That's very good advice. It's a great feeling when you see a bunch of new referrer URL's in your server logs, as folks link to your content of their own volition. That's when you know that greener pastures are in your future
Avi8r, finally someones stands up everything u said in the main topic is very true, and i m impressed that you thought of it and pinpointed it out. they are nearly monopolizing the game, and if u wanna play it, it's either their way or the high way. so all webmasters sooner or later will get adapted to this game so when they see anything else they will consider "irrational" as they are already used to getting their pieces out of the old "style" game but after all this still. having the willingness alone to be part of the game is not an answer, realisticly thinking,(IMHO) it's gonna be a little heard to "see" something that eats the thing from google on the short run. if i saw something new, i'm willing to support it with my full capacity, even if it brings a little less revenue for a while till it gets a little bigger but till then, the peasant can't just go with a stick and overthrow the king of his thrown.
Indeed Google has turned most of us into trained monkeys. What for ? Bananas. It was always about the bananas.
What would you like? Google to change everything so it is perfectly comfortable for the webmasters? Ohh but wait it wouldn't be comfortable because you would then get hardly any traffic because of all the crap that would get to the top. In your win situation you really lose. Google knows what they are doing. They got the most relevant search engine and the heck with the monopoly. I think you guys would find pretty fast that your way wouldn't be the best.
I am not convinced it is completely gone, that it is impossible for it to happen again, due to this explanation by Matt Cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/ Linking absolutely is the key, it seems, to avoiding it. Google dictates this. Scriptwriters should be keeping this in mind nowadays... I was talking about banning the domain from the engine... several well known sites threw up subdomains with 302 producing links, directory style, with disclaimers that the content had nothing to do with them... Most were AdSense compliant in every respect. Those that weren't, got fixed mysteriously, about as quick as little guys get banned.
I could care less about Google: when they do their job. When they're actually doing their job, they rank my websites on top, where they belong. When they're "broke", my income and sites plummet. But truth be told, I've got my Google-related income down to 45% from a high of 98% 2 years ago. Try selling your own products. Only a fool relies solely on Adsense.
LOL, and I take it you weren't getting enough bananas from Google? That's an interesting and intriguing comment. What constitutes them doing or not doing their job in your book? Or in other words, what is your speculation about the cause of your reduced revenue?
If you think you can best Peter Norvig - Google's Director of Search Quality and AI genius http://www.norvig.com/bio.html, I quote "responsibility to maintain and improve the quality of web search results during a time of ten-fold growth and increased scrutiny from webmasters", then you might have something there.