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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....
Read around a bit. SE's often change the way they determine rankings. Google got away with the same basic system for almost 4 years, but even they had to ultimately make some significant changes.
If you survive in the top 10 under any keyword for more than 30 days - count your lucky stars, as there is a search engine that has just made a mistake.
The entire concept that you can remain top 10 with the same page under the same kw month-to-month is flawed. Google was a aberration in the grand scheme of search engines. The fact that sites remained in the top ten month-to-month under the same kw's is a testament to the fact that it simply took seo'ers longer to figure out the system and address the new wild cards.
> If you speak to all the best Internet Marketing Pros they
> tell you SEO is a waste of time longterm,
Of course most of us do - we want the "space" for ourselves.
We are content watching the new corporate sem clueless come in and produce results with their checkbook instead of their brain. Combining the entire set of seo's at the top 10 grossing marketing firms on the web today, could not match the top seos in this forum.
We are talking about folks we can marshall 70-100k backlinks in less than a week. Can your corporate "marketing pro" do that? eg: I've never seen an industry where more "pros" are more clueless about what they've done.
Case-in-point: I was recently at a conference where I was talking with a "top" PPC manager. I happened to ask him what his user agent name was while querying Overture for results. He asked, what's an agent name? That was from - a noted conference speaker - a noted seo book author - and a speaker that charges $400 per person per night. Utterly, clueless about this industry.
> everyone in the industry has lost their position at
> some point from what I gather - or am I wrong?
One site/page goes down in the rankings a month and the one that *was* down goes up - the cycle repeats itself. You are never penalized out of existence or even troubled by what happened this month. There are far more SEO's this month that made out like bandits than there are whinning in the update thread about their little ol lost index page. So what if you lost 1 index page out of as few as two - you do have two right?
Here is your sign for anyone whinning about this update: newbie. Learn to ride out whims of the algo with diverse content.
> I want to hear from anyone who has had long term success
> with SEO say for 6 months or longer....
How about since the first Google update in 98 just as they built the first 25million page index. Here, one of, or THE most often read doc in google history from summer 98: [searchengineworld.com...]
Long term SEO rocks on the net today because those that survived the purges, survived because of one simple premise: diversification. Build pages big, small, in between, high density, low density, multiple small domains, single big domains, lots a links, no links, deep content, shallow content, but content, content, content. Keep those users come back for more. Make the search engines your unwritten partners - even when you feel they let you down. Give the visitor what they want, when they come from an SE to your site.
Long term SEO? It is the ONLY kind of SEO that does work [webmasterworld.com].
If you survive in the top 10 under any keyword for more than 30 days - count your lucky stars, as there is a search engine that has just made a mistake.If that is true, it would create an enormous opportunity for anyone who could build a search engine that could produce relevant results for more than a month at a time. Fortunately, its just not true. I found the entire post to be rather condescending. I am certain there are many webmasters in this forum that followed the steps to a successful site with Google alone and were penalized. In fact, following those steps to a tee seems to be exactly what Google is penalising.
Hehe, my feelings are not bruised. Thanks for your concern.
<<I found the entire post to rather condescending. I am certain there are many webmasters in this forum that followed the steps to a successful site with Google alone. In fact, following those steps to a tee seems to be exactly what Google is penalising.
>>
This is exactly what I was responding to in Jak's post. Sorry, Jakpot, if your feelings were bruised :)
Thsi really wasn't in defense of my sites, which overall are doing better than ever as well. It is addressing the fact that many, many webmasters have killer content and they got spanked this week.
We are talking about folks we can marshall 70-100k backlinks in less than a week.If anything deserves a penalty, that would be it.
Awesome! Every day I learn I've got a lot to learn!
I do know what an agent is though :)
I don't think you care about any kind of penalty. Penalty don't work on the pro SEO
There are authority sites on specific topics. If Google doesn't have those authority sites in the top 10 results, Google is failing. Google used to be pretty good at delivering that, that is why it was so popular. You typed in some search term and got relevant results.
