Forum Moderators: open
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....
I've actually been surprised by the number of my clients who tell me "it's ok - I know you're not to blame - the results on Google are obviously a mistake right now. They are totally irrelevant." etc, etc...
Here's my analogy (never a stickler for sanity):
When you grow a beard, it goes through this horrible-looking stage. Unfortunately this is a necessary stage on the way to possessing a full, flowing, luxurious velvetty beard.
Current SERPs might resemble slightly overgrown wispy stubble right now, but give them time and they'll improve. Hopefully. PageRank has been abandoned. Totally. A brand new system for ranking pages was never going to hit the ground running, but I do think it looks like a step in the right direction.
Many SEO techniques will no longer work. It has become much harder to game the system I think. This is great news for the searching public, and horrible news for most people here at WW. Other forums are also aimed at webmasters, so that explains the current torrent of dissatisfied posts and threads for sure. Joe public, whilst maybe confused at Google throwing up irrelevant results, probably won't care too much.
If Google continues in this vein, people will naturally gravitate towards Altavista, or another engine. That will happen naturally. I for one prefer Altavista results at the moment. However, I believe Google will get better over the ensuing months, so will ultimately remain at the top.
Once you throw in the towel on that dream and get back to building content that aims at 100 or 1000 phrases instead of 1, will you ever be successful long term.
As long as you feel you have 1 keyword in life, you will be 100% at the mercy of the algo. In that case, you are not building a business, you are just using se traffic. Please see AdWords and Overture for more info.
> I really don't see why time should
> be a relevant factor in an algorithm.
Because content rich and back link rich sites that have quality traffic do well in Google. That takes time to build and gain a following.
> If a site has content relevant to the search
> term then it should be ranked well.
Ya, and look at how well that theory is working for Excite, NorthenLight, and Infoseek.
Sites that are relevant that people wish to visit and find rewarding should be at the top of the results.
I think everyone closes their eyes and pretends the toolbar doesn't exist and that the log files generated about referrals, traffic, and behavior don't exist. Gee, you don't think Google could have just used some of that data to influence an update? <sarcasm> Nah, rankings are about relevance on-the-page and not about traffic and site utility. ;-) </sarcasm>
> You're making blanket statements
Seriously yes - it's true. Just offering a bit of balance to the noise coming from the other way. It is no more blanketoid than those crying the universe if collapsing because a few index pages are gone from their personal life long pet keywords.
> Do you imagine that all these complaints, and on every
> webmaster board (not just here), are simply people
> whinning because they have lost placement?
There you go. I just spent two hours looking through 30 searches where people sent me examples of index pages that were nuked. Lets look at the industries:
1) travel.
Appears there were some pretty big shakeups in the travel industry sector.
The results in most travel and tourist industries was "suspect" to begin with. Anything done in this update with keyword of any major city in the world with the word "hotel" or "motel" behind it would be a major improvement.
When we think of spammed out messes in Google, we often come around to the adult industry first. The travel and hotel industry run a close second.
Of the 30 sent to me, 12 were travel related. Of those 12, nine of those members were significant posters at WebmasterWorld and other forums.
2) Pharm.
Need we say more?
3) Adult.
Yep, there were many in the adult industry that took some major hits. What algo g applied to shake things up here is yet to be determined, but there are some heavy independent players that hit very hard. (eg: guys that were making 10-20k a day, are down to $0 a day).
4) Affiliate space.
11 of the sites I looked at, the only common denominator I could find? Commission junction links on the page. wait. I'm not saying anything other than that was one of the common denoms. Beats me.</shrug>
Google has had the same basic algo for almost 5 years. In that time, webmasters have come to be trained in classic Google techniques as "optimization". They have become expectant and are exhibiting a righteous sense of entitlement.
Notice there are very few old schoolers hurting in these thread? I've talked with everyone from the mod crew, to many supporters here, to some heavy industry players, and not only were they not effected by this update, some I actually had to inform there was an update.
Only google knows the depth of changes, but as far as I can tell, they were pretty minor in nature and this update did not effect very many people.
[webmasterworld.com...]
You want 50 pages that produce 1 referral each a day and do NOT want 1 page that produces 50 referrals a day.
