Forum Moderators: martinibuster
First time poster, although been lurking for a few weeks soaking up the valuable advice...thanks :)
Anyhow, i've read a lot of these links posts and it strikes me you can't beat one-way traffic from respected sites which for many of us is tricky, particularly if you are in a market with niche appeal.
But my thoughts are that it may only be a matter of time before Googlebot and the others work out a way to decipher on-page "content" in such a way as to make this the main reason for high SERPS. Somehow beating the spammers as we know, but effectively replicating what the human eye sees but in "automated" form. It surely must be the ultimate goal at Googlelabs, yes?
So all in all, is spending weeks and months, even years, on achieving good in-bounds ultimately going to succumb to a "Florida"? I'd be interested in what you guys think as frankly, I am limiting my time on links now and concentrating on experimenting with on-page factors.
Cheers
Simmo!
The theory that Google ultimately wants to see webpages like a human visitor has been discussed every once in a while here. Just recently Google hired Ben Goodger, a lead developer of Mozilla/Firefox, and that stirred speculations again.
My question to you is: for whom do you build your site? For spiders, or for human visitors? If you build it for visitors, then you should not be afraid of future development in that area. So what is useful to visitors? Content. And if you can't provide the content? Links to other sites where they may find it. The very fabric of the web is links. They can NEVER be considered harmful. Their weight in the ranking algorithm might decrease, or maybe not. But if set wisely, and ultimately useful for a visitor, they can never harm you!
Thanks for your reply - its good to be onboard. I totally agree with your sentiments regarding making visitors the prime focus of a site. In reality, there will always be changes to SEO techniques until such a time as the SE's provide a good manual review process, perhaps even with randomised results, or some form of technology can do this. Just wonder how far away this is at places like Google etc as we've seen Yahoo's directory and DMOZ struggle to achieve this 100% effectively.
Time will tell I guess :)
Simmo!
Sure it is abused but so is every factor of SEO, so it makes all the more sense for Google to keep it as one of many important factors in the mix.
"Do you need some help, sir?" I inquired.
"No, it's okay." he replied.
"What are you doing?" I asked as he turned on his knees and headed off crawling in a new direction.
"I'm looking for my keys", he informed me.
Somewhat distraught, I looked over the illuminated area with my keen vision and saw no glint of anything that might be a set of keys. "Are you sure you lost them around here?" I asked.
"No", he replied, "but this is where the light is."
Given the fellow had thick-lensed glasses and consumate poor vision (or he wouldn't have been on his hands and knees under that HID), his only hope for finding his keys was in the area well illuminated, despite the fact that he had absolutely no chance of finding them there since they were not in that area, I left him to crawl, and have regretted it ever since.
Thus, to you I say, "Your keys are not here, may I call you a cab?"
But my thoughts are that it may only be a matter of time before Googlebot and the others work out a way to decipher on-page "content" in such a way as to make this the main reason for high SERPS. Somehow beating the spammers as we know, but effectively replicating what the human eye sees but in "automated" form. It surely must be the ultimate goal at Googlelabs, yes?
Given that google could do such a thing, and that many pages can rank equally or so nearly so via on-page optimization, it does not solve the question of how to rank the pages. On-page SEO is the easy part. Getting links is the hard part.
Let's look at ranking a page/site from the google linking perspective, just for jollies. Take a site like Yahoo or Microsoft. Literally hundreds of thousands of other sites link to these sites. Are they important. You betcha they are. Now, let's take a site like yours, that no one links to. Is it important? Not likely. If no one links to your site, then, really, how important can it be? C'mon, there are millions of other websites out there and you can't get one of them to link to your site? So, on the one hand we have known sites with hundreds of thousands of links and pretty much everyone agrees they are important sites. Then, on the other hand, we have your site and a hundred thousand other ones that no one links to, and barring the opinions of those hundred thousand owners of those hundred thousand sites that no one will link to, no one else will cast a vote to say one of these sites is worthy. Thus, we might conclude that sites with the most links are the most important sites and sites without links are unimportant sites, and we rank them accordingly.
Anyway, I hope you'll find some humor here and not cut me to shreds as I deserve, and BTW, welcome to WebmasterWorld!
On page SEO has done it's day. If you've done the basic on-page SEO, move on, get some links. Yes, linking is more difficult than on-page SEO. Yes, it has more rewards. And after you get a few links, don't be shy, go get some more.
I have a sense of humour so your post is appreciated :) I get your point and there is sense in there.
I have around 265 inbound links, which are a mix of reciprocals and one-way, which is ok but my original point i guess is: am i better off working on content than links, or a mix thereof, looking to the longer term.
Your point is interesting and goes some way to convincing me a balance of both is my best option.
Thanks
Simmo!
two pages about "big wet smelly widgets", one of these pages if full of content, and the other page merely needs to use that keyterm and link to the page of content.
after that, it's purely a matter of getting links to that page. Sure, I can add another 1000 or 10,000 words to that content page, but does that additional content make the page rank any higher? not significantly, and it is possible it could make it rank worse.
I get a lot of pages to rank #1 and #2 or #3 and #4, with the 2nd ranking an indented result, and this listing is usually to the page that links to the content page. Yes, I can sometimes get additional pages to rank from the same domain for the same keyterms, but in most cases you are just going to get one page in the top 10, sometimes with a 2nd page as an indented result.
once that content is there, and it is optimized, that's all I can do for that page, via on-page manipulation. very limited. however, getting links is unlimited.
the way to determine if you have enough links is easy, just check to see if you are #1. If you are not, get more links, and then repeat. If you are #1, get more links and repeat, to make sure you stay there.
my point to all this is that content development can only bring you so far. So, assuming a site has an acceptable amount of content, I find that my efforts are best applied to getting links.
Personally I think you're approaching this view the wrong way around.
I am limiting my time on links now and concentrating on experimenting with on-page factors.
I think you're doing the right thing, but the reality is, good quality content will always attract inbound links. If your content is good, you score on both counts.
TJ
