2by4 - 5:17 am on Jun 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

rbacal, publishing is not unlike the search engine world from what I know, there has been massive consolidation in publishing, I believe that something like 5 corporations now control most publishing, just like 3 search engines control most search traffic.

I can't blame google for the fact that both msn and yahoo delivered such anemic search for so long, and that the new msn is so weak that even the msn guys now admit that it will be at least 5 years before they have a product that can actually compete with google.

So it's an odd situation in the search world right now. Yahoo could improve, they could get share, but they just dont' seem to care enough even though pretend to. And msn is another weak ms web venture, so don't hold your breath.

I would say, to keep the analogy fairly accurate, that it is in fact just about as hard to get published by a big house currently as it is to get listed on google - well, no, that's ridiculous, who am I kidding, it's WAY harder to get published than it is to get listed on google, by a factor of at least 10, probably more.

You can do it, but it's not easy. The main difference is that anyone who takes the time and energy required can probably get listed where they want eventually if they follow what EFV says and ignore all the typical WebmasterWorld google forums talk as much as possible. Or follow brett's 26 steps, whatever. Problem is that's hard to do.

Takes a lot of work, it's a many year process, and requires content that is worth other people's attention so they link to it. That's not your opinion of the content, it's other people's opinion of it. Everyone thinks their site is great and their content unique, as a writer you should recognize that problem, LOL...

I'm seeing exactly what EFV is seeing, and I'm not paying any attention to my page indexed count, my backlink count, whatever. The only change I saw in big daddy was that on two sites I finally started ranking for the target terms, one number 1 which eluded me for 4 years, another top 30, which also eluded me for many years. Given the heavily competitive nature of the top 30 term, and the fact that I do basically zero work to get links on that site, I am totally satisfied with that placing, it's way better than the > 200 it used to be.

The advice efv gives is good, as long as the site hasn't used spammy methods ever in its past, including fake link building etc. If it has, don't blame google for that.

By far the most accurate way to think of google is not as a search engine, but as an advertising portal that you would like to maybe get free placement on. It's very easy to get placed on it, just pay adwords.

This is hard to get for some people, but google is a media company that sells advertising, that's its business. They offer search not for you the site owner, but for their clients, the searchers, who have almost nothing to do with, or in common with, people like us.

To go with the writing analogy a bit more, I could sit around complaining that my writing hasn't gotten published, or I could find a way to get it published. One thing's for sure, in terms of writing, I definitely wouldn't try to get published with the top companies if I was serious about writing. And I could complain about the oligarchal media consolidation in the USA, or I can just deal with it and go on.

It's not actually a very difficult or complicated choice to make, and it's exactly the same with google, if you want in, do what it takes to get in. If it's not working, figure out why. Not everyone should get in, although everyone thinks they should, which tends to get pretty annoying, especially when you actually look at some of the sites people think should be ranking, but that's too unpleasant to get into more.

google isn't a black box, it's a bunch of programming written by programmers who think a certain way. It's a bunch of writing, in other words, it can be read like any other book or program, even if you can't see the source code, you can see what it does.