Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Everything was going fine, and at the begining of April, nightmare started my traffic started to down, my adesense and CJ was down and my morale was down twice. So what did i do wrong, my all pages are white hat seo, i created my pages always using google guidlines and reading very popular seo experts. Google loved me that time and now wants get rid of from me by dropping my pages. And giving me less in terms of traffic and income.
Well, its not his fault it is my fault that i trusted him. I forgot that i should trust myself not google if i want success. Now, ask one of your friends if they are aware of any google update even though they use google maybe 50 times a day they have no idea what is going on inside. They search find, buy, click etc. Google is working as it is supposed to be he loves me today and he loves somebody else tomorrow. Thats his job keeping everyone happy and work as it is supposed to work.
It seems like as the time goes, we are going to encounter such problems more and more. But I fed up checking my rankings and traffic that google sent me everyday and whenever there is a drop in traffic come to fourms and spend my time while i can be more productive.
I just started to think that SEO is becoming less useful everyday. Of course there are main things to follow but after spending a good amount of time to make everything look great and seeing you nowhere on the web hurts a lot.
Now i can barely make living my unique visitos went as low as 150 200 a day. Whose fault is this i accept that this is my fault. My web site was dependable %80 on google. I am suffering now because of my fault that i trusted google and expect traffic from them. This is a good lesson for me to create independant sites that depend on repeat visitors not search engines.
As I mentioned, maybe i will suffer for sometime but maybe this is good that it gave me an inspiration of creating more useful pages.
Thanks Google anyway for giving and taking it back..
That's the biggest thing to come out of this - don't rely on Google - one botched update like BD can really hurt you if you do, and all you will get from Google is vague and meaningless blog posts. MSN and Yahoo shouldn't be neglected.
Don't worry about Google - write with the aim of getting links from other sites, i.e. articles that will get noticed.
As far as SEO? Don't worry about it - write and design in a user-friendly manner, and the SE's (including Google) will have few problems with your site.
I'm as ticked at Google as anybody, but I simply moved my adwords money (I run AW for a service I provide, not for traffic) over to another advertiser, and I've started switching AdSense ads over to other companies - diversifying, which is something I should have done a long time ago.
Maybe it indicates the end of "Classical SEO" thinking which has the popular idiology; content is king.
After BigDaddy update; links in general and backlinks in particular are kings, IMO. And that leads the SEOs to focus more on link/linking in addition to developing techniques to generate backlinks. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised to see a boost in buy/sell backlinks too.
Of course, we shouldn't be surprised to see a boost in buy/sell backlinks too.
Matt Cutts has clearly stated that paid for backlinks are unlikely to help with ranking.
A massive paid for links campaign is probably a waste of time and money.
I am not against paid for links if they are within a sites overall theme and are primarily for the purpose of attracting customers rather than just a link boost.
I hate banners and believe that clients are much more likely to click a related text link ad.
Therefore I hope that Matts general statement means that such links are unlikely to help but will not harm a sites ranking.
Nothing else really matters it's real simple and easy to manipulate.......
"Matt Cutts has clearly stated that paid for backlinks are unlikely to help with ranking."
Have you expected Google to say something else?
IMO, if purchased backlinks are within the same theme, they mightbe very hard to detect.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not endorsing buy/sell backlinks.
Agreed.
This one works really well right now. I see tons of expired or content changed domains that rank for whatever they want. Its crazy, right now I am looking at a County Fire Rescue homepage that was changed with a high competitive search term content. Guess what, it ranks in top 10 for a 25,000,000 reasults term...
So right now in Google you can rank without any relevant links and no theme content. Just a trusted domain will do. This is crazy, Google lost it.
IMHO we will see the most concentrated and creative collection of 'new age' SEO that we have seen for a long while. There's nothing more creative than a hungry black hat.
Short of making black hat SEO absolutely illegal and constructing a totally over the top penalty system (i.e. heavy fines and jail sentences), you will never quash mans quest for a quick and free buck.
Personally I dislike Google enough to say that I hope they drown in spam.
All the Best
Col :-)
> As far as SEO? Don't worry about it - write and design in a user-friendly manner, and the SE's (including Google) will have few problems with your site.
