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Originally Posted by CaptainJSparrow
I remember back before there were Link Lists we all had websites full of free pictures that just dominated the serps (at first Yahoo and a few others, then Google when they came about) and we sent the traffic to the pay sites, usually on a pre-paid basis. The pay sites did not have the technology to see if the traffic was converting, they could just look at raw clicks coming in from your website.
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There's a few things I wanted to say about this because I don't think your memory is entirely correct, but I could very well be wrong, my memory certainly isn't that great. I was around early on too when Yahoo, AltaVista, InfoSeek, Lycos, WebCrawler and HotBot; which was like a search engine aggregator, were all pretty popular.
There may have been some sponsors who worked on a pre-paid basis, but CyberErotica and MaxCash were the first that I remember doing PPS. Before them, there was XPics who paid per click, I'm almost positive they had the ability to track sales made by affiliates, they were, from memory, using some pretty advanced technology for the day, but they'd rather pay per click and just shave them. There were others, like babylon-x who just paid per click and probably didn't care about affilite conversions since they were making so much money and a casino affiliate program that burnt everyone that I can't remember the name of.
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Originally Posted by CaptainJSparrow
Then technology advanced, and Google took over the search part of the net and tracking software advanced where pay sites could track where the sales came from.
I am not sure who came up with the concept of a Link List originally. I do remember that LL's were popular when the technology was not there to easily display movies on the internet. I suspect that the LL concept was created as a way to easily get a lot of back links for the purpose of getting high placements in Google. This was back when Google only valued gross back links without having the ability to value them accordingly. Hence, a lot of back links (even from new pages) got you top placements on Google which got you the absolute best traffic on the internet.
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Google, or Backrub, has always valued quality links over the quantity of them. This is essentially what PageRank is/does. That is also what separated Google from the other search engines who were primarily using on-page factors such as keyword density, meta keywords and other easily gameable factors. Thus Google's results were better, webmasters started telling people this, Google somehow managed to sell their results to Yahoo so they could focus on other things apart from search, presumably because they didn't have the foresight to see that search was going to be as big is it now is, and that was the tipping point when Google began to snowball into what it is today.
One example: Early in Google's life, if you managed to get 1 PR6 link to your site, you could easily get your site a PR5 after the next PR update, which occured roughly once each month. After the PR update, Google would "dance", as it only used to update sporadically, not kind of organically and dynamically as it does now. Google used to place so much emphasis on PR, your rankings would directly correlate with your PR, and the anchor text of those links. You could pretty much rank a brand new site in 1 month or less for any phrase you wanted if you had the right anchor text, a little bit of on-page SEO, and a higher PR than the sites below you.
All that changed a very long time ago, a lot longer ago than many people, especially those new to the web can even comprehend, which is why I think some people don't understand the importance (or complete lack thereof) of the PR that shows up on the toolbar.
For some reason I felt like pointing that out, feel free to correct me if I've remembered things wrong. I think Greenie knows a few of the first link lists, what with Link-o-Rama being one of them and all
