OK, I got slapped for not really saying anything, so here it is, more than you'll ever want to know....
1972: BS in Commerce and Economics from WLU.edu, Mid-70’s: Worked for Burroughs (now Unysis) for a couple of years selling mainframes door-to-door. They taught me some programming, enough to be dangerous.
Late-70’s to present: Work in the family businesses. Wrote the A/R, A/P, and Inventory software from scratch for a mid-size wholesale supply house. Got heavily involved in price books, catalog production and, later, desktop publishing. My computer background led me to PC’s but it was the unrealized promise of desktop publishing that whetted my appetite for the web.
1995: My first 4 domain registrations were free. The current registrar system wasn’t set up yet.
1996: The beginnings of the high-content, official tourism network goes online. These sites were, and remain, responsible for generating the revenue needed to develop and maintain the project, which is still done through banners (now contextual), affiliates, sponsorships, and ad sales. Today, the sites continue to cooperate extensively with numerous regional and community chambers of commerce, museums, historic sites, and organizations. For most of them, it still provides their primary ‘official’ tourism leads and referral traffic.
1997: Get C&D from a billion-dollar chemical company, they wanted one of my geographic domains. Seems they had a trademark, but in a different classification. They ended up buying it for about $7,800.Lawyers got $2k of that.
1998: First super-long tail local site went up. Though there are so many sites like it out there now that we all damned as a class, mine was close to groundbreaking but probably not the absolute first, though I can’t recall having a competitor when it went live. Being unique and having enough real utility, it was listed as a good travel resource by newspapers, major magazines, edu sites (yeah!), library sites, etc. It even had a book credit from Neil Gaiman …just goes to show how perceptions change or, more importantly, how a good niche gets to be shoving-room only. Interestingly, it was also the one that was absolutely at its dog-ugliest while it was piling on the authoritative incoming links and racking up significant hotel bookings.
As for my involvement in SEO, I was sitting at the keyboard when Digital Equipment’s Altavista changed the web. I say it changed everything because AV was the first spidering engine with a hint of mass appeal and popularity. (“Mass” in 1995 was still pretty pitiful in media terms.) The realization of just how much this would profoundly alter the linear nature of web surfing even caused me to call a meeting on how to deal with it. I still remember the subject line of the email;
Whoa! This changes everything! I guess if you’re looking for the definitive moment when my SEO thoughts crystallized, that meeting would be it. The thoughts? [1] Long Tail and [2] Doorway pages. A few months after that, as Altavista started making inroads with the general public, a local Chamber of Commerce president called me, he was very much agitated and alarmed. His town had been the location of a very negative event that would blacken tourism and relocation prospects and Altavista’s serps were chock-full of references to it. He wanted me to get them removed from the search engines. I explained that while no one other than the search engines themselves could remove them, I thought I could push them off the front page. The Game was on! I was an early subscriber to Danny Sullivan’s new-ish paid site, SEW, but dropped out of it after a few months. I drifted around a bit between a few SEO forums (there weren’t that many). I was an active member in Jim Wilson’s searchengineforums, quit, came back a year or so later, started hanging out online with Oilman. Online forums just weren’t hitting on what I knew was working, what I knew would manipulate results. Then, as now, the newbies drowned out any real chance of having a serp-jerking discussion. Oilman moved to a site with about 40 members –searchengineworld, the predecessor of webmasterworld. I visited, it seemed to be primarily about cloaking, I left. I came back a few months later, though, and became active. Later, I became the first admin, or at least one of the first. There I met or re-met my online friends, many of whom have gone on to become the brand-name nicks of SEO today (though most have also moved on from life in the forums). Mackin came up with the initial spark of what became Pubconference and we started that as a semi-private, international SEO meeting.
I retired from admin life in 2003, I believe, and left
public SEO forums soon after. (The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots. Paul Ginsparg) I still post some water-cooler chat and, every now and then, try to provide a reality-check or counterpoint. Other than the occasional newspaper reporter, I’ve given up on minding the mindless, there are just too many of them. Mostly, I just read and watch the developments in search.
The above is from Michael Gray's site. Let's see if he's tending his logs
http://www.wolf-howl.com/local-search/rc-jordan-local-search-interview/Oct 2010: I'm baaaaAAAaaack.
