Post Panda Era (Is this what killed it?) And Future Strategies?

[MrSavage]

I have two distinct periods in my feeble webmastering life. There is the pre Panda and post Panda era. This is how I see it. I can further say that from what I see, Panda has essentially weeded out and snuffed out most of the enthusiasm that once existed in being a webmaster and running websites. I base this on what I see and the level of interest and participation in this here forum. I don't want to say Panda killed the web, as that's awfully dramatic, but I think it's safe to say that the recovery from post Panda is a fallacy. It's why I'm saying it's an era. I can't SEO my way out of this era. There is little to discuss in the way of organic traffic or so it seems. If anyone can suggest the forums are not a litmus test on the overall optimism or current state of affairs, then tell me a better source of analysis. I'm not dead, but the post Panda era has gone nowhere and I would think it's only traffic source outside of Google that will remedy the Panda era. I know vets have seen bad algo changes, but I can draw a line where all this went south and simply has never and feels like it will never be the same. The partnership is dead pretty much from that day onwards imo. I'm willing to discuss the post Panda effects because to me what we see here now is clear evidence that the impact is still felt today and will continue to chip away at the webmastering community.

[Walt Hartwell]

but the post Panda era to me was about Google disregarding or caring much less about the partnership with the webmasters and content creators.

There was never any partnership, they consider it adversarial information retrieval. Meaning they consider you an adversary.

[lucy24]

But the most important measure of success is the users themselves, not a standard invented by Google engineers.

(Asking nicely) How in the world can you state that as a known fact?

Asking equally nicely: Are you referring to the quoted sentence in isolation, or to the whole paragraph containing the sentence? Taken as a context-free statement I'd have seen it as an expression of opinion/ideology that you can either agree with or disagree with. But going back and looking at the whole paragraph

But the most important measure of success is the users themselves, not a standard invented by Google engineers. That's what click log mining is used for, to judge the user satisfaction. Essentially it's the users voting with their clicks that assist the algorithms in understanding what went wrong, as part of their quality control. The findings are then incorporated into a future iteration of the algorithm.

it becomes more like a question of fact that can be known or not known, proven or disproven or not proven or Scottish-verdicted.

[martinibuster]

Thanks Lucy24 for answering that so well.

[EditorialGuy]

There was never any partnership, they consider it adversarial information retrieval. Meaning they consider you an adversary.

IMHO, the folks at Google don't regard you as a partner (why should they?), but they don't regard you as an adversary unless you behave like one.

[snippet]

Something that pops into my head often is...why did they delete that lengthy thread on the Google hosted forums about Panda? There were over 3,000 posts and then one day, it just disappeared.

I would guess that much of the advice given by Google in the early years of that thread are obsolete as the algorithm has shifted/changed so much over the last 4 years.

[Liane]

I can further say that from what I see, Panda has essentially weeded out and snuffed out most of the enthusiasm that once existed in being a webmaster and running websites. I base this on what I see and the level of interest and participation in this here forum.

I can only speak to my own experience with my one website that I have laboured over since 1998. Many mom and pop webmasters (such as myself) who used to participate on Webmaster World and other forums, did everything "Google Guy" and trusted friends on WebmasterWorld advised. For me, it worked! I had my ups and downs and more often than not, didn't understand why, but for the most part, much of what I did seemed to be acceptable and I was rewarded for all my hard work and obedience with enviably stable rankings in Google for a very, very long time.

But everything has changed since the days of yore and the average mom and pop webmaster, who's first job is not "webmastering", has been left to flounder. In desperation, some of us have admittedly done stupid things. My biggest mistake was listening to someone other than myself. HUGE mistake and a massive waste of time and money.

The problem with forums such as Webmaster World (and forgive me for saying so) is that there is so much disinformation, misinformation and just plain nonsense being meted out that it is very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. The mom's and pop's have no way of knowing what is nonsense and what isn't because most come across as authorities, even though they might be the worst SEO hacks in the business.

My best advice to all mom and pop webmasters, is to forget everything you think you know about SEO and just build the best website(s) you possibly can for your clients. Not for Google, not as link bait and not to please anyone other than your client's and potential clients. Forget keywords, forget buying, selling or trading links ... forget it all. Get on with what you KNOW your client's want and need.

Everything about the web is evolving and quite frankly, I think Google is becoming irrelevant. I find myself more often than not using Bing for my own personal searches because I often find far better quality information on the first page of Bing than I do on Google. By habit, I use Google and my home page is still Google, (I don't know why) but I often get frustrated not being able to find what I want, and that's when I head over to Bing.

