Whitey - 1:29 am on Apr 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

A higher value proposition

It's worth flushing this out some more as i believe it gives some stronger direction to help folks survive whilst the elimination of old signals and techniques countinue to be depricated.

@Cain - if we were planning a strategy out of these painful updates [ for some ], we'd draw a list of things to retire from, and a list of things to work on. Your list makes this clear.

Anything that stands out as a short term advantage, also stands out as a major risk. Anything that builds on "brand" [ Panda style ] provides longer term protection. Good SEO is long term. Bad SEO is short term.

I don't think major offline brands will have as much protection in the SEO game on their company websites. Many agencies that support them are only really providing "enablement services" with crawl access and fundamental organisation. Many engage poor quality link campaigns and unimaginative on page content. Of course there are exceptions - both inhouse teams, and agencies. And these will be the winners.

But let's not forget that organic SERP's are secondary to Google's landing page design. Google is steaming towards owning every single listing with it's own assets.

If folks want to guard against further update hits they must work on the long term value, and truly ask, will they be around as technology accelerates.

[edited by: Whitey at 1:42 am (utc) on Apr 27, 2012]