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.

[Leosghost]

The people doing most of the talking about SEO and the SEO industry, are selling their services and tools and so their unsubtle hinted at advice is "I know the solutions, believe me"..

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.

So true..nothing to "forgive" there Liane..Far too many gurus ( some are even "gifted" ;) here whose business is convincing other webmasters that they, and other gurus know the solutions, whereas , if they really did "know", they'd be so successful with their own sites, they'd never have the time or the need for "clients", they'd be too busy counting the money from their own successful sites..which would actually rank on page 1..instead of on page 5 or 10 or even lower..

[fathom]

Far too many gurus ( some are even "gifted" wink here whose business is convincing other webmasters that they, and other gurus know the solutions, whereas , if they really did "know", they'd be so successful with their own sites, they'd never have the time or the need for "clients", they'd be too busy counting the money from their own successful sites..which would actually rank on page 1..instead of on page 5 or 10 or even lower.

Not sure how you make money or gain any success without clients...

Client synonyms: customer, buyer, purchaser, shopper, consumer, user; patient; patron, regular; clientele, patronage, public, market

Even a scammer needs someone to cough up the cash.

[netmeg]

if they really did "know", they'd be so successful with their own sites, they'd never have the time or the need for "clients",

Not necessarily; some of us do both. Something about eggs and baskets come to mind. (Besides, just when I think I'm done with clients, they keep pulling me back in.)

What SEO means for me nowadays is 1) making sure the site is technically and architecturally sound as possible and 2) finding ways to make the users love it. Nothing more complicated than that. Webmastering and marketing. And so far, that still works.

[Walt Hartwell]

Even a scammer needs someone to cough up the cash.

Given that you've stated you are purchasing/developing 40/50 domains a month, can you clarify your concept?

[3zero]

Panda killed internal linking structures and made sites weaker, Instead of ignoring duplicate content it was penalised and many people suffered due to cms systems that replicated pages. Perhaps it fought spam as well but the collateral damage was massive.

[fathom]

Panda killed internal linking structures and made sites weaker, Instead of ignoring duplicate content it was penalised and many people suffered due to cms systems that replicated pages. Perhaps it fought spam as well but the collateral damage was massive.

That isn't really true. Unintentional duplications causes canonical issues and that tends to make a website (each original page) weaker.

[support.google.com...]
[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

A single page of common topic, gets all the link juice for that topic, where as a group of similar pages share that same link juice and dividing it into much smaller equal parts. Making each individual page weaker. Additionallly, if you have even the slightest chance of earned links they will most certainly be to different pages but similar pages will never (rarely) rank in decending order, more than 2, so if you have say a widget wallpaper site with many more than a single page of wallpaper being indexed but only one or maybe two can rank the link juice the should have been to the one page is wasted on pages that have no hope of ranking for anything meaningful.

In the reverse, that one page would rank better if only it had the link juice that was shared with other common pages that are not quite as powerful as this one for this phrase. Course a single page website isn't a very strong domain either, thus you need to get VERY CREATIVE to offset that fact that commercial content has limited editorial value.

Simply adding more mediocre pages to rank for the same thing as current pages attempt to rank for is the problem... not the solution.

If you aren't creating editorial value to drive any commercial value that you might have for commercial phrases, you really need to start investing is Adwords.

You can fix any duplicate content issue simply by disallowing the pages to be indexed. Although if all you have is repetitive pages that the CMS created that is a serious ownership problem not a serious internal architecture issue.

[3zero]

Thanks fathom that's a comprehensive explanation. It is as much an architecture issue as a canonical issue. Difficult one to fix for many e-commerce sites that offer the same product in a range of colours for instance. For both user and advertising needs it may be more beneficial to individually show each item. For Google they would seem to prefer one item with different colour options. Fair enough but to penalise a site for not doing it this way seems draconian to me. Panda has hit so many sites for minor infractions as well as duplicate content thrown up by cms systems themselves.