With the advent of Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird and whatever other perfectly lovely animal genus Google wants to ruin for us in their efforts to come up with this month's SEO slap down, many of us have and will suffer as long as searchers continue to use Google.

However, if Google keeps doing what they are doing long enough, I firmly believe they will shoot themselves in the foot. I don't think it will be long until others begin to discover that there are other (better) search engines that are more on target than Google.

I don't want to say Panda killed the web, as that's awfully dramatic, but I think it's safe to say that the recovery from post Panda is a fallacy.

Take heart. It is my firm belief that the combination of all the "fixes" Google has employed over the past 3 or 4 years to counter spam ... is what will ultimately kill Google ... not the web! Spam and black hat SEO stuff is their problem to deal with, not mine. Frankly, I think they spend far too much time and effort trying to deal with it. Why the heck should any of us kowtow to Google because of idiots? I have the goods and I know it! Let Google and the other search engines worry about how to deliver the goods to searchers WITHOUT sucking the rest of us into a big festering pile of collateral damage. He who does it first and best - wins.

I mean really, why the heck is disavowing links even a thing? That should be Google's problem, not mine! If some jacka$$ in India or Russia or China wants to try to do some negative SEO and give my site a truckload of crappy links, why should I care? It's not my search engine the moron is spamming! A link to my site isn't on my site. They need to find a better and more sensible way to make their search engine work properly.

In my opinion, Google created the spam problem in the first place. Now they are trying to make us clean up their mess. Perhaps if they hadn't set webmasters up by touting their whole "pagerank" deal, black hat types wouldn't have started with all the link spam crap in the first place!

I absolutely refuse to allow some search engine spam team or SEO hack dictate how I should approach sales to my customers on the web! I know what my clients want and need to know and I supply it. It's basic business 101. There's no mystery to it.

Yahoo loves my site, Bing loves my site, people on facebook all over the world love my site. Google hates it. Where is the logic? Who is right and who is wrong. My take on it is who cares! I know that what I have provided is right for my clients. I know I have the best site in my area and in my niche. If Google eventually figures it out good for them ... but if the problems Google is having delivering the goods becomes widespread knowledge, consumers will slowly gravitate elsewhere and a new search engine war will unfold. Nothing lasts forever, including Google.

Website owners, webmasters and SEO folks have it backwards. Most seem to think that we have to please the Google Gods in order to get traffic. Wrong! If everyone just stopped doing their bidding, perhaps we could get back to some semblance of sanity and get on with the business of doing business. We have to please our clients and that's all we have to do! I have more targeted traffic coming from niche forums and Facebook than from all search engines combined! The best part is that it's all 100% organic.

I believe my best and only option as a webmaster and business owner is to simply deliver the goods for my clients and let Google do what they will. I am barely getting by right now, but this whole experience has taught me one thing ... and that is that I have to diversify. You can try to please this search engine or that and it will work for a time, and then they suddenly change the rules again. What was right yesterday is wrong today ... and your life is turned upside down. No more. Diversification is the only answer if you are going to make a living online.

I remember eagerly watching about a dozen different search engines every month or two to see where this new page or that new page would end up in the search results on Webcrawler, Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Netscape, Alta Vista, Overture, Alltheweb, Lycos, Looksmart, Inktomi, Dogpile, and so on. It was a different time, but there is no doubt in my mind that the search engine wars will heat up again in the not too distant future. There will likely be fewer players, but it will happen.

Google's problems are way bigger than most imagine. They have tried to be so darned clever that they have put themselves in real danger of becoming irrelevant ... just like Hot Bot, and most of the rest. Time marches on and while they try to be more and more clever in their battle with spammers, others are busy providing decent/on target search results.

Google has forgotten the cardinal rule for any business and that is to give the people what they want. I don't want much of what Google delivers on the first page search results anymore ... and I know I am not alone.

Never forget that search engines are using OUR content to make their billions. Why webmasters hand them all the power, bow and scrape to all their demands is beyond me. The only people I cater to anymore are my clients. Nobody else.

I still read WebmasterWorld from time to time, just to see if there's any big news to discover. I don't participate because I have little value to add. I don't understand most of what Google is doing and although there was a time I did care (very much), I really don't anymore. I do care about Bing and Yahoo though because I think it won't be too much longer before they start culling away Google users in increasingly larger numbers.