I have a site that is #1 for Keyword1 and is nowhere to be found for Keyword1 Keyword2. It used to be #1 for both. People search Keyword1 and Keyword1 Keyword2 about equally, the site is equally relevant to both. (Keyword2 is a super common term, Keyword1 is the topic.)
If you think Google has analyzed the toolbar and decided to put the same site #1 for Keyword1 and oblivion for Keyword1 Keyword2, well, I don't know what to tell you. That's completely nonsensical and goes right against what is going on.
Those who run lots of sites are starting to see the patterns of what is going on. Dunno if it is a filter or a bug or what.
Um, there's probably more that I'm not thinking of. :) If something comes to mind, I'll post it again.
thanks to claus for a really clearly-thought out post toward the beginning of this thread, too. Also worth re-reading, along with anything Brett says. :)
Yes agreed, and why im not suffering, but geez where you looking Brett? Its not the results Im looking at for sure
The results are not good for G, whichever way you phrase it
With the years of "SEO bad, google good", I think it might be time to consider that the SEO knows a lot more about the user than the algo wizards.
Any cracks in google from the user perspective will diversify the search landscape, and that is a good thing.
-my2cents
Here's my analogy (never a stickler for sanity):
When you grow a beard, it goes through this horrible-looking stage. Unfortunately this is a necessary stage on the way to possessing a full, flowing, luxurious velvetty beard.
At last--a Webmaster World member who believes in the possibility that Google is Santa Claus! :-)
I have to make a couple of points about Brett's post. As far as I can make out, Brett is in the business of information (about the INet, SEO etc. etc.). Now, the strategy he has suggested is fine for this sector - he provides valuable information, puts up pages, runs a fine informational site like this one. And of course people link to these pages - because the Internet is, and will remain, primarily a source of information. (And I have always thought that the Internet is, in particular, the best source of information about the Internet!)
Now this is Brett's subject - so the strategy is bound to be a success if followed through diligently.
However, my company sells widgets, but let's suppose, hypothetically, that I sell plumbing parts. Now, I could put up a page a day about the history of the U bend, the benefits of plastic over lead piping. It would all be worthy stuff - may attract the odd obscure link, but frankly, isn't never going to give me a PR of 8! (or make me a world famous site!)
For these reasons, I think Brett is being a little uncharitable, and it is of little comfort to me, and thousands of others, that the mods and pros are all fine with the update!
<edit: minor grammatical>
[edited by: superscript at 4:15 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
...Just to try to make it more explicit (from my viewpoint--Brett might not agree with everything I'm saying):
- showing up for one big phrase is probably not the best philosophy. Target a bunch of different phrases. Instead of worrying about rankings, spend a whole day looking at your server logs and the phrases that people have used to reach your site this year. Being #1 for a high-profile keyphrase is nice, but much better to show up for a broad base of queries.
That's certainly been my experience. The great thing about diversity is that it can bring nice surprises. A while back, after a number of readers had e-mailed me with the same question, I decided to make my own life easier by writing a one-page article on what I thought was a fairly inconsequential topic. The resulting article is now one of my highest-traffic pages during much of the year, and it turns up in searches on keyphrases that I never would have thought of targeting if I'd been in an SEO state of mind. Thanks to dumb luck, that inside page is now a major point of entry for my site.
When SEO doesn't work, put your faith in serendipity. :-)
No offense but there are a lot of people toiling away at sites with large content areas that don't ever hit bingo on some kw jackpot and are working on slowly building an audience.
If your 100% ecom and you want to utilize seo as your main point of advertisement you are going to find things tougher and tougher in the age of popularity based search results period. Brett didn't cause this he is just pointing out the obvious.
Sadly, nileshkurhade, sometimes they also resort to cheating ways even more when they are sure of what to do. We've got guidelines on our site at www.google.com/webmasters/ and Brett wrote a lot about how to do this right. You'll also find tons of good info in the archives for this site. But my advice would be something along the lines of 1) make a site map 2) make sure your site architecture such that the spider can find every page if it wants to, 3) pick a small niche where you can be the undisputed best resource. Don't start with something ultracompetitive--look for a fringe or niche or related area where you can present something new, esp. if it's new or useful information that users can't find elsewhere. 4) Once you have a good handle on your niche, expand your horizons. Now that every knows to come to you for reviews/info/analysis about fuzzy used widgets, you can set your sights on just used widgets in general. 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.
