Google’s 18th Birthday
I&#x27;m part of the Google economy now for 12 years, so well thank you Google, kinda.<p>My story for all who are interested:<p>In 2004 the director of the Austria Press Agency (APA) came to me and said &quot;Hey, our PR customers wan&#x27;t to find their press releases in Google, do that!&quot; I was in web business development then, a fancy name for a one man team of developer, coder, hacker,  sysadmin, product development, cooperations, conceptionist, designer, data analyst, external contributors coordinator for www.ots.at, the public relations branch of APA.<p>I did, and it worked. As a matter of fact it worked so good, that for some time the press releases of the companies showed up before the actual websites of the companies. (I used such advanced and then highly controversial strategies like internal interlinking and title-tags) Traffic and soon later revenue exploded.<p>As I was frustrated with web development at that time (IE6 had a market share of 90% plus, FF (firebird or phoenix at that time) wasn&#x27;t ready yet, no competition anywhere near). Web 2.0. was just starting at that time, we saw what was possible, but we could not do it, as the IE6 bugs were crashing all innovation.<p>I could code since I was a child, then I made code my work, now I swore to myself that I will always ever code for fun (or projects that are 100% owned by me and therefore fun) again, but earn money in another way.<p>I followed the money and started my first company &quot;Search Engine Optimized distribution of PR and Corporate Information via Blog and Web 2.0. Networks&quot; in 2006 i think. Today we would call it a &quot;Corporate Blog&quot;!<p>I created a piece of software that was from the front end better than WordPress of that time, faster, bug free HTML, W3C valid, beautiful tag clouds, just awesome. The backend and the actual getting content in there was a complete mess, so what, I had a product!!!! Now I just needed to sell the product, cold calling companies and convince them that they need a corporate blog and that their content needs to get found by Google. Oh yeah, zero sales experience from my side. Lets just say it didn&#x27;t work.<p>So I did what any young founder would do: went to a party, jumped over a wall to save entrance fee, broke my knee in a very complicated way and went into hospital for 3 months.<p>I took a job again: This time as a key account manager to sell websites in the real estate business. I learned a lot, most horrible job ever, too.<p>Went to the next job, now officially called myself SEO for the first time: becoming the SEO manager of the then world leader in sports-betting, poker and casino. Oh what fun! For the first time I realized what unbelievable esoteric bullshit people started to believe about Google and SEO. High-up management talked about &quot;PageRank Black Holes&quot; whereby I explained to them that &quot;Google being able to crawl us&quot; is kinda a good idea if you want to get found for anything. Also I had months long projects to convince the powers to be, that it just isn&#x27;t a good idea to run internal links over 16 (internal &amp; external ) redirects (whereby IE which was still around at that time only supported 10...). I had 70 people working on changing the footer links (as they were owned by different departments and country managers). Learned a lot in those years, especially about working with consultants and other third parties brought in by country managers, product heads, other consultants, bought companies, ...<p>And I learned that the state of SEO, which was a dev driven discipline for a long time became the ultimate bullshit industry. With people selling links that suck, selling tools that nobody needs, telling stuff that could neither verified nor falsified, hurting businesses until the point of bankruptcy. And whenever I though SEO has arrived at a new bottom, it became worse.<p>Then I did what any employee which was fed up with the status quo did, I joined a startup. Well not one, an incubator which owned the majority of all the startups it incubated. I.e.: I helped scale 123people form about 300 000 monthly to 60 000 000 monthly visits before it was sold. And some others which I&#x27;m more proud of. Then joined another startup.<p>In 2011 I started my second company, my goal is simple: To make all SEO agencies, including my own, redundant. I&#x27;m doing great, it&#x27;s still lots of fun.<p>So anyway, thx Google. You gave me a career. I work in the world&#x2F;economy you created.