned Google's listings, over the weekend Google had started the cycle of the monthly update. ALL of our clients were page 1 most were page1 - position1. We couldn’t believe it, traffic rates soared we were delivering 3,000 visitors per month to 5 page websites that were in the fresh caught crab business, our holiday sites were amassing 30,000 unique visits each month and our first global client - Lufthansa Airlines was receiving 50,000 unique visitors from us each month.

However the storm clouds were gathering. In the vertical markets Google listed as many as nine of our clients for generic searches on the first page, all of a sudden the spotlight was turning our way. First of all spam reared its head, our email addresses on the successful sites were spammed by unscrupulous competitors. We would get daily phone calls from Top Pile our UK competitor, we found that our 'micro sites' were being replicated across the search engine world. The cat was well and truly out of the bag.

We continued to proclaim Google as the search engine of choice, of course being so well listed gave additional motive. Google was now capturing the market, the 'Google dance' started to grip the industry and automated reporting and submission software was getting IP addresses banned.

Alta Vista tried to copy the Google approach developing a stripped down version of its search facility but it failed miserably, market share was shifting and the leading search engines were waking up to their own nightmare, leading search technologies such as Inktomi were losing their main partners and were being sent into the doldrums for many years to come.