[fathom]

Difficult one to fix for many e-commerce sites that offer the same product in a range of colours for instance. For both user and advertising needs it may be more beneficial to individually show each item. For Google they would seem to prefer one item with different colour options. Fair enough but to penalise a site for not doing it this way seems draconian to me. Panda has hit so many sites for minor infractions as well as duplicate content thrown up by cms systems themselves.

Not really, but you have to put a little brain power into it.

Most CMS come with a variety of sort for the Patron... Googlebot IS NOT A PATRON.

The only indexed SORT should be [ALL] even if that places 10,000 products on the same page.

No more canonical issue (which suggest all your duplicate content is now on a single page), and even if that is repetitive stuff from 10,000 products the original work from those same 10,000 pages makes the category page very distinctive compared to any single product.

The draconian part is thinking you need to have all 10,000 products indexed to represent your website even when you know you'll never get all 10,000 of them ranked for the same query. Getting the category indexed is enough to represent all 10K. There are lots of other websites that deserve at least the same thing, especially if they have precisely the same products. Organic results are editorial results, if you have limited editorial value that's what needs to change.

[netmeg]

For both user and advertising needs it may be more beneficial to individually show each item.

I work extensively in B2B ecommerce (plus a little B2C) and have not found this to be true at all. In every case so far, when we moved the client products to a configurable or grouped scenario, the users were a lot happier (judging from phone calls, reviews and people who just took the time to write in) But in almost every case, I had a fair amount trouble convincing the client to try structuring the site that way. They thought all the separate pages were the better user experience, and for the most part were proved wrong. (The "advertising" issue - if it's really an issue - can be solved with landing pages and NOINDEX)

My point is, don't knock it til you test it. You might be surprised. I know that as a user, I sure don't enjoy paging through multiple pages of the same product in different colors or sizes. I can't blame any search engine for not being crazy about indexing or ranking that kind of content.

[Nutterum]

SEO operates on the two ends of the spectrum now-a-days. The very white hat folks try to do virality type of content, where they hope they will be featured on other websites. It's definitely the harder thing to do and sadly often the needle barely moves, not to mention that this is way more marketing and way less SEO. The other end of the spectrum are the old school SEO pros, who do the dirty work of finding linking opportunities and exploit them. Footnotes editing, link syphoning, comment and forum participation, ghost linking, the works. They build links like it's 2010. If done correctly they get better results faster and typically avoid penalties.

Google dislikes the second method as it is artificial, yet it is the fastest way to the finish line. Google likes the first method, but to do it right you need bigger budget and a creative team, something many SMB's lack due to financial reasons. So what most companies do, is they try to get the best of both worlds. That approach forced Google to further strengthen Panda and to iterate it to the point where even good quality content is pushed back in favor of the "safe to click" or "brand" websites. Panda will not die it will just ascend into the core algo, same as Penguin by the way.

At this point, we are in the what I believe is the "evaluation stage", meaning Panda is now smarter and is interacting albeit slower with pretty much all websites. Once this transition is complete, the update will act faster (not as fast as most think! but faster than today) and be more precise.

With this line of thought, I beleive the future of SEO will be bleak, because the SERPS will change even more dramatically and even more often not to mention be way more personalized. Google in my mind will push for even greater individuality and will become even smarter, when evaluating your backlink, text, and image or video content.

In a couple of years, it will be all about the marketing side of things and SEO specialists like us will be a thing of the past. Perhaps for larger websites there will be some form of SEO team that will monitor the purely technical and server side of things, but for the most part the developers will handle the small websites they build. That will lead to another phenomenon , where WordPress themes and churn and burn websites will be weaved out of the SERPS, leaving only eligible, ready to commit businesses and information websites to battle for the first page of Google.

This only my opinion on the subject, however looking at how the SERPS changed over the past 5 years, I believe I will be correct in my assumption.

