2by4 - 7:41 pm on Dec 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

So I ignored google and concentrated on working on my site and creating new ones. I did not make any site structure changes or spend my days hunting down hijackers and theives. I just kept working on my site, making it better for visitors, not google.

SincerelySandy, in general this is very good advice, although there are some issues that you should always have resolved before following your advice, rewrites to www/ or non-www for example, make sure site has good search engine friendly urls, basic seo stuff that is. Fixing www/non-www is too easy to not do, it only takes about 2 minutes, so why not?

You can get back in serps sometimes if your site had errors and you fix them, but overall, I am coming to agree more and more with your position, spend the time adding content, making sites, and all that stuff.

That's where I'm headed, and any client I'll be keeping will need to be headed in the same direction. I'm tired of the chase google game.

Once you know enough to have avoided all types of technical errors, worrying about why update x or y messes up your site is a waste of time, I agree. But most people don't know enough, so these threads are really helpful, for example, in the bourbon threads, what was called sloppy webmastering was one major cause of drops, once those types of errors were fixed, site came back.

The fewer seo games I play the happier I am. Plus, if you consistently follow this advice, make more content, one day you'll wake up and find your site may have become an authority site, which is the other way to not worry about updates etc.

By the way, in the new test data center, I'm finally ranking for a very competitive keyword I've been weakly trying off and on to rank for for a few years. Didn't do anything to try to rank, just normal working on site, just so happened google has now decided that the site can rank for that phrase.

Anyway, nice common sense posting, thanks. I'm starting to do this stuff more and more, or not do it, as the case may be.

[edited by: 2by4 at 7:43 pm (utc) on Dec. 30, 2005]