A warm welcome to the SEO's heading this way :)

[Shak]

Never had my phone so busy on a Sunday.

methinks a whole new wave of PPC advertisers are about to join us, especially the clever 1s who have businesses to run and stock to shift for X-mas.

and if u have no idea, what I am talking about, try glancing at this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

I am not being negative about SEO in any shape or form, but come off it, you dont build your whole ecommerce operation on a hunch that Google will send you traffic forever.

Shak

[Yidaki]

hear hear, the vultures are flying in circles above the battlefield ... >:)

[troels nybo nielsen]

It's a bit like the local newspaper: It's fine if you can get the journalists to give your business free exposure, but you cannot depend on it. If you want to have your company name on page one you may have to buy an ad.

[powerstar]

If you run a businesses online you came long time ago. Free Google traffic is only for the real pro SEO or for fun after hours webmasters. If you are doing it for a living you can't depend on Google no way no how.

[cline]

Same thing here shak.

From a marketing perspective SEO and Public Relations (the other "PR") are structurally the same: powerful, profitable, and amenable to influence but not control. Although there are indeed exceptions, it would be a bad marketing strategy for most businesses to quit advertising and rely on PR alone.

[vibgyor79]

Can somebody tell me the gist of what the whole thread is all about? I am somewhat SEO illiterate and couldn't understand much - though I admit I only read the first and the last page of the thread.

I read something about the sky falling over their heads and the world coming to an end... so what's happening?

[paulewing]

Basically Google updated their algorithm that ranks sites in the normal search results. This seems to have had a bad effect on a lot of the WW readers. It doesn’t appear to have had much effect on my main sites, but then I don’t play too close to the edge of the cliff like a lot of SEO people do. This has allowed me to more or less ride out all the previous “The sky is falling” updates that everyone gets so worked up over. It helps that I am in an industry that isn’t as overly optimized as some of the major competitive categories are, so I can get first page position with natural website design.

I did drop a couple positions on some terms, but I have those covered by Adwords (In fact a few even with Premium Position ads. This is just one more reason to keep up the Adwords campaigns even when you are in the top of the free SERP’s. My trackable traffic (that that has a referrer) is currently about evenly split between the free Google results, Adwords, and Overture with a few other sources maybe totaling 5%.