Gendude mostly has the idea here, but I would add that you don't want to ignore SEO. I've made my entire career on developing methodologies that apply across all the search engines over great spans of time. Florida and BigDaddy had very little effect on me. Rather, I worried about the transition from AltaVista to Google, and what will come next. If small tweaks rock your world, you're not well optimized (reinforced by various criteria).
The good news is that in a broad sense, the same techniques work on all engines. They want to reward the right sites, and that all comes down to some combination of content and the clues that indicate "real-world" reputation.
The broad strokes of my "across-the-board" methodology are this...
1. Content leads to an initial dribble of traffic from those very determined searchers who put 3+ keywords in, and are willing to go several pages in.
2. These determined searchers are volunteering to you valuable information of what is ALMOST working for you. It also starts the back linking process if your content is actually compelling and valuable enough. You should never have to ASK for a backlink in this age of over-enthusiastic bloggers.
3. Armed with the flow of interesting, and often unexpected keywords flowing in from your most determined searchers, you know what is on your audience's mind. Maybe, just maybe, the iceberg principle is at work, and if you took these underperforming terms and put out QUALITY content on those topics, you will take words buried several pages in, and bring them to the top.
4. Over time, this creates the snowball effect. The snowball effect is known to increase the effectiveness of sites, no matter what engines, because you're addressing all criteria at once. But the whole process is fed by superior knowledge of what's going on with the keywords on your site.
So no, SEO is not dead. Far from it!
I think what is being said is that SEO is more of a hit and miss thing nowadays. It used to be that once a new algo was analysed we would know how to counter it. Nowadays nobody seems to know what is going on and the only way to get listed is to build hundreds of sites, using different techniques, and see which float to the top. It's hardly science anymore.
All the Best
Col :-)
Add to that the ability to precisely know which pages are ALMOST working for you, and clever A/B testing that gets those pages moving in the right direction. Apply that to all your pages, and add pages as guided by those that are just barely working, and you virtually get a self-optimizing site. Tweaks to specific criteria won't shake a site loose, because over time such sites get fortified in location by many criteria.
Reseller,
Agreed.
Hey Guys, I think that you are over reacting. The change is more subtle than you are suggesting. On page factors are still very important, including good outbound links to major sites using your target keywords.
There may be a bit more emphasis on quality inbound links but that's only a small part of the algo IMHO.
Sid
Why do we see threads periodically about the end of SEO? It's a zero-sum game.
SEO is not a zero sum game. When 1000's of sites lose spots to Amazon they seem to have gained, no?
For google, seo is almost dead for now. Not to say you cannot manipulate rankings, but there is now one factor, so overly important, that all else is wasted if you do not at least have this one factor covered.
However, hopefully it will make it impossible for the hundreds of companies that sprung up as SEO experts who solely were working the recip link areas. You know, the ones that send you endless emails about linking to a site, and they will in turn give you a link from some worthless directory site.
Good riddance to those types.
So what did i do wrong, my all pages are white hat seo,
Hard to say without access to all your data, but a good bet is that you balanced your business on the pointy end of a pyramid, making it highly unstable. You probably had a very sharp power law distribution of traffic versus keywords, a very low Google Stability Number [webmasterworld.com], an accident just waiting to happen.
It's like seeing a construction site with a lot of traffic, opening up a lunch wagon there, making good money, and then being shocked when the construction winds down or some other people open up lunch wagons right beside you. Of course it's a good idea to not just rely on Google for income. But it's a much worse idea to just rely on a very narrow input from Google for income.
"As far as paid links? Google can't always tell that."
Well said! Agreed!
"There may be a bit more emphasis on quality inbound links but that's only a small part of the algo IMHO."
Not small part at all. When reading blogs of Google and Matt, one can't avoid noticing that a large part has been devoted to stress the importance of backlinks.
And who cares whether or not they do? It often makes a lot more sense to purchase a link on a site frequented by your target audience than to wait for SE's to send you traffic. At least you KNOW the traffic you get is likely to be looking for what you have. Maybe it doesn't help your PR and so what? You've got the traffic you want.
I know several people who fly by the seat of their pants in all their approaches - and all of their sites are mostly blown away. I know others who do everything by the book and are very methodical, careful, and pay attention to a lot of detail, and they are doing just fine.