I was a die hard Google fan from the beginning ... but now even I use Bing several times a day! That still surprises me.

[MrSavage]

@Liane thanks for the read. Perhaps a hall of fame post for effort and readability!

[fathom]

Google has forgotten the cardinal rule for any business and that is to give the people what they want. I don't want much of what Google delivers on the first page search results anymore ... and I know I am not alone.

Point #1... Unfortunately, the listing owner is not Google's target market.

Point #2... You can't please everyone. While Google only enjoy 67% searching market share in the United States, their EU market share is 90%, and so is Latin America. It certainly lags in China but so does everyone else (except Baidu), and in India they own 97.5% market share.

Point #3... Free isn't worth very much!

Point #4... Web disparity isn't about money (budget) but more about intelligence (or lack of). If you lack intelligence, including the value-added ways to demonstrate that to an audience, a budget will certainly offset that deficiency. Although, DIY (whatever) will almost never ever be the foundation of a successful web strategy, that is just the surface polish.

[micklearn]

Are you referring to the quoted sentence in isolation, or to the whole paragraph containing the sentence?

I don't know if that really matters. If anything, they're using click log mining to increase revenue and profits. It's so obvious to some of us and has been for some time. They want people to click on ads. And they're sending people to sites with the highest CTR on ads. It's not a search engine, it's a money making machine that they invented. It doesn't have anything to do with user satisfaction. Heck, half the people that click on ads have no idea that it was an ad. How is that a great user experience for either the searcher or the advertiser? If Panda was really about cleaning up the internet, Matt Cutts wouldn't have left the company.

[martinibuster]

If anything, they're using click log mining to...

One thing I dislike is saying no. However when it comes to actual verifiable facts, one simply can't mince words about it. So I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of having to deny that statement with a flat out no. If anything? No. It's not "if anything."

In the real world we know it as a fact according to a plethora of scientific research going back over ten years and patents granted to Google [seobythesea.com]. These are the facts about how CTR and user behavior are used to improve the SERPs. Period. Sticking to the facts, there is simply no "if anything" about it.

Why Matt Cutts Left Google

If Panda was really about cleaning up the internet, Matt Cutts wouldn't have left the company.

Now, on the matter of Matt Cutts leaving, that's a rich source of speculation. But I've not read anything but praise from Matt about Google. [twitter.com] In fact there's is a lot of documentation that Matt Cutts was proud of Panda [wired.com]. Add to that Matt's own words on the topic [mattcutts.com], it's fairly clear he was, like many of us, spending more minutes of his life with work than he was with family and that he was taking the opportunity to reverse that in order to spend more time with those he loves.

I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. However I do wish to make this clear for your benefit and for anyone else reading this discussion that your opinion sits in opposition to the reality of how search queries are actually produced. Even your speculation about Matt Cutts leave from Google doesn't align with verifiable facts.

There is no "if anything" about actual facts.
One can say the sky is blue because "if anything" it's God's favorite color. But that opinion sits in opposition to the facts of water and the prism effect. There is no "if anything" about actual facts.

I enjoy a bit of speculation. But I put more value in facts that are based on reality, that can be read and be understood. Once you understand the facts there is no more confusion and all the obfuscation (intentional or not) and measured statements out of Google can be better understood, because once you have a working understanding of the science of information retrieval there is little the search engine can hide from us. Which is why I encourage all of you to not rely on myself or Bill Slawski or any other blogger. Go out and research this stuff for yourself. It is literally enlightening and good for your business.

Or not
If you prefer speculation over truth so be it. You are entitled to believe and discuss whatever you wish.

[Liane]

Point #3... Free isn't worth very much!

I agree. Google and all other search engines take all our content (research, text, time, photos, maps, etc.) for free and then turn around and tell us to fix problems (of their own creation) for them! Pretty crappy bargain if you ask me. It's like writing a book and the head librarian tells you that their indexing system is messed up so we have to go to the library and help them sort it out. Oh and by the way, we are charging an entrance fee to get into the library and there's no guarantee that after you help us clean up that we will include your book again.

Point #4... Web disparity isn't about money (budget) but more about intelligence (or lack of). If you lack intelligence, including the value-added ways to demonstrate that to an audience, a budget will certainly offset that deficiency. Although, DIY (whatever) will almost never ever be the foundation of a successful web strategy, that is just the surface polish.

Oh snap! LOL.