[engine]

With this line of thought, I beleive the future of SEO will be bleak, because the SERPS will change even more dramatically and even more often not to mention be way more personalized.

The future of SEO as some practitioners may understand it has changed, yes, there's no question over that. It has been going on for many years. In that time, learn and adapt to the changes. Simple things of the past used to be anchor text. That hasn't gone away, it's just that it is now only one small part of the whole mix. It's all the other things an SEO does that helps make a site search engine freindly, and that includes making it work on different platforms, desktop and mobile, making the site valuable to the site visitor (content), giving the site a great structure, creating and feeding the correct data to the search engine (snippets), etc., and, of course, working with the rest of the marketing team.

It's certainly not bleak, imho, it's just a great deal different.

[netmeg]

In a couple of years, it will be all about the marketing side of things and SEO specialists like us will be a thing of the past.

I've always considered SEO as a subset of marketing. It's just one more tool in the box.

[glakes]

In a couple of years, it will be all about the marketing side of things and SEO specialists like us will be a thing of the past.

I see this right now and marketing is far more important to me than SEO. For example, on the 24th there was a three hour span where I could not print off the orders coming in from Google fast enough before the next orders came in. In the hours (actually days) before this I would be hard pressed to find an order coming in from a Google visitor. Do I invest thousands of dollars and many man hours optimizing for this three hour period? Absolutely not. Marketing on other channels and mediums will produce the sales I need and provide a predictable ROI.

It's certainly not bleak, imho, it's just a great deal different.

I would not call the future of SEO bleak, but I would not waste a ton of time on it either. In its most basic meaning, SEO is about optimizing for search engines and too many people place too much emphasis on this. This leaves them reliant on each and every algo update, and that reliance (dependence) is what we all should be moving away from. Just seeing how traffic quality is manipulated, which greatly devalues the benefits of SEO, underscores our need to move beyond SEO and focus on an all-inclusion marketing plan using all tools at our disposal.

[Andy Langton]

SEO dies every year if you listen to the headlines. But SEO only dies when search engines do. Search market share of the web is down, of course, but it's still a massive part of how people use the web. Search engines have to order the results - this means there are criteria for ordering the results. SEO is about meeting the criteria better than other people.

That said, I personally believe there has been a definite move at Google away from giving people the 'best' result to giving people what they want. Happy searchers is the goal. Or at least, not unhappy searchers. The easiest way of achieving that is by providing 'safe' results - show people things they've already heard of, basically. A small page on a big corporate site > a strong page on a small specialist site. This makes SEO a brutally difficult task in some industries, unless you're working for the big players.

[fathom]

Anyone that thought WHITEHAT SEO was ever about generating ranks in Google (or any Search Engine for that matter) has been doing BLACKHAT SEO themselves without realizing it. Unintentionally mind you, but BLACKHAT nonetheless.

A WHITEHAT SEO is incredibly happy with the traffic from where ever it came from, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Digg, etc., meaning the rel="nofollow" link is of zero concern to them. If that traffic happens to materialize from Google, GREAT! But you certainly can't force that to occur unless you deem yourself BLACKHAT.

It is indeed more difficult to manipulate Google (sustainably) especially with low cost content, or chasing one link at a time.

Thus it is very clear the average DIYSEO is nearly extinct.

[Andy Langton]

But you certainly can't force that to occur unless you deem yourself BLACKHAT

You obviously have a particular definition of 'black hat', but I'm not sure it's one that everyone would agree on. To me, black hat = breaking search engine guidelines. Are you saying that activities like using keywords from market research, changing code to make it easier for search engines to interpret, canonicalising URLs or asking people to link to you are 'black hat'? There are literally hundreds of things you can do that influence search results that do not break search engine guidelines.

