In 2007, Jason Gambert filed a trademark claim in the United States for the term Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO.

Almost immediately, there were a couple of problems. The first was that the term SEO had already been in use for well over a decade, with an entire community behind it. The other problem was, nobody knew who Jason Gambert was.

Early SEO

Given enough time to surf the early web, there were all sorts of interesting sites to find. But picking through the hundreds, and then thousands, and then millions of sites sprouting up on the web was not as simple as clicking around. The earliest pioneers of the web recognized this pretty quickly, and split their efforts to make discovery easier into two general categories.

The first began with sites like the NCSA Mosaic What’s New page, and the O’Reilly backed Global Network Navigator portal. These sites featured handpicked selections from editors—something like a staff’s pick section at the library broadened to web scale. Sites were categorized and indexed, and made available for search, and they often solicited suggestions from the public. That formula was probably best perfected when Jerry Yang and David Filo created their own Guide to the World Wide Web, which would eventually become Yahoo!.

The other method for discovery was to send crawlers out amongst the world wide web to scrape and collect content, then make it searchable. WebCrawler and World Wide Web Wanderer were followed by Excite and Alta Vista. In 1998, Google launched with a brand new algorithm, PageRank (named with founder Larry Page in mind) that sorted sites based on how often they were linked to from other sites, creating a more reliable crawler based search.

So if you were putting your site on the web in the mid to late 90’s, it was pretty important that people were able to find it. Bob Heyman likes to tell an anecdote from 1995, when he was working for an advertising agency called USWeb. One of their clients was the band Jefferson Starship, and they had just gotten finished building their very first website. The way Heyman tells it, he was suddenly awakened by a phone call at 3’oclock in the morning from the bands manager on tour, who was stark raving mad.

As it turns out, the band was on the road, and the manager had wanted to show a club promoter how hip Starship was to have its own web site. Unfortunately he couldn’t remember the URL (www.jstarship.com, now defunct), so he resorted to a search engine lookup. To his considerable annoyance, the page did not come up especially close to the top of the list.

The next morning, Bob dragged into the office a bit sleepier than usual, gathered the staff and explained that mastering the art of search engine ranking was a new company priority.

It took actual work to make websites easier to find by the people that were trying to find them. There were certain tricks, and best practices to follow to make your site friendlier to search engines and portals; in other words, to optimize it.

And that’s what it would soon be called. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short.

It’s not too clear who coined the term (Heyman has claimed that it was him, but others have pointed to possibly earlier uses), but Heyman was one of a small group of pioneers that came to the search engine optimization industry early. He compiled his knowledge, along with his co-author Rick Bruner, in the book Net Results published in 1996, where the above anecdote was shared.

But USWeb wasn’t the only company working on SEO in the mid-1990’s. Danny Sullivan created the site Search Engine Watch in 1996 to start sharing the tips and tricks he had found for listing sites successfully on portals, and ranking high for relevant searches on search engines. Incidentally, Sullivan tells a story of how he got started that is remarkably similar to the Heyman’s.

One of our clients was upset at the end of 1995 that his OC jobs site wasn’t ranking tops for a search on “orange county” in WebCrawler. We didn’t have a good answer to give him. We’d done the submission, made use of the meta tags the search engines said to use, but why exactly a site would rank well wasn’t well known. So I decided to look into it.

Sullivan’s initial research eventually led him to a more complete understanding about how crawling on search engines worked. He compiled a guide for developers called “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines,” one of Search Engine Watch’s first major posts.

What’s clear is that many of the first people that dealt in optimizations geared towards search engine stumbled their way to it. They tried things that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. And when they found something that did, they wrote about and shared it. And it wasn’t long until SEO became a complete industry.

There were, of course, people that tried to game the system. Black hat techniques tried to spam crawlers with keywords or set up a fake network of backlinks to improve rankings. It forced search engines to make changes to their algorithm again and again to try to battle it.

Nevertheless, a lot of people were coming to this idea at around the same time. By the time Google launched in 1998, there was already a robust industry ready to meet it. It even had a few experts.

A Trademark for SEO

As far as people could tell, Jason Gambert wasn’t one of those experts. But that didn’t stop him from filing a claim in 2007 to trademark the term SEO. It set the industry almost immediately ablaze.

Sarah Bird first noticed the request when she was searching for trademarks for her company, SEOMoz. By the time Bird noticed in 2008, Gambert was in the final stages of the trademark process. She immediately filed an opposition to the claim, and took to the SEOMoz blog to document the occurrence.

SEOMoz was soon joined by others who attempted to block the request from Gambert, which many felt had come literally out of nowhere. He had no presence in the SEO community, and his website was sparse on details. Other companies, including Sullivan’s Search Engine Watch, began to pay close attention to this trademark request hoping to block it. Most SEO professionals agreed that no one person should own SEO, and that it was best left as an industry term.

But then, Gambert emerged from the shadows. Taking his to blog in April of 2008 (a blog which incidentally does not appear to have existed before this date). Claiming that he was trying to “include everyone,” Gambert said that his goal was to create a patented and approved process for SEO that other businesses could use.

My goal in owning the trademark for the word SEO is not to try to force people to change their SEO process, but rather, prevent companies from selling “SEO” as a service under false pretenses.

Of course, this contradicted what he had previously said in his trademark request, in which he claimed to have not only been the first person to use the word SEO in an email exchange, but to have used it is as a service and not a process.

Nevertheless, Gambert’s post began to spread. And suddenly, it actually felt like people were on his side. Some people took to the comment sections of popular SEO sites to come to Gambert’s defense against those trying to push him out.

And then, perhaps the strangest twist of all. Rhea Drysdale, a contractor and writer for Search Engine Journal, pretty quickly noticed a pattern in those comments. Not only that, a bit more digging revealed that they were all coming from the same IP address. An IP that just so happened to match Gamberts. He had created pseudonymous accounts on the sites, posing as his own defenders.

In the beginning, Drysdale watched from the sidelines. She posted about Gambert’s fake commenting accounts, including some posts on her own blog. She watched as Gambert persisted in his trademark claim. And she saw how one by one, bigger companies dropped their opposition to the claim, distracted or pulled away in different directions. After more than a year, it looked like Gambert might succeed simply by outlasting everyone else.

But Drysdale couldn’t let it go. Over the next couple of years, she spent $20,000 of her own money on legal fees so that she could continue to file motions to stop the claim. And, eventually, she succeeded. Recalling her own persistence, Drysdale chalks it up to a stubborn desire to do the right thing.

Let’s get something straight here. I submitted my notice of opposition as a then 25-year-old individual with a contract job at a startup…I had stubborn morals going for me and a desire to see this through. I was chairing a local non-profit at the time and had the difficult task of raising funds to pay off a massive legal bill we’d accrued in the process of suing a neighboring county. That lawsuit set a statewide precedent for beach access, but it also taught me that doing the right thing can quickly become costly and demoralizing.

By the time it was over, Drysdale was in a much different place. She was the CEO of Outspoken Media, a company that she had founded. She had found her place in the SEO industry. And when everybody else dropped out, Drysdale kept going. And because of that, nobody owns SEO today.