Comment by olig15
3 years ago
I always assumed that ads that told people to search for the product/company were to raise their search ranking (due to relevancy?). But I’ve got no idea if that would actually make a difference or not, or if it is just so people don’t have to type a URL as you said.
The heyday of AOL keywords was before SEO or search engine relevancy was anything that any company cared about. Search engines existed, but this was mostly pre-Google and they were not great. A lot of discovery happened in other ways - the AOL keyword scheme was basically their attempt to tie web discovery to their products so people who left AOL wouldn't know what to do.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I’m talking about modern ads that you see now. They will often say ‘search for Hilton hotels’ or whatever, rather than the domain. I thought that was to help SEO
It was the latter. AOL users didn’t even know what URLs were.
The article didn’t have a screen shot of how AOL tacked the entire Internet Internet onto their glorified BBS as a button on their toolbar. Seriously.