Now, on the matter of Matt Cutts leaving, that's a rich source of speculation.

I agree MB, I think Matt left for exactly the reasons he stated. He is entitled to a life as much as anyone.

My point about the current iteration of Google boils down one thing and one thing only. Whether it be attributable to Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird or whatever ... the fact of the matter is that penalties or disparities last far too long.

Even after webmasters do precisely what Google requests they do, the disparities remain. MrSavage stated that for him, "recovery from post Panda is a fallacy".

It may seem that way because of the length of time it takes Google to recognize that all they have asked of him has been done and to release their iron grip on his privates.

For this reason, they will eventually become irrelevant. The draconian penalties and recovery time that website owners endure are of no interest to web users.

I had a client tell me two days ago that he was freaking out, he thought I had run off with his money because he couldn't find me when he did a search on Google. His laptop was stolen and he had no records of his sale and wanted to ask me to send everything to him again.

His wife uses Bing and while he was in the middle of his tirade in their living room, she said, "It's right here honey, number 2 in Bing."

He then called me and told me the story. He said he couldn't believe that "the best site he had ever seen" in my niche was nowhere on Google. He has rented what I offer (all over the world) for the past 25 years and has never seen a more informative or user friendly website.

His wife told him that's why she uses Bing. So does he ... now.

I am all for cleaning up the internet. It's a #*$! mess. But ... if Google doesn't deliver what people want, they will fall by the wayside. Put simply (for the less intelligent among us), they need to speed up their processes.

[iamlost]

Note: my sites are evergreen info and except for updates have been in maintenance mode for years; revenue is direct ad sales, affiliate pre-sell, with AdSense as default filler; I've never been knowingly hit by a penalty; Google search supplies ~22% traffic on average; in absolute number terms Google traffic is up YoY for every year since 2002 except for 2012-2013 when I went responsive with server assist, recovering within the year.

I think that Google 'turning points' are often a matter of generation and experience. While Panda and Penguin hit a lot of webdevs who relied largely/wholly on Google both for traffic and revenue hard most were simply too young in the business to experience Florida (November 2003), which had a similar effect on webdevs. To those who lived through Florida everything else that came after seemed anticlimax.

There is SEO and there is SEO. By that I mean that, since (even before but especially after) Florida, SEO was seen to have two quite distinct paths: one that was fairly solid and slow, generally accepted best practices; another that was hazardous but potentially much faster seeking out hacks and attacks. How much of which method one practiced depended on one's business model and risk assessment, acceptance.

When webdevs generally and SEOs especially moved from fora to their own blogs the effect of differentiating aka selling of themselves began to muddy the waters. And tools increasingly fixed certain behaviours as standard. Many SEOs were/are selling hazardous hogwash and many tools weren't/aren't fit to purpose; even worse tools were/are replacing individual thought and testing: every problem looks like a nail. Webdevs' behaviours were being standardised, especially with WordPress as the accepted default publishing vehicle.

To my mind the great divide in search began June 2005 with the initiation of personalised search. Every other update was either an infrastructure or index change, personalisation was results rearrangement. Results rearrangement be it universal search, Local, Knowledge Box, etc. was Google moving it's own properties and partners into play. And that has had a far greater effect on pretty much everyone than all the algo updates and the B&W zoo combined.

As to why there are fewer people participating in WebmasterWorld Google fora I expect that the reasons are many. I and some others left years ago except for lurking because no one wanted to hear what we had to say about the great G, about SEO, about business models/practice et al. It is bittersweet that much of what was being ignored or pooh-poohed back when is being debated now. However, it is also why I'm bothering to post again. I have heartfelt admiration for those who continued the fight of reason and experience over faith and propaganda in the interim.

Google and other large SEs are in the ad network business. All their searchers are the product they sell to their customers who are those advertising via their networks. We and our sites are the bait that attracts the searchers that bring the advertising dollars. We are the 'free' content on which they make a killing. The wriggly worms on the hook. And that is all.

The implicit agreement is that we allow SEs to scrape our sites in return for traffic. That once they stop sending traffic wholly or in significant part most webdevs simply wail in sackcloth and ashes rather than shut them out and chase other, albeit more effort required, traffic sources is, to me, bad business behaviour at the least.

The only time that Google or any other SE cares about a particular site is (1) when it manages publicly aka in mass media to embarrass their behaviour or (2) when it is popular but blocking their bots or otherwise refusing being collected. Otherwise, there are zillions of worms to replace those dropped.