[Liane]

SEO operates on the two ends of the spectrum now-a-days. The very white hat folks try to do virality type of content, where they hope they will be featured on other websites. It's definitely the harder thing to do and sadly often the needle barely moves, not to mention that this is way more marketing and way less SEO. The other end of the spectrum are the old school SEO pros, who do the dirty work of finding linking opportunities and exploit them. Footnotes editing, link syphoning, comment and forum participation, ghost linking, the works. They build links like it's 2010. If done correctly they get better results faster and typically avoid penalties.

I will preface my comments below by stating I am NOT an SEO. I am a site owner who could barely be considered a webmaster. I get by and that's as far as it goes.

I believe Nutterum's post contains the best and most accurate observation so far. It is also refreshing to see that the direction of this thread is finally going in the right direction for those who come here looking for "real" advice rather than more rhetoric designed to prop up outdated, ineffective and damaging methodology, by those who claim to be SEO "experts".

I truly believe that the old school SEO methods are doomed to fail sooner rather than later. The sad part is the length of time it is taking to get there. However, Google is becoming better and better at sniffing out fake, bought and manipulated links.

NOTHING can replace:

Proper silo site structure with intelligent internal linking designed to highlight and reinforce the core business on EVERY page.

Well written and original content based on knowledge of the subject to solidly establish authority.

Well written and accurate snippets. (Some gifted SEO's may advise site owners to delete all snippets. DON'T ... just DON'T)

Weed out thin content or flesh it out sufficiently to be of value to the user and of more use to the end user than what anyone else offers on the same subject.

There is no mystery involved in TODAY'S SEO!

At this point, we are in the what I believe is the "evaluation stage", meaning Panda is now smarter and is interacting albeit slower with pretty much all websites. Once this transition is complete, the update will act faster (not as fast as most think! but faster than today) and be more precise.

Exactly! The problem Google currently has with the search results is the length of time this "transition" is taking. While they are busying themselves, playing it safe, other search engines are delivering better quality results ... and people are noticing.

Google's biggest task for the immediate future is to find ways and means of speeding up the process if they don't want to lose more and more market share as time marches on.

My crystal ball predicts that SEO's who take part in link buying ... trading ... selling and other scamming schemes ... will soon be taking a long walk off a short pier and will find themselves atop a very large pile of dead lemmings. The lemmings beings their clients to whom they sold a bill of OLD goods. They may already be standing on the pier and not even know it. For their sakes, I hope they have scuba equipment handy. They're going to need it.

The way forward is for developers (who can actually code) to learn basic marketing strategies for the web ... if they haven't already done so, and replace the old boys and girls who haven't kept in step with the times.

For me, it is a happy time because my background is marketing and sales. The old school SEO was all voodoo to me and never made any sense. Nobody stood a chance at ranking if they didn't know how to "game the system".

But with the painfully slow evolution of Google and other search engines, as long as I stick to what I KNOW makes sense for my business and my clients, then I should be good to go at some point down the road.

Finding an intelligent developer who is up on all the newest trends (not kitchy fads) and who thinks outside the old SEO tool box, was really my most daunting task when redeveloping my site. I was lucky, after a costly SEO misstep that resulted in even more dismal rankings than I was dealing with before ... I finally found him. It hasn't been a panacea for all my Google woes, but at least I am finally getting inquiries from Bing, Yahoo, and others. I can only assume that by this time next year or the year after, I "might" see my Google rankings improve.

A good marketing person or developer will ask themselves, "if money were no object, what could we do for this client, using best practices". They would then tailor their strategy so that the client would get the biggest bang for their buck.

Once the site starts producing, then they can go back to the client and pitch their other ideas they couldn't use from their original brainstorming session. If the site is performing and earning the owner money, the owner can then justify and afford spending more money on the site in order to make even more money and get ahead of their competition.

Contrary to what some believe, today's SEO isn't the wham bam, thank you ma'am strategy of the past. It is a long term approach to marketing that begins with best practices of site design, content and ongoing improvement and development.

