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If you speak to all the best Internet Marketing Pros they tell you SEO is a waste of time longterm, everyone in the industry has lost their position at somepoint from what I gather - or am I wrong?
I want to hear from anyone who has had long term success with SEO say for 6 months or longer....
Is it not possible to rank sites anymore if they are just this? This is equally user-orientated. Just because a site doesn't have forums, chatrooms, endless pages of reviews, shouldn't mean it doesn't deserve to rank high.
I have never checked this phrase in google that I have not seen fringe, marginal, or off-topic sites listed ahead of mine. There's a personal (tripod) home page that hasn't been changed since 2001 that has held # 2 in google consistently for a LONG time for my phrase. On the other hand, I'm not going to complain about hanging in the top 5-10 SERPS for google for a LONG time myself. For this phrase I'm also #2 @ alltheweb, #3 @ altavista, #2 @ lycos, #2 @ dogpile, #16 @ overture, #8 @ yahoo, and #32(!) @ MSN.
I held #3 @ Google for a long stretch until this year, when I noticed the only significant change in Google's algo re: my phrase and that is this: It's a fact that I have over 300 backlinks on the web - a great many of these in various directories that (I guess) get info from DMOZ or Yahoo. I can turn these up in Google by searching on my domain name (which is very unique) and excluding results FROM my domain.
However, a link:www.mydomain.com search in Google turns up a total of 25 backlinks. I don't know this to be true, but in my case it would appear that earlier this year, Google decided to discredit a lot of second tier directory type sites as it pertains to backlinks. I'm listed in the Yahoo, Google, and DMOZ directories, and these are the only 3 directory type sites that show up in a backlink search on Google, but a normal search for my domain on google shows close to 300 more sites linking to me.
Now I might add that I have never paid for any SEO, search engine submission, etc. The only SEO I use is that I make sure my main keywords are used regularly in the content of my site, but even at that - I won't sacrifice quality of content or ease of navigation to include a keyword. On top of that, I've been at it for 4+ years with this paricular site.
I don't operate the above mentioned site as a business to the extent that some of you do, so the SERP ups and downs don't bother me too much - but I agree with Brett for the most part. If you are going to operate a web site, and hope to profit from it, you ought to have some plan for success other than betting it all on your search engine rankings.
I sell a particular type of widget - I have one of the finest selections of hairy widgets online in the UK, and, because I am a widget expert, probably the best FAQs pages about hairy widgets!
Accordingly, my site has been in the top 3 in Google UK for 2 years.
Now, when I search for widgets, I find a page on a site that has no interest in widgets, they sell hundreds of wotsits - but happen to have a single widget in stock.
[edited by: superscript at 4:39 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
5) Notice that I haven't mentioned anything about links, cloaking, etc. Take that lack of mention to heart, and just add a page of useful hand-written content about your niche to your site every day.Those would be my off-the-cuff recommendations to you.
Thanks GoogleGuy . I think now i know where i was try.
Precisely! And most likely, a 'history of the cheesburger' page would involve so many mentions of cheeseburger, that it would be filtered out by the current algo.
This is why I have had to cloak my History of the cheesburger site ;)
p.s. I prefer my burgers with spam personally ;)
The way I see it, cheating is when you manage to get your worthless spammy site full of affiliate links into the top page of results.
But if your site is a high quality site, then it's not cheating to get it into the top page of the results. You are doing the world a favor.
People are trying to assign moral values to things like anchor text and H1 when such doesn't exist outside of arbitrary rules made up by Google.
The sad fact is that websites don't make it into the top pages of the SERPs naturally. They require SEO to get there. Google now seems to be penalizing sites that have TOO MUCH SEO.
Google has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Amdist the spammy sites were also genuine sites that were doing SEO because it was the only way to not get drowned out by the spammy sites.
SEO takes a lot of effort, so the fact that a lot of effort went into SEOing a particiular site sometimes indicates that the site is actually an important site, because people wouldn't want to put so much effort into an unimportant site.
The problem with the Googlebot is that it has no real way of knowing whether a site is "good" or "bad". To the Googlebot, a page of prose written by a highly skilled writer looks identical to a page of randomly generated words.
[edited by: Small_Website_Guy at 4:51 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
Just more "your fault for being a dolt". Users don't want the history of cheeseburgers and cheeseburger discussions and directions to local cheeseburger stands...they just want the cheeseburger...dilbert thinking at its best.
