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1) "Honestly, it is going to be at least a year for you to see any decent results unless you purchase Google Adwords. Google is pretty much a Pay Per Click search engine now, unless you've been around for a year or more."
2) "I realize it has been 6 months and you have spent over $20,000 on your site. Unfortunately, no amount of money is going to make you rank in the "pure" results. I sincerely apologize for telling you that I thought it would be 2-3 months. I was wrong."
3) "You are asking when your site will start making money? I have no clue, because there is this mysterious "sandbox effect" going on at Google. I know my answer sounds like "smoke and mirrors", but I mean this sincerely, and I don't know how long it will take for things to change."
4) "I'm very disappointed that you have decided to stop using my services and instead are now using spamtheseachengines.com. I've tried to market your site using knowledge I've gained with over 6 years of experience, and unfortunately there is a major delay in seeing the results that I expected. I still believe you are going to benefit, even though spamthesearchengines.com is going to get all the credit."
What are you telling your customers?
What are you telling your customers?That I'll be happy to build them that flash site they always wanted.:)
added, I never mention adwords, only overture.
added2-BTW, I sent Google an email recently expressing my dissatisfaction. I guess their reply is stuck in the sandbox, too.
It will be the end of the SEO industry.
I am glad that I did not leave my day job.
On the other hand, our are still getting good rankings on google and traffic and business as well, but still to maintain the rankings, this is again a huge work. Google is loosing the position they had in the past couple of month. Also agree with PPC engine google is going to be in the comming 1 or 2 year. After the florida update, and the changes we have observed in google, Now Yahoo is search engine which is going to be the number 1 if the google will be doing the same as of now.
What we are suggesting to our customers -
Same that we use to say...
1 month for indexing and first business through site
4-5 months for rankings
Rgds
Exp...
Ha, nice one.
1) Google no longer displays new sites...
Er...it does still do this...
I don't agree with point 2 either. In my view, most of the time, Google shows more relevant results.
Assume for one minute that the sand box was introduced to avoid spam, this lag time will most probably force the (most to lose) SEOs to resort to desperate measures, measures that would not have been needed prior to the sand box. As clients start to threaten the move to spamthesearchengines.com this will not only lead to a loss of client base, jeopardise client’s investments but we will also lead to a rise in black hat.
Most of my new clients have old sites, that has been online for at least 3-5 years. They come to me when they are in the process of re-designing their sites since they have heard that search engines are important. They use Google themselves, or one of Googles affiliated search sites, and want to hear what they can do to rank better.
At least one of them got their new pages indexed by Google within days after putting the new site online, while Yahoo still shows the cache of the site as it looked 4 or 5 years ago (two designs back).
These are small or medium sized companies. Their web entity is important, but they do their business off-line. Still, they want to be visible in SERPs, and I still find it quite doable to achieve that for them.
<added>For brand new sites however... I'm referring to a home cooked version of Bret's one year cycle.</added>
I dont see what has changed except the PR. And to me PR means nothing except getting 100 lame link exchange requests every month.
Im not a SEO expert and I dont know the "tricks" that used to "do good" in SE terms, such as link farming and über-optimized content. But good sites with many backlinks and lots of unique content will still show up high in the SERPs, and that is enough for my customers.
added:
Since you mentioned yahoo & msn, the site Im referring to gets much MUCH better results in google. To me google is and has always been ahead of the other engines.
To me, that prooves that google is still doing its job.
1) Google no longer displays new sites
Wrong! For a new product we started to develop I built a microsite. It resides in a virtual server with the same IP-address as our main site and 2 other sites indexed by Google. It has to a small portion identical content than the main site. And it's a dynamic site usin index.php+parameters.
There was only ONE link from our main site (PR5) to the new site. Nevertheless it was spidered within the same week and showed up in the SERPS the following week. Today, even though not top ranking, it's on the first page of SERPS for almost all important keywords.
I never mention adwords, only overture.
Why?
I still can't figure out why Google gets bashed. Please tell me what search engine has the best mix of thorough and fresh results?
