Pull up a beige chair. These are true little stories from people who built, broke, ranked, hosted and accidentally monetised the early web—and a living archive of internet history told by the people who were there.

Early SEO stories

Doorway pages, directories, rank tracking by hand and other historical mischief.

4 old hands

1998 Early SEO 6 Aug 2026

I built a website so people could find me - in 1998

In 1998 there were about 3 million websites. Mine was one of them. It was not my first website - that I built in 1994 in HTML but without a provider. And the domain was different. My first website was chocolate.pages.vossnet.de or something like that. The current domain, chocola…

Optional link: chocolatecheese.de

by Warren Laine-Naida 1 comments share

3 old hands

2000 Early SEO 6 Aug 2026

I uploaded 10000 doorway pages, 5 at a time

Back around 2000 I built a batch-file landing page generator. It took keywords, HTML templates, affiliate links and banners, then spat out 1000's of pages. Uploaded them through Silicon Valley Web Hosting's upload form 5 at a time. They’d mostly rank #1 or #2 in Google, and my k…

by Lars Jansen 0 comments share

What is this?

A community scrapbook for the people who built the web before anybody knew what the rules were.

Short stories, odd jobs, old tricks, lucky breaks, terrible code and the occasional cheque in the post.

Site stats

8Stories told

1988Earliest year

24Votes cast

56kRecommended speed

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House rules

Tell a story you actually lived.
Keep it readable over one cup of tea.
No pretending everything was better.
Names can be changed to protect the guilty.