I saw a similar post by someone. Basically they said that anyone doing any "insurance"-related search clearly wanted to buy insurance. What do you think, James_Dales? Should every insurance search return "buy my policy"? Or would you rather learn about the different types of insurance, and which type of insurance is best for my situation, and what the limits of a policy is? You mentioned inkjet cartridge. Yes, most people typing inkjet cartridges probably want to buy one, and the search results give plenty of places where you can. But to take an example of "U bend" pipes earlier--not everybody searching for that want to buy one. Maybe they want to know how to install one. Or how to take one out if stuff gets rusted. If I'm searching for dryer vents, I might want a dryer vent cleaning service or product, or I might want information about how dryer vents get clogged up and how I'd clean it myself. Good webmasters in commercial areas will sell things, of course, but they'll also have unique information that helps users and differentiates their site.
So you say: If a user types in cheeseburger, it's Dilbert thinking if you believe that the user wants anything other than the cheeseburger. Personally, I think a user who just types in cheeseburger might want information on how many calories are in a Burger King cheeseburger, or a Wendy's cheeseburger, etc. Or they're having a BBQ and would like to cook the perfect cheeseburger and would like a recipe.
From what I can tell from this update many well built ecommerce sites have been booted and replaced by the largest of commercial vendors.
So, if the point was "Hey, everyone can succeed if you build a good site", I believe you are mistaken, at least in the "sales of products" end of ecommerce on Google.
My big problem is, as I've posted before, is that our area is known under three different names all of which produce different results. In order to create a reasonable home page we have to acknowledge that these names exist and that produces repitition of the one common word. It's almost impossible to avoid it. That said I've gone ahead and made some changes to reduce the frequency.
It's all well and good to say that you should try to create 50 pages of content however if the money part of the site is covered by just a few terms and the majority of your visitors only type in different regional terms it is reasonable to assume that I, and the other webmasters in our area, would feature those terms in both titles and text.
And, yes, we do have an AdWords program to supplement this.
The results being provided by Google right now for one of these regional two word terms includes a site with no content (This site is temporarily unavailable. ...) which is in the #1 posistion and has been this way for months.
Our complaint is that we not only fell from number #2 - we disappeared from this term (unless we append -fufuf in which case we are #2).
We will advise if the changes we made have any effect. We are spidered daily.
Similarly, I would hope that 'install U bend' would give me the required info. But if I wanted to buy one, I would hope that 'U bend' would throw up some decent, specialist, high quality plumbing shops.
If you think there's a magic formula to SEO, you're going to be disappointed. The only magic formula that I know of is to build a diversified, content-rich site that users love and link to on their own--the sort of site that you can promote with newsletters, or forums, or any of a hundred different ways such that search engine traffic is nice but not essential. It's harder to do that than to fiddle with PR bars/buy links/sign guestbooks/blogs/whatever, but ultimately if you follow Brett's "build a site in 12 months" guide you'll sleep better and your time will be better spent. Even if Google re-ranks your page, as long as you're building your site primarily for users you know that Google shares the same goal of ranking your site well because users find good information and like your site. Following the sign guestbooks/buy links/PR bar watching path is much more volatile, because you never know when we'll introduce a new classifier, or introduce algorithm improvements that buying links or watching PR doesn't apply to, or introduce new signals of quality.
Try to apply what you are asking to do to an industry like online gambling, and I guarantee you that you will spend one year without seeing any visitor from your site.
I have tried to build a quality site for users and try to make it known via Google and link exchanging, and it has completely disappeared from the search results. Some industries are so competitive that becoming THE BEST site is pure utopia when you don't have at least $10,000 in monthly advertising budget.
My site does not even appear in the first five results for its site name. My site is an internet gambling guide, I have linked with "internet gambling guide", and I am not even at the first ten pages.
Thanks google for having destroyed my small business. Any clarification about the online gambling industry?
[edited by: maxfalcon at 5:10 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
Regarding yoru content rich sites. I have lots of rich content, backlinks etc. I have done everything and stayed in between the google guidelines. But now my site suddenly disappears from SERPs which had been #1 before.
I don't know what's happeneing
Some clarifications GG?
Thanks
I personally am baffled by the update. Building quality content daily is not something that will work for my industry. I have a few content pages and they are the least looked at pages on my site. I deal mostly with businesses and when I get emails or calls, all they want to know is if I can beat the competitor's prices. That's it. Sometimes they want samples but they are mainly interested in price. There are many businesses out there that are similar.
I cannot afford to waffle on every day or even every week, about things that clients are not interested in. I hardly have enough time as it is. I think I will have to accept that Google will not be a source of exposure for me anymore. Here's hoping that Google's domination of the search engine wanes.