Hiring non-native speakers from some far off land to write sketchy content for some crappy WordPress site at $3.00 an hour is certainly not the answer. Link buying, trading, selling is also not the long term ... and in my opinion is not the short term answer. Hard work and delivering the goods for the end user is.

Keeping a site it up-to-date, relevant and two to three steps ahead of the competition is the answer.

It's all the other things an SEO does that helps make a site search engine freindly, and that includes making it work on different platforms, desktop and mobile, making the site valuable to the site visitor (content), giving the site a great structure, creating and feeding the correct data to the search engine (snippets), etc., and, of course, working with the rest of the marketing team.

Absolutely!

Search engines have to order the results - this means there are criteria for ordering the results. SEO is about meeting the criteria better than other people.

I couldn't agree more. And how do we do that? We do it by giving the users exactly what they want so that we EARN their links/votes over time with a steady flow of new links coming in from a wide variety of sources. I firmly believe that links should be aged out UNLESS the content is static and doesn't require updating.

If Google isn't already doing so, pages that continue to earn new links consistently is probably the best possible sign of value and up-to-date content.

Getting a single link from a PR 6 or higher domain will certainly remain the gold standard for now, but unless supported by hundreds or even thousands of links from social networking sites and the average PR 2 to 5 page, then I believe that PR6 or 7 link may not pass the sniff test if reviewed by a human. Those supporting links are more believable in my humble opinion. They validate the big gun's vote.

There are literally hundreds of things you can do that influence search results that do not break search engine guidelines.

I totally agree ... and I intend to prove it. Some just won't let go of their old school ways. Black Hat / White Hat stuff is definitely old school SEO! The term itself is outdated because it implies manipulation. Thankfully, these days it is "business school" and sensible marketing that matter.

Anyway, it's really nice to see a frank discussion about SEO and the way forward. I just hope Google will put their running shoes on and do some catching up. It's agonizing to watch what was once my favourite search engine, decline in quality.

[Andy Langton]

... I believe that PR6 or 7 link may not pass the sniff test if reviewed by a human. Those supporting links are more believable in my humble opinion. They validate the big gun's vote.

I think the 'sniff test' is a good point - but mostly not conducted by humans - all links get 'sniff tested' by the algorithm. I think the biggest thing that has screwed up SEO with 'old school' tactics is that most of the links people build just don't count any more - or are counted as negative votes. And it's very difficult know when this occurs. Add to that a totally different application of penalties from formerly being an on/off switch (Google won't forget what you did three years ago) and substantial query rewriting, Google has massively (and likely deliberately) disrupted the ability of SEOs to see cause and effect ("SEO is dead").

[Liane]

Google has massively (and likely deliberately) disrupted the ability of SEOs to see cause and effect ("SEO is dead").

I agree that SEO is dead. Long live business school for the web based on sound marketing and business practices.

It has certainly taken long enough! I just wish all the wizards and witch doctors who are still thumping their SEO drums would recognize it is time to hang up their magic wands, rattles, masks and potions for good, and stop misleading people ... so the rest of us can get on with the business of doing business.

[fathom]

To me, black hat = breaking search engine guidelines.

The GUIDELINES are intentionally vague. In a nutshell
[static.googleusercontent.com...]

What you can do... "Make a GREAT website!"

asking people to link to you

Define the limits of asking?

If you make a GREAT website… isn’t it obvious that a website owner (with an interested readership) would share that with their readership, without needing your tip.

That said, the rel=”nofollow” micro-expression isn’t a problem because you earned the traffic.

[edited by: fathom at 6:33 pm (utc) on Nov 26, 2015]

[engine]

Google has massively (and likely deliberately) disrupted the ability of SEOs to see cause and effect ("SEO is dead").

It has disrupted it, and i'm sure that was an aim to reduce "gaming of the system" to, as you say, give the effect it desired.

It does not mean that the work of an SEO is finished.

