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If you speak to all the best Internet Marketing Pros they tell you SEO is a waste of time longterm, everyone in the industry has lost their position at somepoint from what I gather - or am I wrong?
I want to hear from anyone who has had long term success with SEO say for 6 months or longer....
Can Google Grow Up?
[fortune.com...]
As Google grows, critics emerge
[boston.com...]
The only one that benefits from all this complaining is WebmasterWorld. You have just given this site a LOT more content at the expense of your own site(s).
Good point Dave.
Brett, you will receive a bill from me by next Tuesday, please pay on time;)
Bottom line is, build your site for humans and NOT Google,
That's like asking politicians to not sling mud at each other to get elected, and to just cross their fingers and hope that the political process will somehow work out in their favor by wishful thinking alone;)
Of course we have to optimize for google, they can never change that, they have only changed the rules for SEO but they can never stop the game.
Why?
Because there has to be an intelligent "system" for giving search results, and that system is based on traits and patterns, regardless how sophisticated the algo gets it will always be based on traits and patterns.
SEO is not going away just because google thinks it should, just like 'trash politics' are not going away ever (even though our society always talks about the need for political reform and the need to end 'trash politics', it never goes away and never gets better).
The connection between politics and SEO is clear (platitudes and reality are two different things).
I have reported sites for cheating, many times, and google is still ranking most of these sites top 5. So it's hard not to join these sites if Google doesn't do anything about them even after being reported. What's good for them is good for me. Two wrongs don't make a "right", but two wrongs make the playing field LEVEL.
As long as some people optimize we all will have to optimize for google, it's that simple. Nobody will be the first to stop so therefore we all can never stop doing SEO...
See my logic? :)
Sometimes in the google idolisation we can forget that it just isn't that clever at ranking sites without some pointers. Thats what SEO is all about.
If the algo was that good, we could all just sit around making our dream sites and not worry about whether anyone would find it.
Only if you believe rudely hijacking threads is acceptable behavior.
Pages that have a lot of keyphrase anchor text links pointing to them need to reduce the optimisation for that keyphrase.
Say you have a red furry widget site and your anchor text links for your index are all pretty much 'red furry widgets'.
You need to stop putting 'red furry widgets' in your title, H1s, and throughout the page.
you need to start putting 'Blah blah Red widgets', 'Furry Widgets that are a lovely shade of red', 'Red furry types of widgets'.
you get the idea. It looks like over optimisation of a keyphrase on-page, coupled with over-optimisation of anchor text is tripping a filter and dumping that page for that keyphrase.
The keyphrase needs to be split and scattered throughout the page, so the individual words don't appear right next to each other too often, but the words do still appear on the page.
Either that, or reduce the over-focus on your anchor text. This is a problem for sites that have the keyphrase as part of the company name, but needs to be done I feel to avoid tripping this filter.
Or am I just crazy? I'm going to try it on one of my less important sites that has been Florida'd and see what happens when the page gets spidered.
I think this question is better phrased as "will search engine optimization work in the long run?" Refining it to Google only is foolish considering a year from now Google may not be the power house. (remember altavista...?)
Anyways, yes I think SEO will work in the long term as long as you evolve with the times and work diligantly. This isn't to say that some months might be terrible for any given SEOer. But, in the long term a hard working and intelligent SEOer can (will) do well.
The problem lies in the fact that people tend to spend more when they make more. So, if someone makes a ton of money on their well optimized sites one month their personal expenditures for that same month increase as well. And they continue to do this as long as the big checks are rolling in.
But this month, after all the previous good months, the algorithm changes. Many "seasoned" SEOers are having a bad month which affects their bottom line and they aren't able to spend as much as they have the month before (which can land people into big trouble if they are in debt).
People are very emotional when it comes to their money (which is VERY understandable) so when they earn less than what they are used to, and there is no apparent reason why they are earning less, they begin to point fingers. Google, being the largest driver of traffic on the internet is naturally the first place people will point their fingers at.
But the fact is Google is a company...The Google search engine is their technology and they can do with it as they please...What would you do if there was no google tomorrow?
I used to wonder why Google has stayed privately held for so long, holding off on the IPO. But public rants like the ones I have seen here makes it a little more clear to me as to why they have yet to go public.