It is certainly not Yahoo or MSN or Teoma. MSN's results from Slurp lag Yahoo's by several months.
Google also shows fresh results, perhaps "competitive" search terms are not as fresh. But why should they be? My their very nature, competitive terms are very likely long-standing "things" of interest.
The other thing I don't understand is why everyone in the "sandbox" is convinced they have better content than those websites currently showing results. Why is your website better? Because you made it?
I going to stop responding to these types of posts because all they seem to be are of the "sour grapes" variety.
Please tell me what search engine has the best mix of thorough and fresh results?Yahoo
Why is your website better? Because you made it?Because it offers, more information in a more user friendly format that is more attractive and more up to date. That and the fact that it used to rank #1 before it was moved to a new domain.
I never mention adwords, only overture.Because I don't like Google anymore.
Please tell me what search engine has the best mix of thorough and fresh results?
Yahoo
Ha! As i said earlier in this thread. One of my customers rank # 1 for the name of their company on Y, but the cache is over 3 years old.
Now, the only page picked up by Y is the index page. Three years ago, that was almost all there was to this site. A business card type of page stating the address.
Google picked up the new pages after a couple of days, the google-bot comes by every day, and the site is climbing the SERPs.
Ha! As i said earlier in this thread. One of my customers rank # 1 for the name of their company on Y, but the cache is over 3 years old.Then you should use their submit url thingy. On the sites in which I have similar rankings on G and Y, the traffic is also similar.
Sell traffic - not rankings - you don't get the moans!
Absolutely, or work for % of profit.
However, I am telling more and more clients to use Yahoo because the results are better and ranking makes more logical sense.
But their customers most likely still use Google and thus you will have to satisfy them on both ends: for their customers and for what they will check out in Yahoo!
Now i can hear THAT discussion: "Now Bob, I rank #3 in that Yahoo! thing. How come my customers don't find my site in Google...?"
You folks struggling with what to tell your clients might try a combination of SEO and PPC. The client gets instant gratification while waiting for core placement results. Everyone is happy.
Sell traffic - not rankings - you don't get the moans!
Amen! Problem is that there are business owners for whom traffic is not nearly the status symbol that a SE ranking is. :)
Anyway, for the original question, the answer depends on how much of our advice/consulting they've agreed to in the development of the site. If they're willing to put in the effort to maintain a site that Google will visit frequently with the kind of quality content Google likes, and adequate backlinks, etc., we tell them they can expect to start seeing some results within a few months. If they're not, then we tell them not to expect results at all. To me, that's pretty much the nature of the biz right now -- if you want to rank well in Google, you give Google the kind of site it wants.
Google, on the other hand, doesn't really help the situation. I do feel it is the beginning of the end of Google. They are doing the exact same thing (IMHO)that led to Yahoo's disenfranchisment with the general public; they are turning away from quality, ingenuity and value in trade for profit margins, hush-hush policies and earning projections.
I couldn't agree more with dvduval. Everytime a new bug is found in Google's algo, there is always this, "Yeah, we're doing it on purpose because we're trying something new" (remember Florida anyone?) or dramatic cloak and dagger statements like, "Things are not at all what they seem to be" with the recent 302 Dupe checker thread.
The fancier the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain, and Google's plumbing is *apparently* getting fancier and fancier everyday. And ultimately, it is we in the design, development, and SEO industry that made Google what it is today, not the other way around.
Google needs to get over themselves. They don't necessarily have the best search algo, they were just the first ones to really market it. And I for one and getting tired of the hype.
</RANT>
I still can't figure out why Google gets bashed
It's quite simple.
There are alot of BAD "SEO Specialists" right now and they're starting to find that the book they read, or the software they bought a year or so ago is now antiquated or no longer being supported.
Sure we've felt the effects of Google's change of "climate" over the past year or so - but we haven't been annihilated like some people seem to have been.
