scottsonline - 3:24 am on Oct 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

@huskypup It's like 2004 all over again. Today we noticed a drop in a keyword that brought us maybe 50 clicks a month. The #1 firm that replaced us has that keyword on the homepage 47 times out of 212 words. It's jammed in <h> seven times. It's nonsensical but it's first.

I learned something else tonight doing research in depth. If you play by the rules you lose. For probably 20 moderate traffic keywords it surprised me that the #1 site had over 200 linking domains on that keyword and usually over 3k individual links with the exact same keywords. We are talking about 200k impressions a month per term and without fail not one of the top three tonight on all of those terms had less than 100 domains linking/under 2k matching text links. Many look like afgrrys.com/dfhetjdsa literally gibberish sites but obviously link banks. That shocked me a little as I figured and was always told that would get you banned in google. I now believe those that say the sites on the other end are devalued but not the buyers.

Anyway these are all US sites. So it's not just the foreign sites as I saw a competitor tonight that went from 47th to 3rd in about a month as links increased by 1000s on one super competitive keyword. So long as google rewards a site with perhaps 40k clicks for one keyword set on one campaign....it's only going to get much worse.