the seo is as old as the first introduction of www at that time few Stanford researchers tried to promote thru blinking link ( there was a browser instead of search engine which had a lot of link which one person on another end could navigate to find files/folders). Though that time there was no option to track the traffic or maintain it but linking was the option to find datas. Even in 90s in montreal telnet server search or archieve was launched but it was damn slow ( you see how ftp webserver works ).
wayback machine is the example of old archive engine .

i regular follow your post but this time writing to you.