INTERNET HISTORY

I Was Once Very Popular in Moldova

For whatever that was worth

aplawrence.com Alexa rankings Feb 2008

In the late nineties and early two thousands, my APLawrence.com was a very popular tech site concentrating on Unix. I know that it was popular because my weblogs showed 300–400 thousand unique monthly visitors and Google Ads paid me thousands of dollars per year.

That all fell apart with the Google Panda update of 2011. Before Panda, I had thousands of inbound links, but Panda frightened many sites into removing old links. When the dust settled, I had a few hundred sites still pointing to me, my page rank plummeted, and traffic decreased by 90%. So did the Google money. A few years later, that struggled to break $100 a month.

That was, umm, disappointing?

Killing my business was the hardest decision I ever made

But while it lasted, it was great. I was well known in the tight niche of people interested in Unix. I met someone at a trade show once, introduced myself, and a few seconds later the man said something like, “Wait! You’re THAT Tony Lawrence!”