Back in 1999, the Internet was a very different place. Odd’s are you were on dial-up (hopefully with a 56kbps modem), using netscape as your browser and having debates over if Webcrawler or AltaVista was a better search engine. Google at the time was just a year old. Only the most tech savvy of businesses and people had a web presence and the most searched term was a young singer by the name of Britney Spears.
Search Engines were pretty bare bones at the time and heavily relied on websites dictating what the content was about. Early Internet marketers took advantage of this and turned it into what is called “The Britney Spears Effect”.
In essence, they just took the phrase “Britney Spears” and either repeated it throughout their meta data or on their page, making unsophisticated Search Engines believe that’s what the content reflected and the traffic came in droves.
Back then things like bounce rate, conversion rates and funnel marketing just didn’t exist. The only metric that mattered was visitors and traffic, no matter how you got it.
Of course today we realize the impact of targeted search. But back then it didn’t matter if visitors came to a site selling Insurance if they were looking for Insurance or not. All that mattered was traffic. Without the other metrics, early digital marketers and SEO’s could easily show the amount of traffic and collect their paycheque. No questions asked.
Luckily today we know better.