(*side note: I think a lot of people are treating google optimization as a normal 9-5 job and have come to expect a certain income every month as if it were a salary. But the truth is if you are a full time search engine optimizer you are running your own business which means there will be fat times and lean times and what makes a good business man is taking advantage of the fat times, preparing for the bad)
[edited by: hobbnet at 2:53 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2003]
If there was no google tomorrow, all the shoppers would be forced to use other search engines, which sounds like it would benefit a lot of us. :)
That wasn't really my point but fair enough...
Question is, are you optimized for the other engines?
I never used to use hyphens in domain names, then I found out that google likes hyphens. So I use those and have good success.
Long URLs are good for Google, since google (at least used to) factor that into relevance. But they are often not good for users.
A lot of people would like to interlink their sites but are scared that they will be penalized by google for doing it.
For the most part, a DMOZ listing is useless, except for Google. So you spend time developing those.
I would actually put many many more links on my pages if I wasn't trying to conserve pagerank and target keywords. Now, seems like I'm being penalized for the links I do have.
In many cases, I'd like to use frames in my sites, but I never do, because Google doesn't like it.
etc. etc.
Google may change what it likes, but you're always going to have to cater to its latest whims.
- Long urls are not necessarily good for google. What is good is to have your keyword in the anchor text of all incoming links. If your keyword(s) are in the domain the anchor text of incoming links is much more likely to have your keywords in it since people typically link to "yourdomain.com". The physical length of a URL is irrelevant.
- I wouldn't be afraid of interlinking your sites as long as they are relevant sites...Many sites interlink and do great. Abusively interlinking sites is what gets you in trouble.
- A dmoz link is as good as any other link in my opinion...A dmoz link does get you into the google directory but I see no direct positive affect in that (I have never used the google directory and don't know anyone that has)
- Putting links on your pages doesn't make your pages lose PR. You can have a thousand links on a page and that page's particular PR will stay the same. Having more links will just distribute less PR to the other pages you are linking to, which makes total sense. If page "A" only links to page "B", page "A" obviously finds page "B" to be very important. But if page "A" were to link to a hundred other pages as well as page "B", page "A" obviously doesn't think page "B" is as important as it does in the previous example.
- Most everyone hates frames, so does google...why design in frames?
Having the keyword in all incoming links these days will get you penalized. However, in the old days (last week), you get bonus points for having the keyword in the URL. FOr instance:
Let's say you have a book site. If the URL for a page selling the book includes the title in the URL, Google factors that into its calculation. So a longer URL is better.
How can you tell what is "abuse" of interlinking? When people are tired with one of my sites I want them to visit another one of my sites. I have to be concerned about not tripping any Google penalties when I do that. What I may consider good for me and my users may not be what google likes.
Frames are good for all kinds of things. I have a dictionary site I wanted to use frames but didn't for fear of Google. If I used frames the user could click on another letter of the alphabet wherever he was on the page. Now he has to scroll to the top or bottom where I have the alphabet list.
I have to manage and conserve PR. To do that I need to limit the number of links. So for my user I might want to provide 50 links to 50 interesting sites, but I don't want to spread my PR that thin, so I only link to 8.
I could go on and on.
[edited by: frup at 3:29 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2003]
-mt-tb-cgi, for example Trade Show Displays - mt-tb.cgi
This string is found in every backtrack created by movabletype.org, but for some reason it's affecting all the keywords I've fallen on. As a comparison, add in any other extenion to see if it changes the results and you will see that it might adjust them a little, but overall they are the same.
_______________________________________________________
By typing in an extension that is created by backtrack from blogs the results on Google are corrected.
If you add -mt-tb.cgi to the end of any keyword affected the results look like they are back to normal with some changes in ranking.
the extension -mt-tb.cgi seems to generated by Weblog sotware Movabletype.org when it creates a trackback. I need some of you experts help, but if you do a search for this on Google by itself without the (-) in front it generates blank pages created by trackbacks. If you follow the second result for this search and then go to the homepage listed on this page you will see that the blog is powered by movabletype.org by a very small link on the right hand side of the page.
So here's my question... what's does this have to do with me setting up reciprocal links with other companies that want to help me do business and why should Google penalize me..... I didn't even know what a blog was until Sunday and this is the second post 9now third) I've made. What am I to do?
Try -showmethegoodsites
same thing, has nothing to do with blogs.
Sorry for the error, there is no space after the - and before the mt-tb.cgi
DO a search for Trade Show Displays and the add your
-showmethegoodstuff and look at the reults vs.
