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That is to say, should one be checking to see if the sites are out of the sandbox regularly or only when they know there is a major Google update? :)
Thanks
Mc
Does that reasonably focuse the practical question?
Personally, I have lots of pages that rank well in several industries. We sometimes sell advertising on these. If I could figure out how to get a list of sites that have been created since Feb 2004 (WHOIS database?), I could offer our services to them.
My heart goes out to anyone relying heavily on the web to get a newly established law firm or insurance company off the gound these days. I would think that these folks would jump at the chance to get into #1 position.
Good idea, or too labor intensive?
What you have to do is about 10 times what you had to do before. Get lots of good quality links, preferably on theme, mak sure the site is indexable, optimise the pages reasonably (nothing over the top) and you will get the good rankings eventually. It may take several months but it will happen.
The difference to before was that you could launch a site, link to it from a few existing sites within your network and bang within a week you are top of the SERPs. No more!
And this is what I mnean when I say that google has written very very tough anti-spam algorithms that only affect sites created since Feb.
Now the simple fact is that for many people the amount of effort required to do the above makes the return debatable and many will decide not to go down that path, and google will be delighted!
You stated;
“Get lots of good quality links, preferably on theme, mak sure the site is indexable, optimise the pages reasonably (nothing over the top) and you will get the good rankings eventually.”
Have you had success with this, for terms returning in excess of 2 million results? And if so, approximately how many back links were needed, and how long did it take? Perhaps your right and we are just falling well short on the back links. We have been a bit conservative adding links, as there was a lot of talk early on regarding the SB, that to many links to fast was the problem.
Any insight would be appreciated.
Yes. But the site has been worked on full time by a member of staff for over 6 months now. Steady increase in links, more and more content, good quality links out. What have we achieved? Movement from not being in the first 1,000 to being in the first 100 under 2 and 3 word terms. Every week the performance gets better but it is a hard slog and very expensive. And who knows - just when we have finally really cracked it and got on the first page under "hotels" (that is the theme - a hotel portal) Google will probably change its algorithm and we'll drop back down to 1,000!
A little more specifics - the main search term we are using to judge success is a 3-word term. We have gone from nowhere (despite being indexed) to number one in google. Whilst there are 2,690,000 results, when you put it in quotation marks there are just 133 results. So it is not very competitive but is a good measure of improvement.
However if you then search for 2 of the 3 words, which is a very competitive phrase, you get 24 million results and in quotation marks 379,000 results and our site is 215th, which is not a bad performance.
So you get the drift - it is a long hard slog and cannot be achieved overnight.
is this Reserach just based on 1 single website, if yes.. can you sticky me please?
if no, then please support your opinion by some examples...
I dont feel a thorough research and a conclusion can be made without any sampling or illustration.
Thank you for info, we do appreciate it. We will take your good advice and keep working at it. You are right, the bar to success has been raised and we must rise to the challenge.
I think at the end of the day our concern is if you have to work the SEO that hard, just to crack the first 300 places, (we would see that as progress in our situation certainly) something is not right. It seems to be fostering an environment that is the opposite of what Google would want, more and more artificial SEO.
Sites, that have something to offer, that are constructed in a professional manner, adhering to Google’s own suggestions should not sit in these positions, for this amount of time. It’s not doing anyone any good; users, Google, or e-commerce in general.
Some day maybe we will find out we have all been missing something really obvious. Until then we will continue to improve our back links and content and hope for some improvement.
