Google SEO longterm?

[layer8]

I had a site, SEO was done, was in top rankings for about 2 months then overnight for no reason site was positioned way down the rankings. All practices were ethical and it seemed no point or logic to this what happend to me.

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....

[crankin]

>>think about what would happen if Google were to give a slight boost to information pages at the expense of e-commerce and affiliate pages.

An end to niche e-commerce websites, and a mass migration of users to search engines who provide the results they are looking for.

People do not surf the net idly, they are too busy to waste time. People overwhelmingly surf in order to shop for things they can't find at the mall or local superstore. Read Forrester, IDC, or Media Metrix if you think otherwise. Check the Amazon.com profit trends and productline expansion patterns.

If a surfer is looking for "quaint handmade wooden widgets" and s/he gets 100 results on the history of local wooden widgets, wooden widget preservation efforts, the great wooden widget debate, widget fanciers forum entries, etc etc but cannot find where to actually BUY a wooden widget for dear old Aunt Fanny's birthday, they are *click* gone with the wind.

Google can pursue noble goals all it wants. Bottom line is MONEY, and without relevant results there are no surfers, no one looks at their ads, merchants like me don't pay for ads that no one looks at, and it's sayonnara Google.

I notice a LOT more traffic and sales coming in from MSN and the Inktomi and Ask universes lately. Good thing I market and optimize for my visitors, not the fickle (read: narcisstically neurotic) Google Gods on Mount Olympus.

[aspdesigner]

Fortune article was a Very Interesting read - gives the good and the bad.

Two questions came to mind:

First, the last time the algo got messed-up, it was right after they got some bad press (in that case, on "Googlebombing").

I read in this article about Google's weak spot is it's inability to "lock in" customers, that - "Though its search engine is a wonderful tool for using the Net, what happens when a better search engine comes along? Or just a good-enough search engine in the hands of a powerful rival? Is there anything to keep users wedded to Google? "Google has a lot of momentum, but its current position is probably not defensible," says an investor."

Are we seeing history repeat itself? Is Google doing another knee-jerk to blunt bad press?

Is this the "Next Big Thing" they wanted to out-do MSN and Yahoo with, but in the rush to get it out before the article, things went horribly wrong?

The other thing in the article that caught my eye - does Google really use a large force of "slave labor" contractors, with no benefits, options, and even ostracized from the company's social events?

Do you really have to be an Ivy-league graduate to become a regular employee with actual beni's?

And is GG one of the "choosen few"? Or one of the "unwashed masses"?

[GoogleGuy]

Gotta take everything you read with a grain of salt, aspdesigner. My perception from reading the article was that they talked to a lot more people outside of Google than inside. "Hmm, people hopped in and out of my presentation--Google must be about to collapse in disarray!" Anyway, I'm certainly not an Ivy Leaguer. :)