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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....
Why does ecommerce get such a bad rap...? I would venture to guess that the majority of people running a business on the web, and using Google for traffic, want the same things Google does. We don't like competeing with spammers, redirectors, etc..
I don't think e-commerce gets a bad rap per se. But because there are so many, many sites selling the same products and services, the SERPs become cluttered with thousands of virtually identical pages, most of which are constructed with boilerplate content. This is frustrating to users, whether or not the Webmasters of those e-commerce sites are pushing the SEO envelope. It's like trying to find information in an index comprised of The Magazine Index, the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, Books in Print, and every Yellow Pages directory in the world.
The clutter problem would be bad enough if merchants were the only people selling things, but there are also thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of affiliates selling the same things, often with the same vendor-supplied advertising copy. So you end up with a situation where you search for the Hotel Whatsit in Shelbyville and you can't find its Web page without digging half a dozen pages down into the search results.
Some people might say "Well, that's the free market, and may the merchant or affiliate site with the best SEO win." That may be a valid point of view if you're a businessperson or an economist, but it isn't a point of view that Google can afford to share. Why? Because Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Simply delivering hundreds or thousands of virtually identical search results in what, to a user, appears to be random order isn't good enough. I don't know what the solution is, but I suspect that it won't be found by continuing to rely on one massive, all-inclusive, undifferentiated index. There has to be a way to channel users into the types of search results they're actually looking for.
No...this "change" is too widespread to be the result of manual penalties. GoogleGuy has also denied this.
Also, the examples I've looked at include sites that no one could possibly complain about, and no human at the Googleplex could possibly find objectionable. For every big site that deserved to be hit, I think three or four little guys were hit. Yes, they were "optimized" in the sense that they are dependent on a couple of keywords to sell their widgets, and these keywords show up in the usual places you'd expect, and in several backlinks, and perhaps in directory or filenames. But I'd call it "common sense optimization" -- certainly nothing like a link farm, or hidden text, or anything even close to that. Maybe one or two reciprocal link pages at most. It's nothing that heavy.
No one -- neither SEOs in forums nor Google itself -- has ever warned that this level of optimization would be targeted. It makes me feel sad that sites like this may well go out of business. Many of these sites cannot wait around for a month after de-optimizing -- even assuming that de-optimizing is a sure thing. Right now, we cannot even be sure that de-optimizing will work at all.
Longterm online marketing now involves bold new partnerships such as pop-unders on the Montana Dept. of Agriculture widget order form.
Use Froogle :)
Commercial and Information
They have to do something quickly, the SERPS suck
Hopefullly this thread has demonstrated that there are Internet marketing types who are pretty happy with their long term experience. So perhaps we could take the "Google SEO longterm?" question and reply "Yes, for longterm Google SEO"?
By the way, I've "heard" that some Internet marketing types (the long term ones) get paid quite a lot to convince people some of GoogleGuy's points in this thread. We can't convince Google to become a shopping engine, or to stop being wary of SEO. We can take account of what Google like and help their software to like our sites.
Thank you for taking the time to shed some light on the philisophy and goals that Google is trying to implement. I completely agree with the Google philosophy of trying to provide good quality content/information for users first, and trying to filter out sites that are just sell, sell, sell...
I agreed with this philosophy a long time ago (prior to Florida), and was attempting to implement this philosophy on my 'commercial' website.
Because you mentioned insurance in a previous post, I hope you don't mind me using insurance as an example (this is my niche market). It is difficult to explain concepts without using examples. I think my specific example will reflect a lot of what other webmasters are experiencing...We may sell 'cheeseburgers', but we have also tried to provide recipes, nutritional info charts, types of beef, and other helpful info as a service to our customers.
My website provides online insurance for people traveling to a certain country... but my website also provides multiple pages of important content about traveling to that country (road maps and city info, customs info, is the water safe?, laws, what to look for in insurance coverage, safety tips, places to stay, numbers to the US consulate in that country, and more). I have had hundreds of happy customers call me and tell me that they purchased their insurance from us because we had such a helpful website that also answered many of their non-insurance related questions as well. Isn't this what Google wants?
Sorry for being 'commercial', but many people also use my site for it's content and don't buy my insurance...I'm happy to provide that extra service.
The frustrating thing about florida is that all of the new top 10-20 sites are still 'commercial' insurance sites! Instead of being home pages, the top 10 sites are now just 1 page advertisement pages on directory sites for the same old 'commercial' websites (usually of with less content). Just for this example, let's use Iraq as the country example:
Pre-Florida results:
#1 insuranceforiraq.com sells insurance and good travel content too!
#2 driveiraq.com - sells and good content
#3-#10 were all decent sites specializing in selling Iraq insurance, and provided some type of content.
