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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....
DO a search for Trade Show Displays and the add your
-showmethegoodstuff and look at the reults vs.
-mt-tb.cgi
On my end the showmethegoodstuff doesn't do a thing...
Interesting post. May have merrit; I'm not smart enough to reverse engineer these crazy SERP's and know if they are far smarter than I am, or what. (Can SERP's be smarter than I am? ... Don't know.)
Here's what I do know. The theory merlin30 put forward (whether it's correct or not) reminds me of a time in the 1940's when everybody and their mother was talking about the next big thing: robots. Robots were going to clean our houses, change the lighting in our homes based on the lighting outdoors, tell us when flashlight batteries were running low, etc.
Very exciting stuff.
However, if your vacuum cleaner broke down and you had the neighbors coming over Saturday night for martinis and pot roast, you still had to find a vacuum cleaner store...and buy a new vacuum!
I feel like I'm in the 1940's, just found out about Google, searched on "vacuum cleaners" with my computer that doesn't exist yet, and found a bunch of great sites on the future of robots: US Govt sites, news articles, grrreat stuff.
Not really helping with my rug problem though, now is it?
Hey steveb, no matter, those robot sites are still great information sites! If I only had time to read about the future of robots. Nope, got to get that rug cleaned or my wife will make me wait another month for Sunday morning sex. Hmmm, maybe the Yellow Pages... ;-)
p.s. merlin30 I'm not saying you're wrong or right...only that if you're right, G has it wrong. They are about 60 years ahead of their time.
You found an old article by Mr. Orlowski critical of the high rankings enjoyed by blogs on Google. He mentioned that there is a way to exclude blogs.
The hyphen or minus sign directly in front of a search term tells Google that you want everything for the terms in the search box except the term that is preceded by the minus sign.
Mr. Orlowski's mention of the blog trick is designed to specifically exclude trackback links. What we are talking about is using the exclusion trick to fool the filter that Google imposed with this latest update, which started a week ago. The blog trick is apples, this is oranges. When Mr. Orlowski wrote this article, the current update was still in the future.
Any nonsense exclusion term apparently fools the parsing of the terms in the search box such that the filter is not tripped. If you have only two search terms, then adding one nonsense exclusion term will probably work. If you have three search terms, then it seems you frequently need two different exclusion terms after them, for a total of five terms. If the trick doesn't work for a single exclusion term on your site, then I would suggest that when you don't use quotation marks, as you shouldn't in this case, an embedded hyphen lacking another leading space will be parsed as two exclusion terms.
It's a bug! For some reason your example might need two exclusion terms. Sure, it's weird. Exploiting bugs is always weird science.
Almost all of us know this by now. It has nothing to do with the specific exclusion term mentioned in Mr. Orlowski's piece.
We're trying to defeat the filter so that we can get a picture of what Google is doing. So are you. But we're ahead of you.
Scroll down to "Google Update, Part 4" and read all 626 posts. You'll see several instances where I and others have explained this in great detail.
You found an old article by Mr. Orlowski critical of the high rankings enjoyed by blogs on Google.
Orlowski thought Google would get rid of "blog noise". Orlowski was totally off base on that one. Google kept the blogs, and got rid of "SEO noise".
Blogs aren't SEOed, except that bloggers have an ethic of freely exchanging links with each other, while commercial website guys have the opposite ethic (because they are so worried that someone else might get more benefit from the link than they do).
I manage about a dozen sites from small fry to international corporations. None were radically affected by the sppring Google change- some keywords dropped in ranking for a few weeks then bounced back to page 1 and 2. This last change has left some term rankings alone, raised some, and caused my top site to basically disappear for 3 of their most relevant critical search terms.
The larget client sells, installs and services a variety of widgets worldwide starting at about $50,000 a widget. They are an extermely relevant result for their products. They have been an award winning industry leader for 13 years but when I took over almost 2 years ago they were nowhere on any of the engines.
Meeting with much resistance I began adding pages and content for each type of widget- how their used, features, benefits etc. I used every possible variation on the widget names in the text with the most popular terms in page titles and header.I added text links so the spiders could reach every page, I built carefully worded inbound text links from relevant industry sites and stayed away from both non-relevant site link requests and link farms. I hand submitted to hundreds of engines worldwide. AND I avoided any questionable tactics- no hidden text, no cloaking,no excessive keyword density, no deceitful redirects.
