[franze]

In 2004 my boss - I was a one man team technical business development at the Austria Press Agency - came to me and told me "our press release clients want to get better found in that Google".

At that time I saw it as a nice, fun project.

too my knowledge I was one of the first in my market on corporate state who took on this topic. which later came to be called search engine optimization.

I was definitely one of the first who gave corporate lectures, workshop, whitepapers, books about it.

20 years later we screwed up the internet. well at least the part of the internet that shows up in Google.

[nicoloren]

I France, SEO was already popular and we were already gaming the Google ranking algo. One of the big player in the game of SEO, abondance.com was registered in 1998 and we also have the popular website webrankinfo.com (registered in 2002).

> 20 years later we screwed up the internet. well at least the part of the internet that shows up in Google.

You're right... :(

[gaws]

> 20 years later we screwed up the internet.

But, you all got rich... right?

[franze]

well kinda, I work as a Yoga Teacher now.