A fragment of SEO history, brought to you by the Wolohan Lumber Company (1964–2006)

Tonight, in the woods about a hundred meters behind our house, my partner found a tag from Wolohan Lumber Company for a Rhododendron catawbiense. This might be the same between-14-and-33-year-old rhododendron that currently lives next to our front door.

I’ve lived in Athens, Ohio for quite a few years and hadn’t heard of Wolohan Lumber Company, so I was wondering how this scrap ended up here. I found that The Internet Archive had captured some pages from their website as far back as December 1998. Sadly at that time their front page consisted entirely of images without alt tags, and The Internet Archive didn’t manage to capture those images, so there isn’t much to see.

But, upon viewing the HTML source, we can see they’ve stuffed a lot of keywords into the header:

<meta name="keywords" content="Application Barn Barns Bath Bathroom Best Blink Blue Blueprint Build Builders Building Business Cabinets Carter’s Central Co. Company Construction Contractor Contractors Custom Deck Decks Delivery Depot Design Designer Do-it-yourself Door Doors Edge Employment Fence Fencing Finance Financing Frame Garage Garages Hardware Homes House Houses Illinois Improvement Indiana Install Installation Jobs Kentucky Kitchen Lighting Lowes Lumber Materials Menards Michigan Mid-West Millwork Molding Ohio Package Packages Paint Panelization Plans Playsets Plumbing Pole Post Print Product Professional Project Projects Remodel Remodelers Repair Roof Roofing Service Sheathing Shed Sheds Shingles Siding Specialist Square Store Stores Studs Swing-N-Slide the to Tools Trim Truss Vinyl Webber Wickes Window Windows Wiring Wisconsin with Wolohan Wood Yards">

Apparently that dubious SEO practice had become so common by 1998 that even a regional lumber chain had adopted it. (They’ve got some of their competitors in the list — “Carter’s,” “Lowes,” “Menards,” “Webber” (Weaber?), “Wickes”. They left some bonus stopwords in the marketing-slop-turned-alphabetized-keyword-list. And how did “Application,” “Blink,” and “Print” end up in there?)

Drifting forward to April 2000, the Archive has a more informative capture which indicates that this regional chain once operated “49 locations throughout Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky”:

Up through perhaps January 2001 they had a location in Athens at 932 E. State St., which may have been where our rhododendron was transacted:

This article describes the company as beginning with Charles Wolohan in the early 1900s, passed to his son Richard Wolohan, and sold in 2006 to United Building Centers. And that company also had a keyword-stuffed website as of November 1998:

<meta name="keywords" content="Cabinets, Ceiling, Cement Products, Countertops, Doors, jambs, Electrical, Fireplaces, Stoves, Floor Covering, Tile, Carpet, Wood Flooring, Vinyl, Hand Tools, Power Tools, Pneumatic Tools, Hardware, Power Tools, Insulation, Lawn Tools, Gardening Supplies, Lumber, Lumber Commons, Lumber Hardwoods, Lumber Clears, Engineered Lumber, Trusses, Siding, Roofing, Shingles, Moulding, Nails, Fasteners, Paint, Paint Supplies, Stain, Paneling, Wall Covering, Particle Board, Drywall, Plasterboard, Plumbing Supplies, Plywood, Windows, Installation, Measurement, Custom orders, Project Planning, Design, Remodeling, Contractors, Home Building, Building Plans, Home Plans, Building Materials, Lumber, Tools, Installation, Remodeling, Contractor Services, Estimates, Delivery, Building Suppliers, CAD, Computer Aided Design, Showroom, Take-Off Services, Take-Offs, Store Directory, Building Advice">

(Correctly comma-separated this time. But not alphabetized, tsk.)

Nowadays, 932 E. State St is a strip mall consisting of a grocery store, a physical therapist, a marijuana dispensary, and an army recruiting center (not necessarily in that order).