Since mid 2002 they have been on page 1 for over 20 top terms on all engines -US and foreign. So have all of my other smaller clients- most have gone from nowhere to page 1 within the 1st month of my starting work- some terms have taken a little longer.
All survived intact the spring Google changes. But not this time- although I have not changed my tactics and all are very relevant for the terms for which they have disappeared. The terms for which they have risen are not as relevant or as high traffic.
The #1 spot for all of the terms used by my top client -have been held for 2 years by a site with hundreds of words hidden in the page with font color matching the background, with massive keyword density- and apparently breaking every rule laid down by Google. I have submitted Google spam reports but thye are still there. As a matter of fact thye are still #1 on the terms for which we (and all other top competition) disappeared. And they are blatently breaking the Google "law" The other top 50 results are garbage- news links and old links to companies that are out of business. These are very specific product "widget" terms. None is going t obe looking to eat one or learn the history. If they search for this widget it is because their business is looking at buying one.
RE ad words- the top terms for which all relevant non-spamming sites disappeared - are all hot terms on google and Overture ppc. The top 6 spots always run $15- $20 per click 7 days a week. All of the advertisers for these widgets - have been dropped from the top 100 search results.
All clients have maintained their top spots on other engines such as msn, ask jeeves, looksmart and allthe web.
The thread theory on a Google ad words conspiracy could have some validity. The terms I've seen most affected are all high price ppc ads. I pay close attention to search results and web statgies of the client's competition AND all of the advertisers have disappeared from the results - whether they were formly on page 1 or page 4- now they are gone from the top 100.
Based on the latest results I implemeted 2 differnet strategies last night on 7 of the webpages (out of a total of 100 + pages)
On some I left the tex tand titles bare bones -removed almost all cases of the widget name- whic hmakes the text read abit odd in places. On others I beefed up the keyword density and header use and altered keywords proximity to one another in sentence structure. The majority of the pages I did not touch. So, I have 3 possibilties for Google to explore- if none work- I'll vote for the commerical adwords theory- thye want to boot all commercial sites out and to adwords- bet they picked up some new clients today.
A final note and then I'll disappear back into the wood work. Some in this long thread seem to feel that google results are screwed for commercial sites but not informational sites. Last night I was researching data for a magazine article I'm supposed to be writing. Has nothing to do with any commercial ventures or widgets. Of course I went to google. It was a wasted 2 hours. I finally used some bookmarked reference sites to dig for the required information- google was useless.
Though I would give both google, msn and alltheweb (sometimes touted as a google contender) a shot at website stat programs- alltheweb and google were same level of useless. Surprising note- many of the same page 1 results? Haven't seen this before. And what does the #2 Florida dept of health or #5 Minnesota Education (on both searches) have to do with me looking for info on website stat programs?
web statistics programs was only minimally better results on all 3.
I'm ready for a switch- but is there a decent engine anywhere? any suggestions? And if so, could the word be spread? Gleefully awaiting the Yahoo/ Overture? inktomi spilt from google as Yahoo spreads their wings. The less of a strangle google has on the engines, the better. Long ago, before Google I was a netscape fan- before their demise.
Of course we have to optimize for google, they can never change that, they have only changed the rules for SEO but they can never stop the game.
As long as you have that mind-set you are going to lose "the game". Google never has and never will tell you "the rules" so you are playing blind-folded. By the time you *think* you have figured out one of the rules, it will have changed.
Google wants to return relavent results for humans, optimize your site for humans and you are Google are singing from the same song book. *Try* to optimize for Google SERPs and you WILL ALWAYS lose.
This is not an unfounded theory but a method that has and does work for ALL that all that are brave enough to 'step outside the SEO box' that most have been brainwashed into thinking.
Winnipeg real estate
Well I just did and the number 1 site reads
<<Welcome to our Web Site!
We are a leading provider of real estate valuations and advice Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and surrounding area.>>>
What on earth is wrong with that?
On the changing of SE's. Name one other popular SE that spiders ALL web pages in the world for free. All the biggies are pay for inclusion, PPC and alike.
Dave
[edited by: Dave_Hawley at 7:01 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2003]
Check the google forums last spring - if you thought this was panic do some reading about G pre summer 03. We still have no idea how long this will last.
if you thought this was panic do some reading about G pre summer 03
....and always from those that have been SEO brainwashed.
Dave
