What with all this ridiculous hype and bull surrounding PR updates, backlinks etc etc, I don't know about you but I'm changing tactics. In my specific field, I've seen websites at #1 with about 10 crap backlinks rank above my site on the 7th page with 100's of quality backlinks. I've seen PR 5 websites get done by sites with PR 0, I seen spam sites rise to the top, I've seen to much inconsistency, it makes a mockery of SEO. I don't know about you, but for me, the obsession with link building and pr stops here. The toolbar is getting uninstalled and I'm going to be spending all of my time on my content. All that money that was spent on link building is going to get spent on new content, press releases and perhaps some articles. If Google doesn't like it, Google can suck my balls.
William, perhaps I'm too much of a newbie to really understand everything about SEO, but why wouldn't you have focused on your content and building a community to begin with. I've found in business that all the best advertising in the world can ever do for you is make people notice you (or your product), but if the product doesn't stand up to scrutiny then you're just chucking your money down the drain.
If you do what you have said you are going to do then google will show you the love that you have been seeking.
To show you're serious I'd modify the robots.txt to ban their bot. They really, really don't like that In fact, when/if you change your mind and do allow them in you may find yourself rocketing to the top of the SERPs (for a brief while at least).
William, you get my vote for thread title of the year Always a pleasure to read something you'd never see published on WMW ;-)
wow, i didn't know you could "ban" their bot. I always thought they were the Jesus of SEs. lol Don't you love him?
I am starting to get tired of SEO efforts too; it seems like a HUGE waste of time to spend a lot of effort fine-tuning a site to cater to search engines whose algorithms are an educated guess (at best), and which can change at any time anyhow--thereby nullifying X months of work overnight. I think I am going to change my focus to building traffic, rather than improving SEO. It is a small change in the way of thinking, but it will change my website promotion activities. For example, I think I'll slow down on the directory submission activity, which seems to have almost no effect anymore. Regards, Duncan
In response to the crumhorn who gave me negative rep for this rather tongue-in-cheek post, perhaps you would like to work with the kind of products I'm working with. Good luck in coming up with washes and washes of content about plain paper labels with content that has to be professional and not just "this is what a paper label is". Aye, exactly.
William, you didn't mention your site is about labels, but you know what, I reckon if you thought sideways about the kinds of people (like scrapbooking hobbyists, schoolkids, libraries and archivists and so many more) who use labels you could probably come up with more content than you could ever shake a stick at. Throw in a few pages from customers about the quality of your labels, add some extra products like felt tip pens that are designed specifically for different types of label, perhaps a bunch or articles of all the different ways that labels can be used, in the office, in the home, on luggage, how to make sure the label stays on, common gotchas with labels etc. Before you know it your site would be the authority on all things to do with labels, then you wouldn't have to restrict you site to selling plain paper labels and before you know it you have a community of people sending you suggestions.
Thanks for your comments. I'd go with you on that, were it not for the fact that I work for a blue-chip manufacturer and putting nice articles like that are not an option. Whatever goes on has to go through marketing department, PR department, 5-a-day co-ordinator, you name it, they have to approve it - and they will tell you that pitching the site at label hobbyists is not in the best interests of our image. It's a tough job.
what about creating a bunch of word templates for all the different uses of your labels and making them freely available to download, then get your existing customers to suggest or send their own favorites. You could even add OpenOffice templates (then you start appealing to people outside of your traditional market). Who knows where this could go, and if the marketing people get excited by the potential they'll run with it. I've found that marketing people have ego's and in their jobs they're always looking for an angle that the local press or industry journals will write about, or maybe they get invited to the local chamber of commerce to do a speech on how the local company is taking on the world blah blah blah... Just do some brainstorming - and always remember one very important rule of managing upwards, work out the motivation of the person you're trying to convince, and pitch your idea at that. If they have an ego, stroke it, if they own shares in the company talk about increased valuation of the business, if they're on a commission package, talk about how much more money they can make. Good luck
Google has been acting really strangely recently. I am slowly starting to care less about it everyday. I'm just afraid thah G will end up like MS did, first most of the people loved it, and then they started hating it.