falsepositive - 3:33 pm on Jun 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

I feel for people who have devoted dozens or even hundreds of hours in an effort to restore their websites after the Panda slaughter. It looks like some or even much of that may have been in vain.

I've done a lot of work and still am in the midst of what may be a very long revamp. We never know what the future will bring. Any of these search engines can introduce a new formula that scores user metrics in the future. Or bring in social indicators. Who knows. I have changed my perspective to stop chasing money and start chasing users. The jaded among us will say it's a waste of time. I'm doing it for insurance and because I realized I was actually doing some things the wrong way...

As far as my SEO experience - I stick to the basics. Good quality pages that validate. I let the links come on their own.

I did a lot of proactive link building before, but am now more and more of the mind to just let things be. I prefer to work on my site anyway, rather than run after links. After Panda, I wondered how much of my link building efforts did in fact help me? Most of the links I got from huge quality sites were natural. The links I got by my own efforts were from smaller sites (peers in the niche).