-mt-tb.cgi
On my end the showmethegoodstuff doesn't do a thing...
Interesting post. May have merrit; I'm not smart enough to reverse engineer these crazy SERP's and know if they are far smarter than I am, or what. (Can SERP's be smarter than I am? ... Don't know.)
Here's what I do know. The theory merlin30 put forward (whether it's correct or not) reminds me of a time in the 1940's when everybody and their mother was talking about the next big thing: robots. Robots were going to clean our houses, change the lighting in our homes based on the lighting outdoors, tell us when flashlight batteries were running low, etc.
Very exciting stuff.
However, if your vacuum cleaner broke down and you had the neighbors coming over Saturday night for martinis and pot roast, you still had to find a vacuum cleaner store...and buy a new vacuum!
I feel like I'm in the 1940's, just found out about Google, searched on "vacuum cleaners" with my computer that doesn't exist yet, and found a bunch of great sites on the future of robots: US Govt sites, news articles, grrreat stuff.
Not really helping with my rug problem though, now is it?
Hey steveb, no matter, those robot sites are still great information sites! If I only had time to read about the future of robots. Nope, got to get that rug cleaned or my wife will make me wait another month for Sunday morning sex. Hmmm, maybe the Yellow Pages... ;-)
p.s. merlin30 I'm not saying you're wrong or right...only that if you're right, G has it wrong. They are about 60 years ahead of their time.
You found an old article by Mr. Orlowski critical of the high rankings enjoyed by blogs on Google. He mentioned that there is a way to exclude blogs.
The hyphen or minus sign directly in front of a search term tells Google that you want everything for the terms in the search box except the term that is preceded by the minus sign.
Mr. Orlowski's mention of the blog trick is designed to specifically exclude trackback links. What we are talking about is using the exclusion trick to fool the filter that Google imposed with this latest update, which started a week ago. The blog trick is apples, this is oranges. When Mr. Orlowski wrote this article, the current update was still in the future.
Any nonsense exclusion term apparently fools the parsing of the terms in the search box such that the filter is not tripped. If you have only two search terms, then adding one nonsense exclusion term will probably work. If you have three search terms, then it seems you frequently need two different exclusion terms after them, for a total of five terms. If the trick doesn't work for a single exclusion term on your site, then I would suggest that when you don't use quotation marks, as you shouldn't in this case, an embedded hyphen lacking another leading space will be parsed as two exclusion terms.
It's a bug! For some reason your example might need two exclusion terms. Sure, it's weird. Exploiting bugs is always weird science.
Almost all of us know this by now. It has nothing to do with the specific exclusion term mentioned in Mr. Orlowski's piece.
We're trying to defeat the filter so that we can get a picture of what Google is doing. So are you. But we're ahead of you.
Scroll down to "Google Update, Part 4" and read all 626 posts. You'll see several instances where I and others have explained this in great detail.
You found an old article by Mr. Orlowski critical of the high rankings enjoyed by blogs on Google.
Orlowski thought Google would get rid of "blog noise". Orlowski was totally off base on that one. Google kept the blogs, and got rid of "SEO noise".
Blogs aren't SEOed, except that bloggers have an ethic of freely exchanging links with each other, while commercial website guys have the opposite ethic (because they are so worried that someone else might get more benefit from the link than they do).
I manage about a dozen sites from small fry to international corporations. None were radically affected by the sppring Google change- some keywords dropped in ranking for a few weeks then bounced back to page 1 and 2. This last change has left some term rankings alone, raised some, and caused my top site to basically disappear for 3 of their most relevant critical search terms.
The larget client sells, installs and services a variety of widgets worldwide starting at about $50,000 a widget. They are an extermely relevant result for their products. They have been an award winning industry leader for 13 years but when I took over almost 2 years ago they were nowhere on any of the engines.
Meeting with much resistance I began adding pages and content for each type of widget- how their used, features, benefits etc. I used every possible variation on the widget names in the text with the most popular terms in page titles and header.I added text links so the spiders could reach every page, I built carefully worded inbound text links from relevant industry sites and stayed away from both non-relevant site link requests and link farms. I hand submitted to hundreds of engines worldwide. AND I avoided any questionable tactics- no hidden text, no cloaking,no excessive keyword density, no deceitful redirects.
