Before 2012, it wasn’t that difficult to get a website to the top of page one in Google results. All you needed was technical know-how, original content, and site authority. Then, with some carefully crafted linking budget, you could rocket a page to the front page of Google for pretty much any keyword relevant to the site. The tactics people employed back then were generally called “link schemes.” Google describes link schemes as links that are created to manipulate search results. It’s a broad definition that includes many different tactics. Google search results relied heavily on PageRank when the algorithms were less advanced. One could manipulate PageRank because it weighted the volume of links pointing to a website heavily. Money for links changed hands frequently. If you had a site that ranked well, you could sell links from your pages. And there were all sorts of manipulative strategies for pushing a page to the top of search.