Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
WHY DO I CREATE WEBSITES?
Wow Robin looks like the pressure cooker is getting the best of you. It's still a wild west out there/here.
The French Philospher Rene Descartes suggested some time ago "I create websites, therefore I am", so be careful quitting since you may find you no longer exist.
OK, he really said "Je Pense donc Je Suis" but I had to translate since French is no longer in fashion in the USA
G__gle doesn't give a da_n about webmasters, the only thing they care about is lining their pockets, greed will topple them, you heard it here first!Yes, we heard it here first. About 3 years ago, yet, they are still lining their pockets.
If you buckled down, picked one, max two sites, and put this amount of work into them, I don't know, you might be surprised what happened. But this spewing out of multiple websites, I don't know, I know what I can produce, how much, and how often, and I simply do not believe that most people really have all that much new or valuable thinking, not many websites worth, maby a few, 2, 3 at the very most. After that it's just more stuff out there for search engines to filter out.
Stick to the oldest best established domain, or the one you like the most, you can create a resource, but very few people out there can produce multiple resources that are actually truly valuable, plus the sandbox makes that too frustrating in the first place.
I know some kids, early 20's, they had a passion, they followed it, their one website gets about 1/2 a million hits a day, they don't do other stuff, that's what they do. And they make a lot of mistakes, it's really funny to watch, but the basic idea is there, it works, if an 18 year old kid can figure this out, I think we can too.
"greed will topple them"
LOL, that's funny, just like greed has toppled MS, right? What greed does is enable you to create larger and more powerful bankrolls, that give you the ability to resist other big greedy companies, like MS.
People say this type of thing every update, if there were even an iota of truth to this statement, google would be long gone, but last I checked, stock is still trading at ridiculously inflated rates. But each update my google/yahoo/msn percentages that I track stay pretty much steady, goes a little up, a little down, I actually get some yahoo searches now on one site, that's new, last 6 months or so, but it's not a lot.
[edited by: 2by4 at 2:49 am (utc) on Oct. 19, 2005]
Seeing how the Pagerank and Backlinks is really just an export how come you call it a update. I know there is an algo update happening at the same time but really the PR and BL is just an export.
Oh yes how do you feel about Matt Cutts and his blog, I have yet to see you post there. He is kind of taken your glory away?
It's the hardworking webmasters like us who have lost out on this update. It's the little guy who found a decent way to earn a living thanks to SE's like Google. I hope GG is right and the sky that *looks* like it has fallen will be lifted back up off of us over the next week. If not, the rich will get richer, and many of us will have to apply to go to work for them (not me - I'll never go back to that - I've been my own boss for too long now).
Just when many of us thought we missed out on all of the horrible disasters as of late - now this. Well, I'm at least thankful that I only dropped nine places on my most popular search phrase. That will be easier to recover from as opposed to 100 or 1000 places. I guess I am luckier than most who have posted their losses here.
2by4, you're telling me not to create new sites. But I have an editorial staff of 15 people, all with diverse knowledge. With groups of them dedicated to each site, not just duplications. This isn't SEO Spammy junk, these are niche publications with thousands of original articles. I started doing this 9 years ago on a site with a limited scope. When I expanded and used the knowledge and resources I'd gained from that first site to create more helpful resources it made 0 sense to put new content, with a new editorial team, on a totally new topic on that old site. You're right, it's not just the knowledge of 1 person, it's a whole editorial team with expertise in specialized areas.
The issue here is that this site we've created, is so clearly a content site. With what is so clearly great content, and it's practically invisible on Google. We're #3 for our term on MSN and #10 on Yahoo, and 17th on Google, and I believe it's because of this age factor. Even though we have more and better content than our competitors, because we're an upstart no one can see us.
If you enter the market not realizing how much this delay is going to affect you, it's going to be pretty annoying. I sat through it recently too, it was very frustrating.
But given the current environment, and seeing what's happened to client's sites, I would not be working on creating large networks of new sites, I'd go back to basics, make one utterly great megasite, a brand, something that people will refer to in the same way they refer to php.net, amazon, google, or whatever. There's a reason those guys succeeded, it was tight, focused actions, for years. That's how you succeed long term, we drifted, lost our focus the last 6 months, and it has really hurt us. If we had kept focused, and not drifted off on all these new schemes, sites, etc, we would not have dropped, that's my belief anyway.
I would much rather have a single successful site, maybe with a few satellites, than have 10 average sites. Think of the names you know, they are single focused sites, all of them. experts exchange, WebmasterWorld, whatever, these sites do well because they've been building for years, out and out, larger and larger, just look at the forums on WebmasterWorld, there's way more this year than last year.
