Website Promotion Articles
How Web Promotion has changed over the last ten years
In 1999 the internet mainly consisted of information type websites but as we entered into the twenty first century businesses, small and large, started to realise the benefits of having an online presence. Webmasters were eager to find ways to obtain a ranking within the first page of the search engine results and it seemed as though the only thing that mattered was to gain as many backward links as possible.
Quantity was the watch word, the more the merrier. I was told on many occasions; the more links you have, the more sales you will gain. It did not matter if the link was from a totally unrelated website or how it was obtained.
Webmasters who were "in the know" were now exchanging links with as many other people as they could and hence the majority of websites that were appearing at the top of the search results had "link pages". Some even had a link page one, a link page two, a link page three and a link page four!
Trying to locate other webmasters who were willing to exchange links in this way was very time consuming. It would involve many hours of cold calling people or e-mailing them. Even though exchanging links would have also helped these website owners it was often hard to convince them of this. Then came the "automated link farm websites", these were just amazing! This is where webmasters could meet and exchange links with other site owners and the whole process was very inexpensive and it was automated, suddenly you could gain around thirty backward links each and every day.
As we entered into 2004 page rank was the main talking point on all of the web promotion and SEO forums. People now realised that to purchase two or three page rank seven backward links would have a massive, positive, affect on their sites ranking on the search engines as well as on the overall page rank of their own website. This was some what frustrating to the small businessmen, a person who works hard to obtain their links from the more traditional and ethical forms of web marketing, mainly due to the fact that they could not afford to purchase these links. Yet again it was the "fat cats" who ruled the roost.
But then Google decided to hit back and started to wage war on the paid links industry after making some important changes to their webmaster guidelines. To purchase a backward link and excessive exchanging of links were now a big NO NO and webmasters were warned about their future conduct.
The SEO community was in uproar, how dare Google tell us what we can and can't do, many of them were saying. Well actually guys and girls they can, after all it is their search engine and if you want to gain a good ranking you need to play by their rules.
Over the last couple of years link baiting, SEM and the old favourite of article marketing have come to the fore. For me I have always believed and probably always will believe that you can not go far wrong if your link building services concentrate on obtaining one-way backward links from websites that are related in some way to that of your own site.