1997 Issue #1 Search Engine Secrets Update Newsletter

It's hard to believe that exactly ten years ago today I stared at the computer screen wondering what I was going to write for the inaugural issue of what became SearchEngineNews.com. Back then we called it The Search Engine Secrets Update Newsletter

In 1997, Google hadn't even been born yet. The big kids on the block were Infoseek, Excite, Lycos, HotBot, AltaVista, Webcrawler and OpenText and Yahoo! ...a cumbersome and inefficient directory which wasn't even considered a search engine!

The ranking strategies of the time involved keyword stuffing, doorway pages, meta and title tag tricks. Keyword density was all the buzz. Common terms like SEO, link popularity, pay-per-click, link farms, mini-nets, and sponsored ads had yet to make their debut on the searchscape. People were accessing the web via dial-up connections and many big companies were still wondering if this "internet thing" was just some fad that would soon fade away. The very first Search Engine Strategies conference was almost a full three years away! ...and some guy named Danny Sullivan was running a site called Califia Consulting.

Today such remembrances seem anywhere from quaint to mildly absurd to almost impossible to ridiculously shortsighted. But, if you were around then, you are probably amazed at how much has changed in what really i...