Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
My site is doing ok in yahoo. Now I decide to make it more popular by ranking good in google. But it is really hard and I found it quite difficult to determine the effect of my changes, as the result comes slow.
Any suggestions?
So don't discourage things that work now just because they may not in the future. It might be best to diversify and rely on multiple paths to earning money.
All of the really competitive search phrases that I monitor have the same sites ranked number 1 in Google that Altavista rated as number 1 when Google was still an idea in some students heads.
At the end of the day, the more people that find you, the more people that can link to you. These sites that have broad bases of 1000's of quality links generally do not suffer from the algo changes.
Long-time established sites do not have to be the best, they just have to be mediocre.
IMHO Age is the factor that is needed to rank #1
In order to be #1, you should deserve to be #1, otherwise your ranking has been artificially inflated and will likely be deflated soon after reaching #1.
This statement deserves to be repeated. The concept is overlooked much too often.
Whatever Google's ranking algo is today, it will change and it will improve. The fact is that Google wants to rank good sites at the top. Build a great site that people find useful, and the Google engineers will be on your side and not fighting against you.
However, the reigning #1 site in my regional industry is the definition of a "thin affiliate" - ZERO original content, pages fed off affiliate server to CNAMED subdomains. Dunno what their ranking is based on other than the industry category in the url (widgets--countryname.com).
Apparently not all "thin affiliates" are equal: some hit #1 and stay there.