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It may be a surprise to you but link building has been thriving long before Google.

When I went online and started publishing in 1997 Google didn’t even exist. Many search engines like

• Infoseek
• Webcrawler
• Altavista

already did but they didn’t take links into account. They ranked pages according to onsite factors.

I didn’t really engage in SEO until 2004 so I spent 7 years on the Web without caring for search engines and Google.

So having no Google traffic is nothing new to me.

Nowadays that Google keeps most visitors on their own services there are many lessons in this early era.

How did I get people to read my poems and view my sites back then?

Building links as if Google wouldn’t exist

Today I will introduce you to non-Google link building beyond search. How else can interlinking Web properties work?

It’s an optimization for people first no matter what tools they use to find you.

First a little history lesson before I update the techniques used decades ago to fit the new “social search” Web we face today.

Here are the main ways to get visitors to your site we used before Google on our non-profit sites about literature:

Mailing lists – It’s not what you think. I didn’t mean “the list”of people you send newsletters to!

Mailing lists were discussion lists where one person could reply to all the others at once.

Ideally you would reach lots of people at once with a mail and everybody would discuss your mail copying the original message.

Of course you would either post your text in it or link to it if it was too long.

So all the people actively reading the mail you flock over days to your site in case you did incite a debate.

Web rings – Web rings were connected lists of sites.

You would add a small piece of code to your site at the bottom and a user could go to the previous, or next site from the Web ring.

Also Web rings also had a random site button in the middle!

Plus there was a link to the homepage of the ring itself where you could browse all sites from the ring.

Mirroring – In the early days of the Web nobody would have thought something like “duplicate content” could be a bad thing.

The opposite was the case, the more sites published your work the better.

In many cases mirroring whole sites was also needed for technical reasons! Why?

Many servers could not withstand major traffic spikes or were unreachable for other reasons.

There were often caps on traffic for individual accounts.

Also remember that the Web was very slow in those days.

I literally had to hit “enter” in my browser and read a book while waiting for a site to load.

Writing together – Today we again follow the “one text one author” dogma dictated by print media.

In the early days of the Internet we experimented a lot with texts having multiple authors.

Some of them have even been edited all the time by many people at once. That was even before the invention of Wikis.

We were also enthusiastic about the possibilities of hypertext and linked within those texts a lot.

Newsgroups – Do you remember the Usenet and so called newsgroups?

You needed special software to connect to this part of the Internet. It wasn’t using the http protocol.

There you could discuss things with sometimes thousands of people at once who were specifically interested in a particular topic.

For example I would enter a JavsScript Newsgroup and announce my experimental JavaScript poetry.

Btw. the name onreact stems from these days.

How to practice mutual aid and interlink like it’s 1999!

So over the years I adapted some of my old school techniques from before the Google-era to work in the new reality.

We have different tools these days but the techniques can be still used.

Feedback communities: We don’t use mailing lists in such a way today but forums are still popular and work similarly.

Btw. I did program forum software myself with a friend of mine before phpBB and the likes existed. Then we connected the forum to our existing mailing list.

The best way to combine the advantages of modern and old techniques are feedback communities third parties offer like UserVoice.

Combined feeds: There are some web ring tools left but it’s also not difficult to create one with the help of so called RSS feeds.

You can use services that will combine several feeds into one.

Just connect with your fellow blogging peers and explain the idea.

I consider doing this as soon as possible. It’s not about the software though.

You need to find like minded publishers to connect with you.

Republishing: You can also republish content as long as you are not afraid of the Google “duplicate content” penalty.

Publishing a poem in different places was the norm back in the nineties.

When I banned Google search on my blog in 2012 I wasn’t afraid of it anymore. Thus I gave away my content for republication under a Creative Commons license ever since.

In case Google has already penalized you for one of the myriad reasons they do penalize sites you can do it as well as you won’t lose much traffic either then.

Also it’s a good way to prepare for hacking attempts etc, when you have a copy of at least for your best pieces of work published somewhere.

Writing together: You can still write something together with others.

Even WordPress is an easy tool to enable several authors to add to one piece but you can’t edit at the same time without deleting passages.

You can simply use Web-based office tools for group collaboration these days:

• Google Docs
• Zoho Writer
• Proton Drive.

Ultimately you don’t need fancy tool.

You can cooperate on a text via mail as well as long as everybody is responsible just for her/his own part.

Think group interviews if you still can’t imagine what I mean.

Niche communities – Newsgroups do not exist anymore and forums have replaced to some extent.

The best way to share links IMHO are niche communities though.

For startups there is Product Hunt.

For many niches there is no lively niche community site you can create one of use forums instead.

Some easier to set up options are:

• Subreddits
• Facebook Groups
• Telegram groups

Do not flood them with your links though, neither the communities nor the forums.

Give first to get later. For example I rarely submitted my own postings to niche sites.

In case they were relevant other community members did it for me.

It’s neither rocket science – Nor modern art

OK, doesn’t sound that complex, does it?

It’s neither rocket science or “technical SEO” not akin to modern art or way to abstract for mere mortals.

You can type text into a mail? You can do it.

These are just the most common techniques used in the past for link building before Google arrived on the scene and disrupted the Web.

Do you remember the early days of the Web?

Tell me how you got traffic before search engines and Google.

Stay tuned! I share more techniques that go beyond Google optimization.

Content and social SEO are the way to go in 2025. It’s time go beyond search.

Ultimately it’s about connecting people to the benefit of all parties involved! The technicalities are only an effect of this.

* Creative Independence is an Creative Commons image by Nattu.