I have been into SEO for quite sometime now. I still remember the days when Google declared that content is king, but the more experienced i get i see only one thing counts: backlinks, and lots of them. does'nt matter if these links are site wide, non PR pages, obviously bought (which "official" Google bans), duplicate content or whatever. the more you have the better. It should be fairly easy for Google to find paid for links: if your site has 100 baclinks, and 95 of them come from 2 domains, this suggests bought site wide links. But still, nothing matters: you have plenty with the correct keyword attached youre in top result. This means one thing to me: Google now plays corporate games and search relevancy doesnt matter. if you have enough money you will buy enough links to obtain first result. for long tail terms nobody buys Google is fine, but for relevant search on hot keywords, better use Live or Yahoo. For hot Keywords just use Wikipedia (thats what Google is doing: try searching for "texas holdem" - a hot keyword with no doubt). of course traffic still arrives from other terms and keywords, but in my opinion Google will suffer from this policy for the long run...
IMO you are wrong on almost every count... But opinions are like @$$holes, everyone has one. Google says "content is king" because good content is how you attract "natural" links... and natural linking is what Google thinks the utopian web would be made up of... something that most SEOs seem to care less about than spamming blogs and directories, submitting articles, etc. to PLANT their own 'unnatural' backlinks. Unfortunately, this short sited approach of farming your own unnatural backlinks thru social bookmarking, blog comment spamming, automated directory submission, article submission, etc. is exactly the thing that will screw you in the end. They are the techniques that SEOs and spammers alike use to strategically place unnatural links back to their own sites with the sole purpose of improving their rankings that Google will eventually target with their anti-spam changes to their algo. Their short-term gains have become long-term pains. When it happens, those that use these self promoting, link farming techniques will be the ones who see their previous link building efforts go up in smoke, their rankings drop tremendously, and then they will end up on a forum like this whining about how Google screwed them over when they devalued their 10,000 backlinks from irrelevant directories that they submitted with some automated tool or their 1000s of blog comments they paid some spammer in some third world country to get for them. All the while the site that took the long-term strategy of growing links naturally by writing good content and letting other sites decide when/how to link to them will rarely see their rankings drop because their backlink profile is EXACTLY the type that Google is promoting... Natural... and their backlinks will rarely get caught up in Google's anti-spam changes to their algo. SEOs should spend most of their time refining their on-page and on-site SEO and less time worrying about farming links. They should leave the content writing to the writers (with some general instructions and guidelines from the SEO on how to write SEO friendly content), and the link building to their marketing people. Marketing should concentrate on building a brand... Once your company/site has a brand the links will come NATURALLY... it's a snowball effect. Unfortunately we live in a society where people now days need instant gratification... Most webmasters/SEOs are too impatient to wait 1 or 2 years for their site to develop a brand, become an authority on a particular topic, gain backlinks naturally, and THEN starting ranking on page 1. They are not willing to pay their dues... They want the quick and... yes... dirty approach to showing up on page 1. I think Google is dead on with their approach... in what the practice as well as what they preach. And as far as relevancy, Google has absolutely the best, most relevant search results of all of the major players... far better than Yahoo!, MSN/Live, Ask, or anyone else. No matter what it is I am searching for, I can almost ALWAYS find it at Google w/ a single search. And if you want to talk about corporate games... Yahoo! is the absolute WORST at mixing business w/ organic search. Are you familiar w/ SSP at Yahoo!? When it first came out it was touted as helping your organic rankings... then later they said it had no affect on organic rankings... That was total BS. With SSP when your page appears in their SERPs for a particalar keyword you can pay Yahoo! to display 3 additional links next to your organic listing (kind of like sitelinks at Google) to the URLs of your choice with descriptions of your choice. Everytime someone clicks on those links in the organic listings, you pay them per click. My company has participated in SSP and been #1 or 2 in the SERPs for years and years at Yahoo! for all the major head terms in probably one of the top 3 most competitive verticals on the web. Recently we stopped paying Yahoo! for SSP. On the date the contract ended, all of our terms went from 1-2 down to 15-20 and they are still dropping... Yahoo! is the absolute worst at corporate games... They are a flailing company who is desparate to make a buck because they are being whooped hand over fist by Google at a 'game' that Yahoo! USED to rule... What you are seeing in Yahoo's SERPs frequently are either the companies/sites who are willing to pay them to rank organically or sites that rank because of cheesy spam techniques like directory submissions, blog commenting, etc. A lot of SEOs prefer Yahoo! because they count the crappy links they have farmed unnaturally or because they pay their way to the top... They like them because they are easy to target. Hell, it is even said that Yahoo counts "nofollow"ed backlinks. Terrible. Google IMO has the best, most relevant search results... and their quality team tries to police the SERPs. They do a lot more than most are aware behind the scenes with their quality raters who are constantly monitoring search results. Are they perfect? NO... Do they do more than other engines to prevent spammers from ruling the SERPs? Hell YES. Do they have the best results... Most of the time, YES. There is a reason that 70+% of the users on the web use Google for searching... And it's relevancy and quality results.