Which brings us to the hard numbers game: for every query there are a maximum of a thousand returns, in practice only one to three hundred due to domain replication, in reality only ten to twenty given how far searchers parse results. With half of the first listed results often being ads and SE properties the numbers slip even lower. Roulette has better odds. Except that webdevs have SEO. If they know what it is and how to use it (and many demonstrably do not).

SEO is rarely about being first in Google for some vanity or money term these days, that is just the icing on the cake if achievable. SEO is getting out of the URL data dump(s) where G deposits everyone into various query indices. SEO is getting as high as possible in as many personalised queries results as possible. It is having a title that catches the eye out of order, a description that compels a click; is part of site design such that SEs' cold algo hearts are impressed; is part of identifying/segmenting search visitors and why they came (not as simple as it once was); is part of everything that impacts on SEs and the traffic they refer. SEO needs to deliver required information such that every other site component can do their job of holding, informing, enticing, entertaining, converting search visitors.

That SEO has the prominence it does is because too many sites are one SE ponies. If all your traffic is from Google then GO is all powerful (SEO is more inclusive by definition). However, both GO and SEO are increasingly weak as SEs withhold and obscure data. Especially if you don't do the same in return. And unless you find ways to get what you need - ways that are not as simple and easy as they once were.

Not everyone that is penalised by a SE deserves it, false positives of a fraction of a percent equal significant numbers in absolute terms. On the other hand, the more one's site looks and feels like one's competitors, the less anyone is going to care if one is whacked and another not. Before SEO, before anything: what is your business model? what are your points of difference? what is your unique selling point? what is your customer/visitor experience first to last?

Yes, many sites have fallen due to SEO failures; however, even more have no natural business buoyancy beyond being propped by SEO. This is not 1995, not 2000, not 2005, not 2010; get over it. The times they are always a-changing. Unless one changes at least with, preferably ahead (and the pointers are almost always there if one pays attention) one will stagnate and fail.

I am still full of enthusiasm for marketing and visitor analysis and contextual content delivery. Search and SEO have become mundane largely built in and only worthy of having an eye kept cocked for drama. A part of a much larger web process. Not the process itself.

[Essex_boy]

The problem is Google have been fiddling with the SERPS since at least 2003, problem that I have, I can only find total cr*p in the serps and Google ad's- Change for the sake of change IMO

[EditorialGuy]

The problem is Google have been fiddling with the SERPS since at least 2003, problem that I have, I can only find total cr*p in the serps and Google ad's-

Are you suggesting that they should be using exactly the same algorithm they were using in, say, 1998? That doesn't strike me as being very practcal.

[micklearn]

If you prefer speculation over truth so be it. You are entitled to believe and discuss whatever you wish.

Gosh, that was an unexpected and somewhat offensive response, martinibuster, and not just what I quoted above. You've assumed that I'm behind in reading up on patents, out of touch with reality and lacking knowledge in general. If Google wants to demolish a website or business model so that they can take it over and make more money, they'll do it. Cutts left the company shortly after an interview at a conference in which he admitted the rankings were sometimes unfair.

[FranticFish]

I do find it strange that there is a school of thought that finds it inconceivable that Google - or any business - would indulge in behaviour that would seriously damage their reputation if widely known, given that every year there is hard evidence that this is exactly what businesses do.

The most recent notable instance of this in my part of the world is one of the world's biggest car manufacturers - caught out, having designed software to falsify emissions data by having their engines behave in a certain way when driven under test conditions. Fraud, given that a vehicle's tax status and therefore running costs, not to mention desirability in the public's eyes, are tied to emissions levels.

Google know where they send people and they know or can infer what actions they take when they get to their destination. They know where their income comes from. They have the means to do what micklearn suggested.

[Essex_boy]

EditorialGuy: Rather extreme response, almost silly, change happens

What I would like is a serp that provides decent results as Google of old, where you dont HAVE to buy Adwords (to a point) to succeed, id like to see an search engine that flood the serps with their own ads etc etc

Google really has lost its way and the first time in 14 or so years Im looking to use Bing.

