Everyone else has already covered webrings and directories, but there’s a couple things missing imo. Or maybe I just came in too late.

Back in, I want to say 2003 or so, I discovered this absolutely incredible browser extension called StumbleUpon. It was like a crowdsourced version of those contemporary curated link pages; you gave it a list of topics you were into (ranging from vague things like “art” down to really specific things like "), and when you pushed the “Stumble” button it added to your browser, it took you to a random website that matched one of your chosen categories. In turn, when you found a website that wasn’t in the database, you could add it by checking off what category/ies it fit into. I spent hours a day hitting that button and being taken to random new content, and quickly became the clever one in my friend group by finding all the best “cheezburgers” and “demotivationals” and “image macros” lol. Hell, I’d still be using it now, if they hadn’t shut down like five years back.

And let’s not forget Geocities neighbourhoods! Every GeoCities site was a “house” in a metaphorical “city” and at the bottom of their page, you could move between "house numbers’ to visit their “neighbours”. So if you found a good site, but got bored, you might check out who’s nearby. Cities were loosely themed, but didn’t enforce topics of any kind, so you might go from a Sailor Moon fansite to a college student’s tutoring homepage to a shrine to a dead loved one. You always found fascinatiing stuff eventually.

One other person said it but I can provide a bit more context: web rings were the life blood of fan communities that weren’t on Usenet or irc. Many people would make their own website (yes, geocities and much later, angelfire … there were others but I don’t recall) and petition to link up to the webring.

Being on group email lists was a big thing too. Listserv was one but there were a bunch of others at the time. The group emails were like forums a little bit.

At least in the corners of the Internet I hung out there were a few sites that got “big” and they would often have pages that would maintain links to other sites as well as being part (or the originator) of the webring. Sometimes on the community site you could be kind of a member and get a blurb, or just your name, which would link to your email or person website (or both}.

The larger and more polished community sites really did kind of end up as these social hubs and an early form of social media.

You still used search engines to dick around but they really sucked pre-seo but they were sometimes their own community and link hubs in their own right (Yahoo).

You could also just browse larger sites manually. Exploration was part of the experience and stumbling on weird stuff randomly was one of the best things about late 90s, early 00"s internet.

Earlier forms of SEO: I remember when Yahoo was a directory, not a search engine. In those days the categories they accepted you into mattered A LOT for discoverability.

[It seems I accidentally deleted the original comment when I went to edit it, so here’s the repost]

There were literally classes at the public library where people would get together and share websites. Also, because the web wasn’t monetized, similar sites would link to each other because they didn’t see other sites as competition for views and ad dollars. The Anime Turnpike, for example, was basically a yellow pages of any and all English-language websites related to anime. There were also “circles”* (even well after search engines entered the picture) of sites sharing a theme (eg a TV show fandom) and you could click through them like flipping through a Rolodex. But yeah, in the very early days (as in, before most folks even had email) word of mouth was quite prevalent; one of my mom’s favorite sites she heard about from a taxi driver.

*EDIT: Sorry, I think I got my languages mixed up; as others have said they were called webrings in English

Word of mouth from friends, on forums, and chat rooms.

Web rings were neat. A bunch of sites would be part of the ring, and you could use the little applet at the bottom of the page to jump to the next site. An interesting way to expose yourself to a bunch of content in a similar category. Kind of wish they still existed, but I assume they’d be abused by the same SEO fuckers.

And let’s all not forget typing in random shit for domains to see what came up.

There were literally classes at the public library where people would get together and share websites. Also, because the web wasn’t monetized, similar sites would link to each other because they didn’t see other sites as competition for views and ad dollars. The Anime Turnpike, for example, was basically a yellow pages of any and all English-language websites related to anime. There were also “circles”* (even well after search engines entered the picture) of sites sharing a theme (eg a TV show fandom) and you could click through them like flipping through a Rolodex. But yeah, in the very early days (as in, before most folks even had email) word of mouth was quite prevalent; one of my mom’s favorite sites she heard about from a taxi driver.

*EDIT: Sorry, I got my languages mixed up; as others have said they were called webrings in English

As a youngster then, it was mostly word of mouth and random links.

Someone would have some cool site or game they’d tell everyone about. You’d see someone at the library on some site and you’d peek at the URL.

Sometimes those sites would link to other sites.

It felt endless even back then. And for all intents and purposes, it was, to the average user.

For me it was word of mouth. I found out about Slashdot, fark, Google, and boingboing from friends.

Surprised that I don’t see more people talking about listservs. There was a time when email was cool. It wasn’t just regular mail, it was electronic mail. It was instantaneous. It was free postage. It was global.

Before the spammers and the scammers, email was the future of communication. Lots of random sites offered free email. No one was mining data. It was just a cool thing that you could basically already do if you set up a server anyway that didn’t really add cost. Low bandwidth meant no one was pumping out a crazy number of emails, and there was no video or audio to speak of online except in very niche uses.

So the listserv was born. A way to send and share information to your entire social network (before the term social media was even conceived). People would have years-long discussions, sometimes even threaded within the multiple layers of replies (before we knew what threaded meant). You would spend hours or even days composing witty, insightful, humorous replies before sending it out to the list. You would open your text-only email client each day with bated breath to see the latest news and group drama… and what new corners of the web people were exploring (it was already called the web - that’s practically ancient history). Hyperlinks were among the first pieces of complex formatting that people used regularly, although it was not unheard of to write out a URL by hand on a pad of paper and then manually type it into Netscape.

So websites were discovered and shared. Most people belonged to multiple listservs and so would share and reshare. Presto: dancing hamsters!

I literally bought a book called The Internet Yellowpages. I wish I still had it. It included great IRC, Usenet, etc servers.

Word of mouth, networking, magazines, and books were big, as I recall.

Blogrolls and webrings

Forum links, linking on other sites, that sort of thing. Keep in mind, search engines have been around since the 90s.

RSS

i ran a few sites that grew organically from a base of locally dialed-up-to BBS systems…back in the aol/compuserv days. some BBSs became original gateways to local internet access.