Current results:
#1 www.allaboutiraq.com/bargain-iraq-insurance.html - this is a 1 page insurance ad for this company that links to that company's home page...and once you link to that home page, it may not be a very content rich site..just sell, sell, sell.
#2 - #20 all seem to be 1 page ads on Iraq information directories, and these ads don't really give any helpful info except 'buy from us'!
Also the #4 postion is a spammy site for auto insurance for the US and doesn't mention 'Iraq' once.
I understand Google's intent, but it just doesn't seem like the method is producing what the philosphy's goal is.
For the cheeseburger example:
Instead of getting qualityburgers.com, superburgers.com, and burgersandrecipes.com (pre-florida) you are now getting commercial ads for Billy Bob's possum burgers on allaboutmeat.com/billybobs-possum-burgers.html Then when you link to billybob.com, the whole site just says, "Buy 10lbs of ground possum, 20lbs of ground possum, or 2 tons of ground possum....there are no recipes and hardly any content.
At least this has been the result in my niche....I'm not complaining, I'm just trying to give feedback with the intent of helping.
But the current SERP's were not the solution, especially when dropped like an atom bomb.
As I stated elsewhere, I only have one site that was hit in this way; I manage many others of the type Brett has been espousing and they are doing fine, just as one would hope.
What bugs me so much about this is not the intent, but the specific solution and the way it was handled. Very harsh; not well thought through, not balanced, not elegant.
Like large companies, it is often not the goal that's the problem, but the execution...a particularly appropriate term in this case. Too many well intentioned, clean sites blown away with seemingly little or no acknowledgement.
E-commerce is not all bad, and in fact the best business practitioners understand that fairness must be at the core of any good relationship, whether b2b or b2c. G did not play fair this time. That was never the case before. Hope this is very temporary, and not the 'new Google'...
Balance, grasshopper.
I'm not sure I can completely agree with you. I agree that clutter can be a problem. However, there are only so many brands and so many models of products...
The real problem, and challenge, for Google is all of the spammy sites... they are easy to see using human eyes, but difficult for the filters to catch for some reason.... This update is no different... I see just as much spam as I always have... get rid of these and you have hundreds of thousands less pages to deal with... then it's a battle of who is the best...
Back to the issue I was talking about in my first paragraph: If I want to sell "freds blue widgets" and you want to sell the same, there are only so many ways to differentiate our sites... color schemes, amount of information, marketing knowledge, etc...
Generally the only difference between what we sell is in the "deal" we are making. It's not so different from buying products in the bricks and morter world. However, in the bricks and morter world no one can tell you that there are too many gas stations, or shoe stores or whatever then reshuffle your shopping district... as a consumer you shop... get a deal and purchase a product...
This Christmas I'll probably visit 3 or 4 large electronics retailers... they all carry the same brands and models... I'll buy from whichever does the best sales job.... period..
If you sell a product on the web you not only have to rank well, you have to do a good job of selling the product...
Your reply on my "penalty" question was extremely helpful; thank you!
I notice that you keep mentioning good quality *sites* rather than good quality *pages*. Does the content/popularity of the *entire site* now affect a single page's ranking in the SERPs? Or can a single page still stand on its own?
The reason I ask is because I have a page with a very informative article on "blue hairy widgets" on a small niche website. It used to rank #1 for a "blue hairy widgets" search, but post-Florida is nowhere to be found. From your reply, I gather it's not being penalized for having "blue hairy widgets" in the title or linking to a store that sells "blue hairy widgets". So I suspect that the relevancy of the *page itself* is no longer sufficient to merit high ranking; the entire site must be deemed "high quality."
In my industry, sites that are barely relevant for "blue hairy widgets", but are authoritative (about.com), directories, or immensely large and popular (ebay, amazon) for "hairy widgets" (or just widgets for that matter) are dominating the SERPs with a single mention of a "blue hairy widget". The small, niche mom-and-pop sites focusing exclusively on "blue hairy widgets" are now off the map.
This long-winded post boils down to two questions:
1. Popularity vs. Relevancy: Is site popularity (as determined by outside votes, like links, visits, or some sort of popularity tracking) more important than specific content (particularly for popular or "big money" keyphrases)?
Example: Is it Google's intention for Huge Popular Widget Store (with a few blue hairy widgets for sale), Huge Widget Directory (with one blue hairy widget link), or Huge News Site (with an article mentioning blue hairy widgets) to rank high, while the small but spot-on relevant Blue Hairy Widget Store has disappeared?
2. Site vs. Single Page: Is a single page's ranking affected by the popularity/content of the entire site? Example: Is Huge News Site's article mentioning blue hairy widgets a better quality result than Small Niche Site's article exclusively on blue hairy widgets?
Thanks again in advance for your guidance! :-)
