Things have been recklessly busy as of late. I have been moving into my new house and as I was unpacking stuff I came across the first web marketing/web design book I ever bought. I have attached a scanned image of the page on “Announcing your site”. It made me laugh. This was only 8 years ago.
It is worth noting Google wasn’t even included on the list, funny stuff. Here is the excerpt if you cannot read the image:

“Publicizing your page in the major search services helps Web surfers find your site. You should try and get your page listed in as many search services as possible.
The following table describes how to add your site to several of the popular Web Search services. To list your Web Site in the search service, go to the URL and click the link indicated in the last column of the table.”

Altavista
Excite
InfoSeek
Lycos
MSN Web [...]

Original post by Brian Chappell and software by Elliott Back

Apparently, Google doesn’t really care about penalizing sites in their index, whether that is by the page level, or flat out kicking you out of Google, no matter how legit your site is you have a giant target on your back if you are not careful. Over the last year there has been a lot of talk from M.Cutts about the “problems” with buying links. He has been pretty persistent with telling webmasters that they do not condone it.
I don’t really care much for the idea Google can tell you where you can and cannot buy advertising. However, it is their index and they can do what they want.
From what I have seen so far, as far as the penalizations go they are not across the board. I still feel like it is a manual handcheck and perhaps with some level of algorithmic manipulation.

The [...]

Original post by Brian Chappell and software by Elliott Back