I used to think exactly like you, and you gave some good examples but failed to address the sitewide links issue and relevant results. if i am looking for the super hot term of "auto insurance quotes" i see insurance companies and lead aggregators spending probably many thousands of $ every month to buy links and occupy 1st results (of coursr the return is high as well - but thats for a different post). these sites have amounts of incoming links that can only be explained by using farms - but yet Google will never penalize them. i have been watching this market for 3 years now. if you are not REALY crossing the line with hidden pages or links then you will never get penalized, Google know the amounts of cash you put into it, and obviously sympathizes. The most relevant sites (at least where i come from) are way back in the results. And while i am on it, i should mention that other things considered SEO friendly, such as tabless design, W3C compliance, SEF urls, Hx and so on, has little to no effect comaring with simple back links: but they give the SEO occupation more reasons to charge big bucks and show they are busy, and also magnify the Google myth. the bottom line stays (and this is backed by tests and simple observations): back links determine 95% or more of your SERP strength, and you realy dont need a very clever algo for that.
Hi, In my opinion,yes it is right that, Google says "content is king" because good content is how you attract "natural" links... and natural linking is what Google thinks the Utopian web would be made up of... something that most SEOs seem to care less about than spamming blogs and directories, submitting articles, etc. to PLANT their own 'unnatural' back links.
Hi I think you are a bit mistaken at this. firstly Google still respect content and "content is still the king" for all websites with no exceptions. secondly backlinks are also a deciding factor and paid links may help for sometime but in the long run they ultimately cause a lot of damage . moreover if google would have degrading then so many people wouldn't have been still using it for searches anymore. google still gets 70% + searches and this is much more than the traffic added up for all the search engines combined. GOOGLE rules !!!! thanks, Ankur
People using a service doesnt make it good (Microsoft has 95% market share for OS, thats a lot higher then Google's SE market share). Google is far behind where search algorithm concerns.. non relevant results means only rich companies can occupy 1st results for popular terms, and for long tail its the exact opposite - you can influence them just by clicking (yes, site visitor volume is a relevantely a big factor and so is click count for long tails) If Google keeps this up, it wont be long before 70% will drop... last thing (again) for all populat terms Yahoo and Live are more accurate, less biased and follow traditional SEO methods (content!!! rather then backlinks)
Good point. Honestly, the only reason why Google is so popular is not because it's good, it's because so many damn people use it on a daily basis and they're not looking at any alternatives because the G brand name is so strong. How many times have you searched for something on Google and had to look on the 2nd page because the 1st page had nothing but web forum posts from 2004, or over-optimized blog posts, blackhat stuff, unhelpful links like Shopping.com pages with outdated listings and other garbage? Not trying to be picky, but in the present day, you'd seem to think something better would have come along. I keep reading about how services like Twitter search will take over traditional search engines, and I can see how this will probably happen: up-to-the-minute search results...can't beat that. Just last month, I was doing a background check on competition for some keyword terms and saw a 12 year old website ranking #1 for a super competitive keyword, they had "invisible content" (almost-white text crammed at the bottom of the page), and were operating a link farm that gave them 900 dofollow backlinks from a network of their own websites. I reported the site through Google Webmaster and it looks like nothing has been done, I'm guessing nothing will be done, either. I thought Google penalized that sort of stuff...rather than rewarded it? Maybe it's not all about the backlinks - but it is at least 'mostly' about them...