Since mid 2002 they have been on page 1 for over 20 top terms on all engines -US and foreign. So have all of my other smaller clients- most have gone from nowhere to page 1 within the 1st month of my starting work- some terms have taken a little longer.
All survived intact the spring Google changes. But not this time- although I have not changed my tactics and all are very relevant for the terms for which they have disappeared. The terms for which they have risen are not as relevant or as high traffic.
The #1 spot for all of the terms used by my top client -have been held for 2 years by a site with hundreds of words hidden in the page with font color matching the background, with massive keyword density- and apparently breaking every rule laid down by Google. I have submitted Google spam reports but thye are still there. As a matter of fact thye are still #1 on the terms for which we (and all other top competition) disappeared. And they are blatently breaking the Google "law" The other top 50 results are garbage- news links and old links to companies that are out of business. These are very specific product "widget" terms. None is going t obe looking to eat one or learn the history. If they search for this widget it is because their business is looking at buying one.
RE ad words- the top terms for which all relevant non-spamming sites disappeared - are all hot terms on google and Overture ppc. The top 6 spots always run $15- $20 per click 7 days a week. All of the advertisers for these widgets - have been dropped from the top 100 search results.
All clients have maintained their top spots on other engines such as msn, ask jeeves, looksmart and allthe web.
The thread theory on a Google ad words conspiracy could have some validity. The terms I've seen most affected are all high price ppc ads. I pay close attention to search results and web statgies of the client's competition AND all of the advertisers have disappeared from the results - whether they were formly on page 1 or page 4- now they are gone from the top 100.
Based on the latest results I implemeted 2 differnet strategies last night on 7 of the webpages (out of a total of 100 + pages)
On some I left the tex tand titles bare bones -removed almost all cases of the widget name- whic hmakes the text read abit odd in places. On others I beefed up the keyword density and header use and altered keywords proximity to one another in sentence structure. The majority of the pages I did not touch. So, I have 3 possibilties for Google to explore- if none work- I'll vote for the commerical adwords theory- thye want to boot all commercial sites out and to adwords- bet they picked up some new clients today.
A final note and then I'll disappear back into the wood work. Some in this long thread seem to feel that google results are screwed for commercial sites but not informational sites. Last night I was researching data for a magazine article I'm supposed to be writing. Has nothing to do with any commercial ventures or widgets. Of course I went to google. It was a wasted 2 hours. I finally used some bookmarked reference sites to dig for the required information- google was useless.
Though I would give both google, msn and alltheweb (sometimes touted as a google contender) a shot at website stat programs- alltheweb and google were same level of useless. Surprising note- many of the same page 1 results? Haven't seen this before. And what does the #2 Florida dept of health or #5 Minnesota Education (on both searches) have to do with me looking for info on website stat programs?
web statistics programs was only minimally better results on all 3.
I'm ready for a switch- but is there a decent engine anywhere? any suggestions? And if so, could the word be spread? Gleefully awaiting the Yahoo/ Overture? inktomi spilt from google as Yahoo spreads their wings. The less of a strangle google has on the engines, the better. Long ago, before Google I was a netscape fan- before their demise.
Of course we have to optimize for google, they can never change that, they have only changed the rules for SEO but they can never stop the game.
As long as you have that mind-set you are going to lose "the game". Google never has and never will tell you "the rules" so you are playing blind-folded. By the time you *think* you have figured out one of the rules, it will have changed.
Google wants to return relavent results for humans, optimize your site for humans and you are Google are singing from the same song book. *Try* to optimize for Google SERPs and you WILL ALWAYS lose.
This is not an unfounded theory but a method that has and does work for ALL that all that are brave enough to 'step outside the SEO box' that most have been brainwashed into thinking.
Winnipeg real estate
Well I just did and the number 1 site reads
<<Welcome to our Web Site!
We are a leading provider of real estate valuations and advice Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and surrounding area.>>>
What on earth is wrong with that?
On the changing of SE's. Name one other popular SE that spiders ALL web pages in the world for free. All the biggies are pay for inclusion, PPC and alike.
Dave
[edited by: Dave_Hawley at 7:01 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2003]
Check the google forums last spring - if you thought this was panic do some reading about G pre summer 03. We still have no idea how long this will last.
if you thought this was panic do some reading about G pre summer 03
....and always from those that have been SEO brainwashed.
Dave
