How it all began

It all starts with eldest brother Arjan in the year 2004. At that time he is studying in Delft and has the fastest internet in the Netherlands in the library of the TU and a free workplace. He helps a company that wants to be found better in the online search engine Ilse, the most popular search engine at the time. Once dived in, he soon discovers Ilse's secret: adding as many search terms as possible to your page. But with the convenience for the user in mind, he puts the words in the same color as the background, so that they are invisible to the searcher: both the client and the searcher are happy.

Business is booming thanks to this finding; brothers Andries and Geerten join them, and a few SEO specialists are hired. The team quickly develops into a specialist in the field of search engine Ilse.

But then Google comes…

Google is overtaking all search engines right and left. Mostly thanks to a revolutionary idea from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin: PageRank. The more often links are made to you from other sites and the more important those pages are, the higher you will rank in the search results. Suddenly, the journey to the top of the search engine is all about three things: links, links, and links.

Brother Andries joined in 2006 and with their company, which they renamed upMention, they are fully committed to unraveling the secret of this new search engine.

At first they start with Home pages - who remembers them? They build their own homepages, such as traps.startpagina.nl (which still exists!), to generate links, where they then of course put their own customer at the top - with the famous 'tip' behind it.
This turns out to be very successful. upMention is growing fast, extra hands are needed and so Africa comes into the picture. It may not sound logical, but brother Andries has a tree nursery in Kenya. This gives the brothers the idea of recruiting technical specialists in Africa and setting up a second branch of upMention there. For example, two Kenyans, Richard and Risper, join the management. A refreshing addition to the three cheese heads.

In May 2023, upMention will open a new branch in London. This way we can serve the UK market even better. The story continues and an exiting new chapter will be added to the book of upMention.