I saw a lot of people complaining about getting banned by google. It surely affects their income. So is google having too much power over webmasters? It already have Froogle, Gmail, toolbar. What next? A new browser? Will it be like Microsoft?
The difference between a succesful webmaster and a lousy one is how do you react when this happens. I have seen loads of threads about people crying out how Google has dropped their site and they feel like jumping off a cliff. Believe me, crying out on a forum and saying that Google is "broken" will never be any help. People come here and ask "oh, why was my site penalized? Please take a look and tell me what to do to get my rankings back". Well, I don't think ANYONE here could tell you that. I used to feel so confident about my Google SEO. Nice top 10 rankings, visitors flowing with no stop. Sudenly ALL my keywords vanished. Traffic dropped 50%, and so did income. The only reason I can imagine is that my backlink count jumped like crazy and that was penalized. But, instead of wasting my time crying about it I re-optimized targeting Yahoo and MSN. Since I can't figure out Google's algo anymore, I might as well focus on the "easy engines". Traffic is starting to grow now. The best thing is that before the update I just depended on the income of one single site. After the update I built several sites and now my income is much more than before, so I really tank Google for penalizing my site and making me bust my a*s creating new sites. My wallet sure is happy now.
I've read it before and think it's good advice... don't put all of your eggs in one basket. There are more ways to generate traffic than SERPs.
That was my biggest error. Felt confident about Google and relied on a stupid engine that likes to modify it's algo whenever they feel like it. Target as many engines as you can. If it is a low-competitive keyword, target MSN and Yahoo and in a few weeks you wil have a top 10 rank.
Use metatags. Cant stress it enough. And use links. Getting banned from google hurts....its like oh no ive been violated. Whoooz your daddy now... Dear _________, It has come to our attention that invalid clicks have been genrated on your account. To protect the advertisers....
so far all those site owners whining about dropping out of Google had a really terrible HTML code with fatal errors in their pages. as long as even here in this forum many site owners clearly say NOT to care about code validation - there is little reason/need to start helping. the basic of all is a clean code - clean means fully validated from A-Z on all important pages. Googlebot clearly gets kicked OFF by invalid code or CERTAIN errors in code. the safest way is to have a fully validated code ..... on the other side if people are careless about clean code to make life of bots easier WHY should those bot-owners care about those careless site owners ??? if you want best possible service by ANY bot, from ANY SE - then a top design with clean links and layout as well as fully validated code in all aspects is the very least we site owners can offer in exchange for the hundred thousands of free visitors sent to us by search engines. the best deal WE can make with top search engines is to provide TOP quality and top content in exchange for TOP indexing / SERPS until today i have NEVER seen one single clean web site being kick off by Google just for fun or no apparent reason - either a site owner has violated substantial parts of TOS and human ethic rules or simply omitted to have clean pages. a bot is like a wife - you want to attract a SE - then you have to OFFER something of value rather than problems. as to the key question about G being too powerful - NO SE ever can be too powerful in quality - however in a world of ego driven activities and business it is up to us site owners to equally support and optimize for ALL possible active search engines - a healthy strong competition is the best insurance for a fair trade in business behavior among all SE a site optimized for all SE may never depend on a single SE - only a monopoly where most of all traffic comes from a single source is subject to potential might abuse - strong competition however requires top SEO to "please" all SE requirements
Fryman, your site is showing 46,200 backlinks in yahoo's linkdomain search. Wat was the time span in which you acquired these. Also, do they all point to your index page? If you don't mind me asking.
You can see here that the links just jumped in a very small amount of time. Yes, I did point them to my index page, but using several different anchor text, and some were without any at all (just a link with my site's name)
Yes.. I see it very clearly. Exact same thing I'm seeing in a few other big sites I've been keeping an eye on. Thanks for sharing that. What are your thoughts.. if you had spread out the 160k BLs across say ten of your main category pages.. and only a minority to the index page?? Presently, I'm in a *very* similar situation as that graph you just attached.. number-wise the similarity is scary.. Ranking on the first page for a term with 14M results: "Distance Learning", along with a few others. Good thing is the links are spread out over about ten internal pages.. and about only 20-30% point at the index page.
Well, Yahoo and MSN seem to love my new links ang gave me loads of new rankings. My traffic didn't drop so much thanks to those engines. But, I learned my lesson and now spread my links across several pages. However, I have just forgotten about Google. Their new algo is just too weird and can't figure out what they like now. I am focusing on MSN, much easier and a very friendly engine. and once you get a nice rank at MSN, Yahoo seems to follow up and starts giving you good ranks also.
There are general rules for SEO like clean html, backlinks, keywords density, quality content etc. But I was thinking all these rules are important for all SE's. If I've understand correctly, you say that there are differences by opitimizing our site for differenf SE's. I'm sure you're right. My site's rankings on Yahoo and MSN are pretty low. Most of my visitors come from Google. So, how can I optimize my site for other SE's like MSN and Yahoo? What are the differences?
G is only as powerful as those webmasters decide to make it. You have a choice as to how big a part Google plays in securing your income/reaching your goals.
I don't think webmasters have the power to make or break Google, or any search engine. Even us webmasters bow to a higher power: the surfer. If the average surfer decides, for whatever reason, to use one search engine over another, you can bet I'll be doing my very best to rank high with that SE.
No, you can't break them but you can break yourself by relying on them. SE's and their natural listings aren't the only source of traffic. With that attitude and that little effort in diversifying your marketing mix: don't come crying here for help when they ban you and you loose 95% of your traffic.
Very true. But it is a source of traffic that doesn't cost me any cash.. What attitude? I was merely stating the fact that, as marketers, we go to where the people are to pitch our products. Webmasters never "made" Google. Google made Google and people went there because they provided a good service. When people began to go there in greater numbers, we webmasters saw this and began to strive to get our products/services listed higher with them. I think you're drinking too much coffee, dude. You need to relax a little and not take things so personal.