Magnamous founder, Glen Magnamous, launched his first website in 1997. Yahoo was the main player for “search”, although in those days it wasn’t Search, with a capital “S”. Yahoo was a web directory. You had to wade through a hierarchically driven matrix to find what you were looking for. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. That’s when everything changed…
At the time Glen was a research associate in a medical lab at UCSF. He was a graduate of UC Berkeley in Molecular Biology. He gets the scientific method…
Glen had an experimental website at Mytoolbar.com. He taught himself HTML and Javascript to make it do what he had in mind. He has since lost the domain name, but the spirit remains. He was hoping to make a killing in affiliate marketing by providing an easier to use (and monetizing) type of directory. These were all hand selected sites that were useful to the user, and they all had the benefit of having affiliate programs so that Glen could become rich.
In the meantime, Glen created landing pages with very specific keywords, designed to lure buyers of products into his evil web so he could extract valuable commissions. A year went by with little, or no, commissions flowing in from Linkshare or Amazon.
So he went on a week-long surfing vacation with his cousin to Baja, Mexico. On that trip he realizeed he was spinning his wheels. The same old evil forces of capitalism had all the controls monopolized and there was no money for the little guy. He was prepared to close up shop and go and get a real job.
But when he got home he checked his Linkshare and Amazon and Walmart affiliate balances one last time. There was over $3000.00 in there, after only one week! It sounded too good to be true so he checked his Analytics to see where all the traffic was coming from. Google! Surprise! And what pages were they finding? The landing pages that were “optimized” for the keywords he was going for: Amazon, JcPenney, Walmart, Sony Television.
A small fraction of people searching for “Amazon.com” were finding his site, Mytoolbar.com/landing-page. That page would instantly (with Javascript of course) send them right to Amazon.com/my-affiliate-ID and he’d take (at that time) 15% of the total sale! Let me restate that for emphasis: Fifteen Percent of every sale. That is why Amazon was growing so fast and not making a profit. They were giving away the store to affiliates, like Glen, and growing like crazy. But I digress, I’m not talking about Amazon…I’m talking about Google. I’m talking about SEO. Search Engine Optimization. It’s a thing. It’s here to stay. It is very powerful. And it’s just an algorithm…waiting to be cracked.
At the height of this affiliate frenzy Glen was raking in $12,000.00 a month from Amazon alone. But nothing lasts forever. The techniques used by Glen in 1997 do not work today. His affiliate monies shrunk to almost nothing, but the lessons he learned were invaluable.
Skip ahead 20 years to 2017.
Glen now manages the SEO efforts of 50+ virtually identical websites with Service areas spread out all across the United States. They are all WordPress sites using the same theme. They all have nearly identical content because they are all in the same industry. They are distinguished from one another on only a few key points, physical location being the most germane. It is the perfect scientific SEO experiment, if ever there was one. Make a tweak to this site, submit it to the google, see how the rankings go, implement it to everyone else, make an audit, rinse and repeat. Document everything along the way so that real, scientifically verifiable, conclusions can arise and educate the entire process.
Eventually, the whole Google algorithm can be unlocked, right?
To be continued…