[seoskunk]

I think it wasn't just Panda but a combination of things happening at virtually the same time that have caused upheaval. Google started looking to promote brands. Google stopped preferring static content, Google started indexing more parameters and dynamic content, backlinks became automated, content became automated. So Google introduced penguin and panda to counter this automated content/backlinks. The result has been month on month growth in advertisement income. The users get what they expect as in brand names for top results and the shareholders are getting great results too. Thats good business in anyones book. The independent companies have lost the net as far as Google are concerned and I don't see them coming back unless they stop playing by Google's unfair rules. I just did an link audit of a well known company and internet brand, they haven't stopped buying links ,its blatant they are as active as ever.

[EditorialGuy]

What I would like is a serp that provides decent results as Google of old,

I see plenty of those--something that's remarkable when you consider how many more pages are being indexed and ranked than were, say, in 2003. I'd guess that most people are largely happy with Google's search results, since Google has a dominant market share in the U.S. and an even greater market share overseas.

For that matter, Bing and its peers aren't bad, either. The people who run search engines have made enormous strides over the past 10 or 15 years.

[MikeNoLastName]

>>If Google wants to demolish a website or business model so that they can take it over and make more money, they'll do it <<

And here I suspect is the crux of the matter. I agree. G is trying to be everything to everyone starting with the most profitable areas first. More so now that they are venturing into the Siri-like search results.
Many of you may not be in some of the highly competitive (as in "competitive with where G wants to be") areas that I have delved into over the last 20 years. I wish this board allowed specific examples so I could show you specific examples, but you'll just have to take my word for it. Our content needs to be updated almost daily, yet is not something that users use more than once a year or less, thus repeat traffic (<15%) is not expected and thus negligible, so new visitors via search engine traffic is critical as it is not really something people search for on social media.
10 years ago G reps personally called us literally weekly to sign up for Adsense and put it on as many of our pages as practical, because of our traffic in a highly competitive niche and finally we agreed. They loved us. Had a personal dedicated rep, etc. Things were good. Can't really complain. Made our 'millions' at the time for the original idea via GAds [ahem, literally.]
Then G realized, hey, this is really a profitable niche, we can take this over and cut out the middle men and use machines to steal all their content as fast as they produce it and feed it directly to the searchers ourselves, at the TOP OF OUR RESULTS under our own heading and save the 50+% we pay them to do all the research! Even still being in some of the same SERP positions as years ago, traffic has dropped drastically from GSearch due to them diverting the traffic to their own search results or to paid/pre-arranged affiliations in "special". Search results at the top of the page, to the point that it simply isn't profitable to produce the content anymore and G search traffic (and Adsense earnings) have become irrelevant to us.
So my point is, just because people call you paranoid, and claim it ain't so, do NOT underestimate the greed and motives of a near-monopoly like G. Good business practice dictates, If a certain avenue is profitable, MORE, is even more so. Why share when you can get it all for free to start with. Would you? If we stop doing it (and probably will before much longer) some other dumb sucker will come along and attempt the same for a year or two. G will find and exploit them as well.
To confirm this one need only look at their algorithm model for Adsense. After tracking it all for as long as I have, it is obvious that they use (fairly simple and transparent, and certainly not the greatest) algos to "optimize their income" based on ultimately CTR x PPC (without a care for which parameter is optimized since the outcome of the product is the same) and with a bunch of relatively minor 'side bets' as I like to call them. They don't really care what the individual site owner experiences and earns or loses, all they care about is their own bottom line earnings. For instance do you suppose they test out the viability of newly submitted ads and formats on G-search results, or on publisher pages (where their risk and profit is lower) first? There ARE amazingly (thankfully) SOME things a highly astute and observent publisher can do to improve things, but it takes valuable time that could be used on better things. Plus they STILL will not release the most critical bits of information. Of course their greed has led to a number of exploitable situations and timings, (which we know Adwords gamers have already learned and use daily, so I won't go into them to make things worse.)

[LostOne]

"why there are fewer people participating in WebmasterWorld Google"

More options today. This place ain't much fun anymore. Too much noise, repetitious garble. Sure it was fun in the frontier days.

And Panda is more of a roulette wheel in the cases of better quality that has been affected.

But, hey it's free traffic unless the Gorg scrapes your life away.

[Nutterum]

The more I read this thread and its various opinions and replies the more I asked this simple question :

In the current state of the web - What is SEO? I ask this question because the majority of the people here talk either about development or marketing (in all its shapes and forms) . Some throw in UI/UX . But where is the SEO?

I`ll tell you where it is. The Post Panda and Post Penguin updates killed it. SEO the way the majority of the people here see it is dead.