I recall the questions in the past to SEO sites, and the business would do next to no marketing of any kind outside of the SEO. That used to work, for a while. For many years now, i've been advising against just that one activity. Slowly, businesses have caught on, but, unfortunately, this is where the smaller business goes back to struggling when up against corporate business as they don't have deep enough pockets to compete with the corporate budgets. But they can set their sights differently.

However, as mentioned, there are many, many aspects of a site that require attention, and it can make a difference. Just don't expect it to be easy, as it was. But it can be done, but not in isolation.

Many businesses were founded on the basis of putting a site online, and it's suddenly got a profitable business. I remember the very early days of a business going online: It had more business than it knew what to do with it. It forged partnerships and referred enquiries. It was pretty much the first in its niche. That was waaaay back. Now, that same business is still online, but the enquiries are far fewer and further between, even though it still ranks well. Now there are many competitors online which were never there at the outset, and much of the competition also tells a good story. The share of the pie is probably more evenly divided, however, the visitor traffic is more discerning, and it requires telling a great story, better hooks, more appealing. It requires a great UI, ways to capture the data, and even then, the traffic may not even find its way there through a search engine, and quite often it doesn't.

[Andy Langton]

Define the limits of asking [people to link to you]?

In terms of asking for links? Unless you're talking about some sort of exceptionally large scale thing, I don't think this is "black hat" at all. I'm not aware of anything in Google's guidelines saying you can't ask people to link to you (although I'm not intimately familiar with every guideline).

It does not mean that the work of an SEO is finished.

Yes indeed. However SEO is dead seems to be a synonym for "SEO doesn't work" which is certainly the case for some tactics that may have been effective in the past. So, for those without any alternate tactics, SEO is certainly dead ;)

[fathom]

Although UNNATURAL LINKS are not a PANDA thing...

This was about "1" link from a source [moz.com...]

The fact that Google's Webspam Team picked this single link out to represent a much larger problem doesn't suggest this single link would be a natural feature if the larger issue didn't exist (Which was the point Rand Fishkin incorrectly tried to address).

It is clear that PANDA doesn't have a problem here. Although, the LINK wasn't for the readership it was clearly for the author. Matt Cutts comments at page bottom are eye-opening.

[3zero]

Why are there so many people talking about links on a Panda thread?

Panda evaluates content not links

[fathom]

The thought processes are so intertwine it wrongly produces these thought e.g.

The very white hat folks try to do virality type of content, where they hope they will be featured on other websites. It's definitely the harder thing to do and sadly often the needle barely moves, not to mention that this is way more marketing and way less SEO.

This style wrongly thinks you need to create high quality content for others to get a DOFOLLOW link... When the actual practice is tapping into the readerships of more authoriative websites to earn traffic and thus a NOFOLLOW LINK is no big deal. The former thought process doesn't work very well if there is a big disconnect between the posted information and the link provided, that should extend to topic elsewhere, not change the topic, just because the author wants DOFOLLOW LINKS.

While that in itself isn't a PANDA problem... This part is... If the page on the other end of the link (at your domain) isn't another piece of very high quality content because you gave that away for FREE and you can't be bother to increase the value of your own domain to (one up) what was given away to promote you, you are intentionally devaluating your own domain. Making it something that shouldn't rank well since all the GREAT CONTENT is elsewhere.

Google states very clearly make your website GREAT! The guidelines never hint about guest posting as a content development method.

[Nutterum]

Yes, but even if you have great content, the GREATEST content of them all and have 10 backlinks, chances are you will still be on page 10 ro 20 or 100, depending on the niche. See that is the problem with Panda. You can't just look at it from the content angle. You need to look at it from the backlinks angle as well. How can I promote my content to others so they link back to me. As for the do follow vs no follow argument. If you run a high level content marketing campaign that is orchestrated with SEO in mind, you will get 10x more no-follow links than do follow links, because most websites are created that way.

