Comment by lamontcg

> Though I do sympathize with folks who reminisce about 2008 Google Search results, there were probably orders of magnitude less content out there and a complete ignorance to how valuable your place is on your business and thus no SEO.

That was a decade after Google was created and people certainly understood SEO and Google was constantly updating its algorithm to punish people who were trying to game the algorithm.

The wikipedia page on "link farming" for example references it happening as early as 1999 and targeting SEO on inktomi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm

I remember some internal presentations at Amazon around ~2004 about how boosting Google SEO on Amazon web pages increased traffic and revenue (and Amazon was honestly a bit behind-the-curve due to a kind of NIH syndrome).