[MrSavage]

I guess the question in its purest form is this regarding where did everyone go. If it wasn't Panda (ultimately the dawning of a new era and attitude from Google) then what else can explain it? Clearly people left and by big numbers. Come up with an explanation that doesn't fall back to the Panda event. To me that's where the erosion started and clearly killed a lot of hope and interest since that time. I could be wrong. There may be a more reasonable explanation which is why I put this out there in the first place.

[Tonearm]

I've read over and over about how classic SEO is dead. What does modern SEO look like? Structure your website and code however you like, build content, and wait?

[nomis5]

What does modern SEO look like?

Who knows. In my opinion it looks like actions which make your site chosen over and above the others. There is no set recipe any more and there hasn't been for a long time.

Martinibuster talks about "verifiable facts". Well I'm not so sure what that means. What's fact for one person may not be fact for another and two points of view at odds with each other can both be correct. Mine might be correct for me, yours might be correct for you. There is NO single truth about anything, and that applies to SEO.

[martinibuster]

Good point, nomis5. I can't argue with it.

In hindsight, looking at posts from five years ago we can see how quaint some of our beliefs were. Five years ago the industry was convinced that social media signals were a ranking factor. Thus in a discussion about a statement by John Mueller about how there are different algos for different niches, someone speculates that social media signals might play a role and the statement was taken seriously while today we'd scratch our heads because nothing in Mueller's statement inferred social media, either implicitly or explicitly.

Similarly, when the SEO industry says Google is looking at semantic analysis the SEO industry advises we should add synonyms into our web pages to rank better, totally disregarding that the web pages are ranked the same, no change in ranking and scoring. Another shallow and naïve response to data.

When Hummingbird was released the SEO industry focused on the natural language processing aspect of it as if Google was now everything Ask Jeeves aspired to be and the industry recommended we should rewrite our existing content in order to be able to rank better for search queries that are asked as questions. Wow... Shallow thinking.

The problem with SEO is that it's no longer just about anchor text and it takes more than a shallow understanding of title tags to make it in the SERPS. Links still count, but there's a bit more going on. The leading problem with the SEO industry is a reluctance to study information retrieval, to rely on a few bloggers and then reach out in the darkness with speculation and inferred motives. Hissing that Google prefers brands does nothing to advance your cause. I think it is more productive to delve into the science and get into the algo through that back door. Then one will have a better chance of understanding what the heck is going on.

So, Google was recently granted a patent about measuring distances between a seed set of trusted sites and a web page to give it a trust type of score. How does hissing about Google preferring brands solve that problem?

[Tonearm]

So anyone who understands SEO is doing nothing to improve their rankings?

[FranticFish]

I realise I'm tempting fate (pride comes before a fall etc), but the sites I work with (SME service providers) are doing better than ever.

I have an increasingly laissez-faire attitude to content optimisation (more focused on making my pages read well, hang the 'optimisation') but when it comes to SERP analysis THE INFO IS THERE. Looks at who ranks. Study. Compare. Analyse. And, if you have the money (I don't), experiment.

I'm far from an SEO expert, more of a lucky mud-slinger. But my sites are still there. Reverse-engineering, with an eye to Google's stated aims, has not failed me in 7 years now.

Next year I plan to properly get my head around usability - heat maps, adjusted bounce rate and other engagement tracking, CTA tracking, drop-off, paths through a site, A/B testing etc - to see if I can demystify on-page a bit.

[iamlost]

The people doing most of the talking about SEO are selling their services and tools and so their advice is whatever promotes that usage.

Much of both, the tools and the services, are addressing the thinking of 5 to 10 years ago. However, their volume dominates and is the common thought bubble that gets repeated. Good for their businesses but not those blindly following.

Much of the old best practices are still that. Some of the newer best practices are less known because they rely on a different understanding and personal testing, which is not generally shared for various reasons. Also it can vary as to what is best by category/vertical, local/general, info/ecom, etc.

The biggest problem is that everyone wants it fast, cheap, and automated. In other words spam.

Perhaps what really makes me shudder is the garbling of SEO in pseudo-science. The old fashioned have a hypothesis and test it seems to have all but disappeared.

[tangor]

This "There's an App for that" culture seems to have spread to webmasters (usually new ones, or those nicked by previous adjustments to google's famous algo). Not necessarily helpful, just an observation for some of the noise... er... conversations.

As fast as the web might seem, the net is actually pretty slow to CHANGE, but when it does it is a major shift (think search engines).