People are pissed because they developed high quality sites and optimized those sites for Google. Google appears to be punishing people for this optimization. It's one thing to get knocked down from #1 for 2 years to #12 in a shuffle. It's another thing to get knocked to oblivion.
EXACTLY the tactic that Google is now addressing with this update!
In SEO, particularly since the latest Google update, some say "diversity, diversity, diversity."
Okay, I'll tell you what the long-term should really be about. It's "anti-monopoly, anti-monopoly, anti-monopoly." This is where nearly everyone in the SEM business has failed to see the light.
Let's assume the worst -- that Google has opted for having a non-commercial "white pages" for the organic SERPs, alongside a PPC AdWords strip on top and down the right side. How would they do this? Probably the best way is to do what they seem to be doing with this latest filter move. You start sniping at the optimized pages in the organic SERPs based on how well they overlap with your AdWords terms. This forces many sites from the left side to right side, and makes more money for Google.
Soon it will all be over except for the screaming from little guys who made their living off of the Web (who hears little guys scream anyway?). At that point Google pulls the plug on the commercial sites that remain in the white pages. By now they're all super-ugly, trashy, directory-spam sites anyway, and no one will miss them.
Can Google pull this off? Sure it can. The FTC won't mind at all; it's not something they'd object to. At most the FTC might object to nondisclosure on Google's part about what they're doing. But that little objection -- if it ever becomes an issue -- could be solved in five minutes with one press release from the Googleplex: "In response to the spam problem on the web, we are phasing in a new system whereby all e-commerce is on one side of the screen, and noncommercial results are on the other side. Everything will be clearly labeled." End of discussion.
Could Google pull this off if they didn't have 80 percent of all external referrals on the web? No.
Could Google pull this off if every journalist on earth except Mr. Orlowski and Ms. Olsen didn't slobber over Google at every opportunity? No.
Could Google pull this off if every time Google Watch was mentioned on Slashdot or other low-IQ forums, hordes of teenie geeks and script kiddies denounce anything anti-Google as "Unkool, Dood, cuz Google rocks!" No.
There's a lot of talk about not putting your eggs in one basket. But from the same mouths, I keep hearing Google defended at all costs. I think SEOs have, to a large extent, brought this on themselves by helping Google overhype itself. Now Google doesn't need them anymore unless they are willing to pay.
Tsk, tsk.
But what if you're trying to promote your main site in Google? In that case, your domain, your content and you branding are too important to try a whole bunch of high risk/reward methods. Some people need their primary domain to do well, month after month. That's when it all begins to look like Brett's 26 steps and it's why I spend more time telling clients what they should not do as what they should do.
Every so often there's a significant change at Google. There are always some webmasters who feel that the change is unfair, random or unfathomable; that SEO is some kind of witch craft and that no one has any answers. It isn not all luck, however.
Since December 2001 (please tell me that needs no explanation!), some people have taken the view that Google SEO has as much to do with avoiding penalties as it has to do with helping the bot acknowledge relevance and importance. It is possible to trip filters with or without aggressive SE promotion tactics, yet many people want to think of them purely in moral terms to be argued instead of software to be analysed. I'd argue that Google's current round is quite well focussed, but I'm sure I'm in the monority here.
I know at least half a dozen people who saw the new types of changes in Google before last weekend. The filters applied to far less pages over the previous month or so, but they were there.
What happens next? Google tested, now apply their new feature widely and after a while we should expect them to reign it in a little like they normally do.
Ask anyone who has an idea about these filters if AdWords is a factor and they'll laugh. Really.
Other webmasters quietly benefited from their gains.
The rest of the world didn't seem to see the problem, there were still widget stores and content sites listed on Google when they searched.
Change will happen again as change has happened before. It is part of the landscape we inhabit if we choose to take an interest in Google.
