RANT: Your Link Here

September 25, 20251Rants

_RANT

It’s funny as I sit here scrolling on this site trying to come up with a few ideas to get inspired to write a post. Well as of right now I was browsing the main page and came to the Links section. Glanced at a few of the links then I came to the last one. “Your Link Here“. Fucking crazy that in 10 years of AOLFOREVER being online I haven’t received one link from anyone for their website to be listed.

In the 90’s when we were all creating E/N Sites, AOL Sites, etc. The only way of someone finding your website was through Word of mouth, Spamming, Topsites and a Links section. I can’t really remember but I’m pretty sure back then the search engines were total basic. You relied on a Topsites lists or a Links section placed on someone else’s website with the same genre of content; hoping you would land on a great page with some actual working links of Progs, Warez, Mp3’s, Pron or whatever the hell you were into at that time. Hell, half the time I was just browsing sites for unique layout ideas or which CGI/PHP script was gonna fuck up my page this time.

On almost every E/N Site, AOL Site the main page always consisted of Links or Affiliates. Displaying either a text link or a 88×31 width/height button image then underneath those were 88×11 images. Finally getting to the bottom of their list was the “Your Link Here”. Normally just a text-link that’s linked to a mailto:x@x.com?subject=”Your Link Here”. So then another webmaster 😉 or creator would e-mail you asking to exchange links. You’d place one on your site they would do the same.

Now a days you aren’t getting a link on anyone’s site without paying. They don’t want you navigating away from their site. I remember when making my E/N sites back in the 90’s I always said content is king. So I tried to create a great list of content with interesting blog posts. For what reason back then I have no clue it was just like this clique community. You would just visit pages from Links and affiliates. You had no idea when someone made a new post on their site unless they told you personally. I know they had bookmarks on Internet Explorer but still it wasn’t as sophisticated as it is today.

Also don’t get me wrong I know the scene is even way deeper than this. This is just the year and style of the scene that Myself and several others existed in.

Here’s some of the sites that come to my mind that I would visit. Boonsim.com, 7-Days.net, Head-Trip.org, BVDesigns.net a lot of them are from the 2000’s but you get my drift.

There was even a section that was dedicated “Link to us“. So someone could go there find the textarea and copy their link and image. You always had to make sure you saved the image and uploaded it to your server. Half the time back then everything was hot-linked because for whatever reason you only had X amount of storage space. So sometimes you’d visit a links section and if it was hot-linked it would look similar to the one missing image below.