I've been saying for over a year that Google is starting to hang itself - and they will continue to as they slowly seperate themselves from what made them so popular in the first place... their webmaster-friendly index and fresh results (around the board, not just in a few places). If it wasn't for the SEO community - and to give credit where credit is due - WebmasterWorld for it's announcements of the updates and hype built through word of mouth on the forums, I highly doubt that they would have become much more than just another meta. They gave us something new and innovative, then ceased to impress as they readied for the stock market.
But I digress...
There's no reasn why you can't be a successful Internet Marketing Specialst if you truly specialize. However, if you're basing your SEO projects on the work of others - such as being a mesage board jockey instead of getting your hands dirty and trying to dig up scoops of your own - you'll never be ahead of the game... hence, you will not be a very effective search engine professional.
Ad buying is an age old field. Copywriting is an age old field.
I'm sure that some of you would be tits in those fields - so why don't you focvus on offering those services instead of search engine placement? There's just as much money to be made if you're a proactive business person.
Even for customers with older sites, if the PageRank is 4 or below, and you increase links and build pages, those new links and pages are penalized.
I would like to remind you that there are actually 2 penalties in effect right now:
1) The filter that has afflicted sites since March of this year where new links and pages have a negative handicap.
2) The lack of PageRank update ... hasn't been one since June 23rd.
Some would argue about #2 saying that PageRank has been updated, but is simply not visible. I would argue that the new pages where PageRank is not visible are not able to "give" PageRank.
So back to the topic...
My newer customers do not understand why I have been so successful in the past with other sites, yet their site is not doing very well.
While the price of web development has gone down (through outsourcing and open source), the price of web marketing has gone up. And the very people who have always been popular because they produced great results without being blinded by money are showing showing strong signs of a reversal in policy.
So I am forced to tell my customers to stop giving me money, and instead, give it to Google. It's a sad day.
(good thing I have other revenue streams)
added:
Quick question here!
Does advertising in AdWords help to come out of sand box quicker?
So I am forced to tell my customers to stop giving me money, and instead, give it to Google. It's a sad day.
I think this is just what Google want SEO's to do. I do not intend to start another conspiracy theory but you are playing right in to their hands.
Personally I am with Powdork. I never mention adwords but give a gentle push toward overture. I strongly suggest other SEO pros do the same if they get a client wanting instant traffic. It is the only way we can turn this around.
[edited by: Total_Paranoia at 7:40 pm (utc) on Sep. 16, 2004]
Okay, what if SEO professionals built a site for their client but relegated it to it's own folder under their domain as in: www.seocompany .com/client_website/index.html
If the seo company has an old site that is not being sandboxed - the sub-site should perform in an acceptable manner.(If seo site is not sandboxed too).
At the same time, a domain is purchased for the new client and has very little content on it - certainly different content on it, secondary content. Start a link campaign to the new site and get it built up.
After 6-12 months, whenever the sandbox goes away and the incubation period is over, the SEO moves the client's website over to the new domain and puts up "Page Moved" on the old pages. - Once the sandbox is no longer affecting the new domain.
I don't know if sub-domains are being sandboxed [client_website.seocompany...] .com - so I can't suggest that.
Anyway, it was just an idea. Thought I would throw it out there.
ADDED--> I have been adding new pages/folders to old domains and they have not been affected by the sandbox. In fact, I think most people are reporting the same.
I think this is just what Google want SEO's to do. I do not intend to start another conspiracy theory but you are playing right in to their hands.Personally I am with Powdork. I never mention adwords but give a gentle push toward overture. I strongly suggest other SEO pros do the same if they get a client wanting instant traffic. It is the only way we can turn this around.
I was actually trying to paint the picture and let others make a decision based on the facts, but I was certainly trying to suggest the very view you just presented.
I NEVER thought I would say this, but I would definitely rather give my money to Overture than Adwords right now, and quite honestly, the ROI on Overture is getting to be a lot better lately (when compared with Adwords).
Not only that, I am getting more traffic, especially for new sites, from Yahoo and MSN. Therefore, I must put the money in the right hands.
