Forum Moderators: open
Hypothetical example:
Domain: widgety-widgeters-widgets.com
Content: affiliate website with product descriptions copy pasted from widget manufacturers description (not duplicate content on the same site or conglomerate of sites).
Page Titles: Widgety Widgeters Widgets from DeepestWidgetland, Widgety Widgeters from DarkestWidgetland etc as meta title and variation in H1 page title - hundreds of pages.
Links - few hundred links in, ie more time spent on creating relevant page content than attemting to get 1000s of links.
Now the theory is (or used to be) with Google, is that if people can see what you were doing (ie not hidden or cloaked etc) then it's good so long as you dont plaster the keywords al over the pages in a high density fashion (ie obvious spam).
Add link PR into the equation and this 'quality' content (consider here we are not looking for unique content as the first hundred plus SERPS are affiliate sites with same copy anyway!) and you should do well.
My experience however is more and more, that high PR, often with mulitple domain conglomerates (ie false PR) of little or no copy pasted content (ie really really lazy webmasters) are getting the top SERPS, followed by even more sites whose pages are listed purely on the basis that many links to the page have the keyword.
Seems to me Google is penalising H1 en mass widget pages (ie well titled pages of what the punters are actually looking for) in favour of en mass keyword intensive dodgy content bound links!
Google is heavily heavily favouring PR over content it seems to me, this has to be a major no no if things are to improve.
The balance just doesn't currently favour relevant content enough, I feel this is because it's quite easy to alter the rankings to disfavour webmasters who are trying 'too hard' with their titles etc - ie perhaps Goggle perceive this a being likely spam and thus went too far in combating the 'widgety, widgets are good at widgety widgeting widgets in widgetland' spammers, whereas perhaps they have problems with multiple IP interlinked domains which currently confuse the hell out of the algo but are totally obvious to a human being.
You could argue 'who cares about affiliate sites whose content is the same' that's the affiliate webmasters problem' - but since most e-commerce is based on such services, these searches become the real test of Google - same content sites jousting for position for very important searches with regards to people wanting to buy stuff.
Result currently is that such webmasters have taken the linking/interlinging/domain thing to such great heights of ridiculousness as to have Google confused, the PR thing that works well for 'not particularly competitive keywords' really struggles to cope these days with the affiliate breed of site (and let's face it, the affiliate sites can in theory present the infomration in a much better or more focused way to surfers than the originators of the content/services/products so they are important for many big big searches).
Something's gotta change!
Mummy, my Google gone and broked! Bwaaaaaaaaa.....
from a users point of view if the first 100 sites are all doing the same thing the truth is they are all pretty much equal anyway.
if you're playing that kind of game, indeed any kind of game, then you have to go with the flow, if the strategy 'a' works better than strategy 'b' then it makes sense to follow strategy 'a'
However as you say, if having a hundred and one domains works (ie spam) then go with the flow I guess.
Let's spam!
