Danny Sullivan Leaves SEW & SES

[Linda Buquet]

I know I speak for many others when I say that to me Danny Sullivan IS SeachEngineWatch. He started SEW over 10 years ago. Back when I had my own SEO consulting business SEW was the bible and Danny was like the SEO god! Even after he sold SEW to Jupiter Media to me the power of the brand was still Danny. Too bad that Incisive, the company that recently bought SEW from Jupiter does not realize Danny's worth. They evidently are the type of company that does not realize what they have until its gone. I predict in about a week it will become painfully clear to them what a big mistake they made.

I was a mod at the SEW affiliate forum for about a year, until I got too busy. If I were a mod today I wonder if I would stay. I wonder if any of the other SEW mods will leave. Here is a thread that's just starting over at SEW about the unfortunate change. Danny Sullivan To Leave SEW & SES.

You can still read and hear Danny's words of SEO wisdom at his new Daily SearchCast site and read about any new endeavors at his personal blog. Today Danny's blog begins with "After ten years, I'm leaving Search Engine Watch and almost certainly leaving the Search Engine Strategies conference series as well. My contracts with their owners Incisive Media are expiring, and we've not been able to agree on new ones."

Good luck Danny! I'm certain the future will be brighter for you regardless of what you decide to do next. I know that that thousands of people in the search marketing industry will be ready to follow you wherever you go.

[lingstar]

Morning all,

I well remember SEW...back from the times that Infoseek did real-time indexing. I totally agree that things will most likely be different...I think that big business does tend to sometimes have quite a short future view. Remember when Blue Mountain was bought for 780 million dollars? It sold again for considerably less years later.

Can you believe that more than a decade has passed from the tentative beginnings of the graphical WWW?

Best wishes,

[Linda Buquet]

Ahhhh you just reminded me of way back when Altavista was #1.
I used to be able to get my clients #1 rankings for ANYTHING on that engine. I even got a client that was new and didn't have any cars to sell yet #1 for both "new cars" and "used cars" got another little start up #1 for cordless mouse above Logitech and all the big brands. I had the algo down!

I would probably still be doing SEO if it was still that easy and Alta was still on top.
But alas SEO times have changed.
Couldn't pay me enough to do it for a client now!

[lingstar]

Indeed, those were the days...I remember the thrill of tweaking capitals verses not in title tags, reindexing the page in infoseek, and within 30 seconds, being able to check how it affected the rankings.

My speciality back then was Internet recruiting - I taught recruiters how to rank in the top 10 for their specific niche or state or level or whatever. So easy it was back then!

Back in 2003-2005 I also broke the Google code for ranking in the top 10 for just about any search term I wanted. Oh that indeed was nice - taught myself all about portal building, Adsense/eBay integration and the like.

Ah, memories. :-)

Best wishes,

[MikeDammann]

Danny is a cool dude, hope he will be happy.

[AffiliateGuild]

Originally Posted by Linda Buquet

Ahhhh you just reminded me of way back when Altavista was #1.
I used to be able to get my clients #1 rankings for ANYTHING on that engine. I even got a client that was new and didn't have any cars to sell yet #1 for both "new cars" and "used cars" got another little start up #1 for cordless mouse above Logitech and all the big brands. I had the algo down!

I would probably still be doing SEO if it was still that easy and Alta was still on top.
But alas SEO times have changed.
Couldn't pay me enough to do it for a client now!

Hey do you rememner Northernlights Search Engine? That one was used by all the libraries and a good number of us webmasters until little baby Google came along.

Ranking was easy and searchs were relevant ... or at least they seemed to be?!!

I really think the webmasters community rallied behind the Google engine and popularized it. I wonder today, if we knew then what we know now ... would we still "dance" with Google?

Yeah, SEO is much harder today ... but look at the bright side, the pay for a real whitehat SEOer is pretty good. Although the amount of time evangelizing on white and black hats for clients is a pain, eh?!

[MikeDammann]

Northern Light is the first engine I've ever used LOL

[lingstar]

Originally Posted by sidhewolf

Hey do you rememner Northernlights Search Engine? ....

Do I remember - ah, the memories! Northernlight had a super easy way to find free resumes on the Internet. It was very popular back then.

But if you *really* want to get esoteric, anyone here remember PeopleClick (I think that's the name)? They were the first folks to come out with an ICQ thingee...but ICQ ended up being the favored solution for folks to download.

And and and (hey I'm on a role here) who here actually used a working copy of the Utah Teapot screensaver? Unbeknownst to folks back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the pipes screen saver would display a Utah teapot every 1000 angle. Well, someone hacked up a version that let you control the number of teapots generated! Let me tell you, that was big stuff at AT&T. :-)

http://www.answers.com/topic/utah-teapot

and I quote:

...With the advent first of computer generated short films, and then of full length feature films, it has become something of an in joke to hide a Utah teapot somewhere in one of the film's scenes. Utah teapots can be found in Toy Story, Monsters Inc., and Disney's Beauty and the Beast, as well as in The Simpsons. The teapot also occasionally appears in the Pipes screensaver shipped with Microsoft Windows. It is also featured in one of the levels of the video game Super Monkey Ball 2, in technological demo section of Serious Sam, and can be found in Microsoft Train Simulator. By using a cheat code it is possible to have a Utah teapot as an avatar in the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic PC game....

The joy of geekiness,

[Larwee]

Great memories from the past. AltaVista and Northern Lights were both some early favorites of mine. Also, it wasn't very much of a challenge to rank well in either of them.

Things were so less complicate then. Most of us felt that Northern Lights and AltaVista did a much better job than they really did, now that we look back on it. But at the time it did seem good.

Thinking about some of the good things from the past just makes me want to jump for joy.

[MikeDammann]

wow I remember how exciting it was when I first got online, now it's like 2nd nature. On Norhtern Lights I've found all kind of ppl and info about my high school. Too bad they went downhill. I should backorder the domain