I've been out of the SEO loop for a few years now. At one point in history I even offered consultancy to budding webmasters wanting to separate the good (white hat on page factors and link building) from the bad (follow these steps and we guarantee #1 in two weeks?), and get some genuine advice.
I've turned my attention to SEO again, and, well... whilst core things have remained in place, the landscape they are in has changed dramatically.
On page factors, keyword density, anchor text, quality of inbound links, etc, all of these remain core to getting listed (I'd have been really shocked if that had changed).
But what has link building become now? Ok, reciprocal link pages we well on their way out last time I was here, but DMOZjust closed... I mean, it's like the end of an Era. Yahoo directory went years ago, many of the directories I used to list at appear to have vanished.
And PageRank? What happened to PageRank? If nothing more, you knew that if you hit a site with N/A pagerank they were probably on the naughty list and you really didn't want a link from them. What will people talk about without the endless does PageRank matter debates?
What happened to using Yahoo or Google to check the inbound links for any domain you wanted? Ok, Google used to filter those results, but Yahoo was usually pretty decent. Now there appear to be two main sources for backlink stats, Moz and Majestic (Hi Dixon), both of whom seem to completely disagree with each other.
What happened to PPC?
I remember the days of Goto (then Overture, then Yahoo Search Marketing), FindWhat, Google Adwords, etc. Now it seems to be Bing or Adwords, and nothing else. Yahoo doesn't even have it's own results anymore, and they use Bing ads, as does Ask? Everything seems to have sucked into either Microsoft or Google.
Communities seem to have taken a hit as well. I used to post at WebProWorld and now, boom, gone. This place doesn't seem to be getting the traction it used to. Where is everybody?
What's with the modern SEO tools?
They seem keen to rehash what you get from Google analytics, and freely from Moz and Majestic, and charge you for the privilege. Am I missing something? Most of them seem more concerned with the load times of your images and your DNS settings, than checking whether your page is actually targeting the key phrase you want. Not that pulling out information on keywords is as easy as it used to be...
Sorry for all the questions, I feel like I just woke up from a coma 10 years later, and almost everything I recognised has gone. Hoping someone can give me a little guidance and how best to get back up to speed.
Lyle
