Who would have thought that Doogie Howser, arguably the first blogger ever, would pave the way for the modern internet? Back in 1989, the tv show starred a young Niel Patrick Harris pursuing his young medical career, and taking the time every night to sit down at his computer to document his life. As we all sipped our Ecto Cooler Hi-C and chewed on our Bonkers candy, we giggled at the computer nerd putting his thoughts onto his monitor. 24 years later, it seems the entire internet consists of forums and blogs. What happened?

Early on, the web seemed like such a sporadic, cluttered and disorganized mess. Early adopters utilized AOL, EarthLink, NetZero or Compuserve to tap into the early internet via a horrible dialup connection. The early websites you visited were jumbled together, had pixelated images, bad content and lots of movement via Marquee images and animated gifs. As time went on, and consumers started catching onto their boards to ride the wave, domains were scooped up and tons of websites started popping up all over the place. Thousands of forums were also set up, and the boom was in full swing.

Just up until last year (2011 and early 2012), website ranking was based on easy-to-manipulate items such as site and page title, domain name, and how many crappy, fake backlinks existed on the millions of forums on the web. Then Google released a set of updates known as the Panda Updates that changed everything. Since then, content is king. Original content namely. No longer will Google cherish your 10,000 backlinks and bad signatures on all of those horrible, non-used forums, nor will it rank you #1 for widgets just because your page title is “Widgets 4 the win!!” and the word “Widgets” appears 200 times in each paragraph. Now, Google thinks like a person and likes original, relevant content.

Where better to get tons of original content on every subject imaginable than that written by ordinary people just like Doogie Howser? With hundreds of millions of blogs on every topic from life hacks to daily journals by pregnant women, search engines can now focus directly on categorizing all of this data and serving it up much higher in the results than the blinking widget websites of the early 2000’s.

Want to market your site better? Plain and simple: start a blog and incorporate related content. And don’t be afraid of shameful plugging of your own products.

Google like this!

Happy Blogging!