Google SEO longterm?

[layer8]

I had a site, SEO was done, was in top rankings for about 2 months then overnight for no reason site was positioned way down the rankings. All practices were ethical and it seemed no point or logic to this what happend to me.

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....

[troi21]

How many of us blindly trust that Google/the world will reward them for their efforts in building "good content sites?"

I don't. Like I said before, for my industry (printing) a constant turnover of content pages is just not possible. Prices are what my visitors are interested in and we were thriving because of our high visibility on Google. Now the time has come to increase efforts in other marketing areas and forget Google. My blood pressure can't take the ups and downs of the update.

[Small Website Guy]

SEO is to websites as the "Shopper's card" is to supermarkets.

I HATE those shopper cards, I hate having to carry around extra junk in my wallet, and I hate the fact that some big corporation want's to track what I purchase on a computer.

Yet the marketing experience of the supermarkets have shown that the shoppers card helps them increase sales. That's all that they care about.

In the same way, I'm willing to decrease the quality of my sites to increase traffic. How's that? By linking to disgusting ugly sites so they will link back to me. By repeating keywords to the detriment of good writing. By spending time doing this stuff instead of increasing the quality of the site.

[synergy]

How is "buy business widgets" a generalization? That seems a pretty specific search to me.

Please re-read my post as I think you misunderstood what I was saying. "Business Widgets" is a very generalized search that has generalized results. A search for "Buy Business Widgets" is not a generalized search, thus having more relevant serps that let you "buy business widgets" rather than learn how to "make a business widget origami figure" as one top10 result for "business widgets" currently shows.

It's not Google who will train users... users train themselves by using an SE. They will use whatever combination of KW's that get's them what they are looking for.

I agree. The point I was making is that people will start learning that they will need to be more detailed in what they are searching for.

[Miop]

I have a site with good content - I sell noun widgetry which is also an artform - people do not come to my site to read all about this artform - there are plenty other sites for that.
What this sounds like is that if I want to get found for noun widgetry, I will have to add dozens of pages of waffle. If tried to add a fresh page of content every day, I would have more waffle than products.
There is an irony also in this, in that if you now search for noun widgetry, you don't get information sites abour the artform, and only one or two of the results are noun widgetry shops, the rest are all shopping malls which advertise sellers which sell everything.
How can a shopping mall with perhaps 0.05% of its listings being dedicated to noun widgetry, be more relevant than a site which informs about the artform, or a single shop which sells nothing but noun widgetry?

Thirdly, GG says we should try and capture more search terms - what are you supposed to do when your customers only ever use the term noun widgetry, or noun-thingying-widgetry (neither of which term I show up for anymore...)? My site is optimised for hundreds of wide ranging terms, and can be found on top for most of them, but if people don't use these terms to search, I might as well not be there.

I would love to go away and make my site better for people, and hope that I once again become at least visible for noun widgetry, but I wouldn't even know where to start anymore.
I can only wonder why not one of the other search engine agrees with G's results. (except those which are fed by it...)

[Kackle]

The number one site for cheeseburger is a hoot. But I know why. Googlers only eat gourmet lunches. Check out the number three site for gourmet lunches.

Superscript: You can't test that way. You have to take a page that is penalized for a particular search term, change the filename on that page to a file on the same domain with approximately the same PageRank, de-optimize for the problem search term, wait for the freshbot to update, and see if it's still penalized. If it recovers its ranking, then the penalty was page-specific. If not, then do the same test except jump to a new domain with the de-optimized page. Evidence suggests that the parsing of pages for "bad" keywords is probably done once per crawl, which would mean that merely de-optimizing a page won't help you until the next update. Unless, that is, you define it as a different page (or even a different domain?).

[maybej]

Maybe someone suggested this already, but...
Is it possible that this last change was a manual one? Maybe it was a combination of algo tweaks, but mainly it was just google staff manually targeting sites they got complaints about? For companies that had SEO done on them and can't understand why it's happening to them, is it possible that some user or some competitor complained about it to google and google responded? It's true that legitimate sites may have been penalized, but maybe this was a manual shift and mistakes were made?

[Napoleon]

>> Building good content sites is the best thing for users, and we're trying to bring those results to users <<

GG: And this new approach does that? I genuinely can't believe that you really believe that. Check out the number of content providers who are now moving over to spamming (your definition, not mine).

