Importance of Linking, Google was founded on Linking

2002 - Underneath all this was the growing realisation that linking was driving our listings, our process of linking new clients to old in an effort to get them spidered was originally designed to avoid the use of automated submission software and also cut down on the lead time for getting indexed. We now realised that 'inadvertently' link popularity had driven our clients to the top. In addition to this, working in vertical markets had ensured that the links were on topic and themed to each business type.

We realised we didn’t nearly know enough, that our knowledge needed expanding and so we launched test pages, hundreds of them, we started to frequent the growing number of forums and really penetrated the ground level intelligence for this industry.

Google now had the market, search engines were falling by the wayside and some leading names were in decline, some had died already. This was the year that SEO grew up, it was the first year that major spam culling started.

Alta Vista, Google and MSN all started to drop websites that were too far the wrong side of their guidelines, this was the era of the cloaked page, duplicate websites (including some of our html clone sites), doorway pages, spam directories, no script tags and hidden linking.

Throughout the industry hysteria led the way, hysteria about spamming but also about the Google Dance, all eyes were focused waiting for Google to start the monthly update of its index. There were winners and losers, it was addictive there were thousands of posts in forums all predicting what would happen and when it would start.

Spam hysteria reached new heights, there was massed culling in DMoz (ODP) editors were physically removing websites that they felt did not meet guidelines some with self interest and the importance of Dmoz (ODP) was fuelled by its relationship with Google. SEO was in absolute chaos.

The biggest development in SEO was the realisation that the leading engines had got clever, sophisticated spider technology was at the forefront of the culling, different engines applied penalties in different ways. Google was able to enhance a process of undermining websites that were caught in the filters, identifying techniques and then
rendering those techniques less effective was their way forward, at the time this was a very passive approach.

This was also the year that Google started to get tough with its linking algorithm, websites that were found to be linking with each other from the same server or IP address were penalised. This was the tip of the iceberg and the catalyst to the biggest change in attitude by website owners in the history of the net. It seemed unfair to web agencies that hosted their clients on their own server, it was a natural process to link these together.