Did you know? 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. Yet they didn’t take links into account. They ranked pages according to onsite factors.

I did not optimize for search in those days.

You linked each other to get found at all. How?

How I got visitors before SEO

I didn’t really engage in SEO until 2004.

Thus I spent 7 years on the Web without caring for search engines and Google.

So having no Google traffic is nothing new to me.

In 1997 I started publishing self-written poetry on the Web.

Most visitors came directly or using various sources.

Plus I announced new poems online in manifold ways.

Nowadays that Google keeps most visitors on their own services there are many lessons to learn from this early Internet era.

The most important one is that you don’t need Google for people to visit you.

You can even build connections or links with like-minded individuals to get visitors that way.

It’s not about SEO really as there is no search involved when people click links on websites or in messages.

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

So how does no-Google link building work, that is linking similar websites with no SEO in mind?

Building links as if Google wouldn’t exist

Let me introduce you to non-Google link building beyond search.

How else can interlinking Web properties work? Directly!

You cut out the middleman (that’s Google) and link or get linked to get people to visit you through those links.

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.

We started out on college servers. Yet later on services like egroups allowed that for free for many years.

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 flocked over days to your site in case you did incite a debate.

We even remixed poems that way! One original poem would spawn many visitations.

Web rings – Web rings or webrings were connected lists of sites.

The sites were usually closely related along a topic or idea.

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

Also some webrings 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.

I was part of some poetry web rings e.g.

In 2026 I checked once again and found some promising modern webrings that prove the model still works for some:

The HTML Hobbyist Webring is a small group of hand coded website enthusiasts.

The Fediring connects sites whose owners are also part of the Fediverse (independent social sites based on Mastodon e.g.).

The IndieWeb Webring includes all kinds of quirky independent Web creators.

The Tech writing webring is obviously connecting technology writing experts.

The sidebar Webring simply collects headlines from several UX blogs on one website.

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.

Thus a mirror nearby could speed up content delivery significantly.

Nowadays so-called CDNs use a similar logic.

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.

Nowadays there is a simple version of it called crowdsourcing.

It’s not the type of crowdsourcing where you work for free (creating a logo or something) and the best item gets paid.

It’s simply letting various authors contribute. One popular variant is the group interview.

You can even do it without asking people to write something.

Just add quotes from existing websites, ideally from experts.

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 JavaScript Newsgroup and announce my experimental JavaScript poetry.

Btw. the name onreact stems from these days.

It was a wild often anonymous way of communication.

Reddit is still similar to it in some ways despite appearing on the Web many years later.

I’m u/onreact over there!

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 like UserVoice.

Combined feeds: There are some webring tools like onionring left.

Yet it’s also not difficult to create a group of blogs with the help of so called RSS feeds.

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

Some free RSS tools to combine feeds are: RSS.app, RSS Mixer, rssrssrssrss.

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

I did that a few years back but then some of the bloggers stopped publishing and ultimately the tool stopped working.

It’s not about the software though.

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

When the blogger is ready the tool will appear to paraphrase an old adage.

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.

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 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.

Yet 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 Docs.

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.

I’m onreact everywhere on social media yet mostly on LinkedIn and Reddit nowadays.

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

Content and social SEO are the way to go in 2026. It’s time go beyond search.

AI summaries eat your lunch anyway and users stay on Google.

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.