Check in at the reality hotel. I'm actually desperately sad about this, I really truly am, because I thought Google had the potential to continue to build a wonderful "Mom & Pop" (as you seem to call it Stateside) way forward for everyone. You could have continued to defy the commercial shortcuts and could have made a real difference long term.

What a pity.

[flicker]

>people will start learning that they will need to be more detailed in what they are searching for.

I think a lot of searchers already know how to do this... I mean, I get 4-word queries all the time on pages aimed at grade-school students. It would seem the proverbial 8-year-old knows how to make searches more specific. (-:

So is the current theory now that one-word and four-word searches are getting different treatment from Google (the one-word searches being assumed to be vaguer, and the multiple-word searches more specific)? If so, it's an idea that could use a little refinement (some single words are already extremely specific, especially technical terms), but definitely a step in a good direction. Honestly, if somebody just comes in looking for "cats" the shotgun effect is probably the best chance at serving them; if they ask for "BreedX cat breeders in LocationY" it's reasonable to assume they know exactly what they're looking for.

[superscript]

Hi Folks,

This isn't sour grapes - I honestly think surfers will go to a different SE. I was explaining what had happened to Google to some friends in the pub last night (none of them work on the INet). They said they only occasionally used Adwords when shopping, they much preferred to chose a site from what they called 'the proper listings'.

[edited by: superscript at 7:30 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]

[ineedmoreexercise]

"I think people will click on and start to use extra words when searching"

I don't think so. Some people might. Others don't want to take extra time to refine a search they previously used to be able to conduct without needing to refine...

They will move on, and find a new place to get search results.

Honestly, for many searches I have tested the results are what I would expect to see from back in 1997.

I am seeing sites in the top 10 that basically have not been updated in years.

It is laughable. Good businesses have been replaced by outdated, un-updated, abandoned sites.

Ho ho ho, it's not Merry Christmas, it's a bottle of rum.

[c1bernaught]

I don't think it's about "good content" anymore. It's about "lots of content".

For the terms I watch it's the massive dynamic sites that are doing well... probably because of the second new piece.. which is "relevance" is out and "obscure relevance" is in.

So... in order to get to the top you need to have tons of barely relevant pages. This will net you all of the low quality, low traffic search terms... this way the highly competetive keywords can be bid on through Adwords....

[curlykarl]

They will move on, and find a new place to get search results

I,m ok then, two word searches on other engines still bring the desired results, there is more to life than Google :)

Karl

[edited by: curlykarl at 7:34 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]

[superscript]

Also Ineedmoreexercise, its tempting to think that people *know* what the correct search terms are. Sometimes you have to use a broad search to get into the subject, find a relevant site, do some reading, then refine etc. etc. (I guess its called 'research'!) But if the first word or word-pair comes up with off topic pages all the time ...search over, hello AV.

[deanril]

If Searchers cant find where to buy Widgets they will buy somewhere else, and Google will ultimately lose.

This plan was not well thought out by the Suits at google, just a half brained idea.

I remember Voodoo saying we wont sell the chips, we'll make the video cards ourselves(another half brained idea). Where is Voodoo Now.

Another thing Yahoo is not playing ball as far as I can tell, those Serps are a week+ old. Inkomi hurry up!

[caveman]

IMHO, Miop's post #211 captures the essence of a very widespread problem that is killing thousands of legitmate sites of all kinds.

Sites generally about e-commerce are best when they are utilitarian; find the product, get in, get it bought. Who has time?

And if I want to read reviews of goods or services, I rarely read the reviews at the site I'm buying at anyway, since those reviews are too often slanted to the items/brands being sold there. That is what the review / editorial sites do well.

When algo changes shake things up and webmasters complain about unfair changes or lost ranking, I have little sympathy; particularly when changes are an attempt to stem spam and improve SERP's...that's life and all those "rethink your business model" comments apply to the whiner on those days.

However, when a SE turns against anyone on the Web who is trying to sell things for a living (or at least anyone who is not a multi-billion $ company)...that's a different matter.

Spammy affiliate sites, spammy e-commerce sites - they are a blight on the Web.

But affiliate marketing per se? Small and medium sized businesses? I get the feeling that those categories in general have become the object of disdain. Not sure why that is. Especially when AdSense is in effect an affiliate marketing program.