As for the folks asking why we discuss backlinks in a Panda thread. Because the sole reason of having content on your website from a pure SEO standpoint is to generate links, that will enable Google to give you their "stamp of approval" . Before Panda you could have a landing page with a contact form and nothing else, pumped up with gazzilion links and it would have worked...hell it still works (churn and burn websites anyone?).

Panda comes in where Penguin fails. Simple as that. Panda was created to artificially block your content from the first page of Google until you reach the point where you bite the bullet and allocate big enough budget to be able to join the "big boys SEO poker table" that is Page 1. That is what Panda really is.

Now many of you will probably boo me, but if you really look deep enough and focus on what Panda really is, you will know I am right. Take Rand Fishkin's article about quality content and SEO : [moz.com...] . The guy is right, he really is. One problem though, he didn't mention that to create such content you need cash, preferably A LOT of it.

That is why in my mind SEO is dead (at least the way we know it), because the antes(cost for entry) is getting bigger and bigger over time. It's business as usual folks. The big ones reap the rewards of their budgets, while the small ones either pay Adwords or forever stay on Page 2...and frankly, from personal experience I can tell you Adwords is waaay cheaper in the long run.

[Itanium]

Yes, but even if you have great content, the GREATEST content of them all and have 10 backlinks, chances are you will still be on page 10 ro 20 or 100, depending on the niche.

I don't think that's the case (anymore).

I have a competitor who only has backlinks from 25 domains. His rankings EXPLODED with Phantom 2 and continued to rise throughout the last couple of month. He has surpassed me and many others for many highly competitive, high value keywords, despite the fact that every top 10 competitor has _at least_ 10 times the number of domains (often from high PR domains) linking back to them, than he does.

Links are important, but it looks to me, that since Phantom 2 aka Rankbain rolled out in May, other things are more important (like unique content & structure, time on site, bounce rate, ctr, etc.).

[EditorialGuy]

Yes, but even if you have great content, the GREATEST content of them all and have 10 backlinks, chances are you will still be on page 10 ro 20 or 100, depending on the niche.

Maybe. But if you want organic links, you'd better have content that's worthy of such links.

Also, high-quality content isn't just link bait. It also makes your pages more Panda-friendly. Most important of all, it makes your pages more appealing to users (thereby improving user metrics that may be taken into account by search algorithms).

And yes, it takes money and/or money to create content that has intrinsic value to users. Its like anything else: If you want to publish a magazine, you'll need to invest in editors, writers, and art directors. If you want to run a fashion boutique, you'll need to create attractive window displays or hire someone to do it for you. "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

[Andy Langton]

Yes, but even if you have great content, the GREATEST content of them all and have 10 backlinks, chances are you will still be on page 10 ro 20 or 100, depending on the niche.

I really sympathise with this, because it's a bugbear of mine. Google has a bee in its bonnet about being up-to-date. Remember "realtime" search? Search engines aren't built for 'realtime' - social networks are. Hence Google+, I suppose. Many searches that don't demand recent results are now peppered with news and articles.

It's not about having the best content. Google likes new content from sites that have either never done anything wrong, or are too large to ignore. It's a good time to be a new player anywhere but the most competitive niches. Maybe this will change, because prioritising quality is surely something that people want. But maybe not - the web is the biggest game in town. The major media players know this as well as we do.

Forgive me a little Friday night rant ;)

[tangor]

Obviously we all want page 1. But there's nothing wrong with a consistent page 2. On sites I manage for others, those who do their very best in content, freshness, and natural linking, they hold solid spots on page 2 and their business reflects a good ROI. Yes, all efforts are made to break onto page 1, but dang it, there's nothing wrong with page 2 now that half of page 1 is paid/brand/se properties. Users are beginning to understand that and click through to page 2. And they are there because of good content, freshness, and natural links, and always at the "front door" if one site on page 1 screws the pooch and drops.