SEF is TEN. Yep, that's right, the site has been online for Ten Years.

This domain (SEF) was registered ten years ago yesterday, by Jim Wilson, and forum content was being posted to it as of July of that year.

I do see a few posts dated late April of that year now showing, so one of the other domains was likely online a little before that date.

Jim's online empire spread to multiple other domains over time, each domain covering its own niche, and the whole lot could be accessed through jimworld.com - an early form of portal if you like. That all seems so long ago now.

Several years back, amid Duplicate Content concerns, the whole lot was brought back under one roof here at SEF, and all the other alternative domains now redirect here.

The web has changed in many ways since those early days. Heck, I remember writing some stuff in 1998 and then searching Northern Light, Lycos, Altavista, HotBot, Dogpile, Excite, and all the rest and seeing a SERP like 1 to 10 of 85 or 1 to 10 of 350 with my stuff on the first page. Today, in Google, those SERPs bring back several million results, and my information still shows up on the first two or three pages. I look back at my coding from back then and wish I had embraced CSS a year or two earlier than I did.

I also remember an almost exclusively informational web, with almost zero commercial utilisation, and the days of GeoCities and many other places to put up a website with minimal effort.

SEF has evolved over the years, and many of the well known names in SEO cut their teeth here. I wasn't around for the first two years of the site being active, but I regularly read in here for about 18 months before finally joining in. I never did speak with Jim, he was already very ill by that time, and the site was being run on a day to day basis by several other people.

We've seen many changes over the years. Let's use this thread to highlight things from the past, both from here and out on the wider web.



Over to you...






[ Message was edited by: g1smd 05/02/2008 02:34 am ]

This is the first place I ever came to about SEO and have learnt a lot and hopefully helped a whole load of others. I never spoke to Jim but he was quite a legend from what I've heard

I must have started reading here in late 2000 and was one of the first places where I started to learn about SEO.

I remember going online for the first time in September 1996, when I went to university. Windows 3.1, Netscape Navigator 4.7....long before IE took over. In the browser search options you could select Infoseek, Excite, Yahoo and Webcrawler.

I used to like using Yahoo back then...and the others we good at the time. I used go2net.com as it was a decent meta search engine. Then I started to use Altavista, which was my favourite for a few years, until someone said try Google...

I never spoke to Jim, but we owe a lot to him for starting this forum.

[ Message was edited by: sem4u 05/02/2008 11:59 pm ]

There was a thread about 'How to Annoy Your Web Site Visitors' that went on for seven or so pages. It was fantastically funny - and all too true. A very old thread, but very useful.

It’s interesting that some of the biggest web sites today are all based on Social Networking, and that is basically what Jim provided very early on.

I was one of the fortunate few who were rapped on the knuckles by Jim for the way we expressed ourselves in the public forum. His newsletters carried the message - "give back to the community". He set an example by working very hard - he worked 20 hours in a day.

Many of the Mods in this forum were/are top notch professionals and authorities in their field of expertise. It was an experience to see the way they wrote their messages without offending anyone.

The blurb wraps it up so nicely - "Ten years - Helping to make the Web".

Can't believe it's been 10 years. Already? Never had the opportunity to meet Jim but I remember using his online tools long before it came to be know as JimTools.com (if memory serves).

I learnt about SEF a little later from a young entrepreneur (in some other forum) who credited his Google page rankings to SEF. His point was to prove that he could begin a simple (affiliate) site from scratch and have it earning him serious ca$h from one source. Google. No adsense back then

Followed up on his site's progress which btw has never dropped below p.r 2 to this day and Bam, I was sold to SEF.

I remember this is what it looked like when I first joined. Take a walk down memory lane and enjoy more old snaps of SEF

Jim also brought me the message about giving back - what a wonderful teacher he was

The trip down memory lane was enjoyable - Thanks for the posting of the past.

Yes 10 yrs ago this all started - WoW !

I remember coming here ( different user name then ) and wondering if all "this" would stand the tests of time, and here we are today

I bow to the power of Un

Where's Excell?

And Crash?

Added - bloody hell - I know so many people here I just know I'm going to upset someone

At the very least, OAC, Jenn, & Johnny Coka Cola

[ Message was edited by: philh 05/06/2008 03:09 pm ]

Excell is around from time to time. Haven't heard from Crash for a while now.

Yep when i signed up here i knew it as Jim's world. This is one of the better more knowledgable seo forums on the net.

...can't believe I've been hanging here for so long. Excellent joint - then and now!

hahaha, I remember how Jim was one of the first online destinations to use the UltimateBB board. This BB was up about 2 months before I first became a member and it was already a lively place. Of course Jim had a monster mailing list going on then where he could advertise the SEF BB. At one point the mailing list had about 250,000 subscribers.

The list even went up as high as 450,000 - almost half a million subscribers around the time when I joined. One of the newsletters carried this information to the effect that over 450,000 newsletters delivered.