Hello Guys, I am Adikul and I am an SEO expert with more than 3 years of good practice. I still remember the days when I used to rank my client's site within a week to top of the table and literally crushed their competitors. But within nest 2 years everything got changed. Call it Panda, penguin whatever but the reality is Google is refining its algo. In last couple of years I did SEO works for more than 50 sites and ranked them good but the way it was done was comparatively easy to that of my current practice. Throw some spamy huge quantity of links on wikis,web 2.0, comments etc and you are done! You were ranking higher but things changed dramatically. The most obvious thing you might have noticed. Now a days when you search on google just check date of that article. Before last algo update the most recent posts were ranking top but now a days you will find posts from year 2010 ranking top for your keyword relevancy. You might be thinking "what does that means?". Well I will try to explain more specifically. While doing SEO for my clients I had some sites my own to try my techniques so as to give my clients more rank improvements. I used my techniques separately on those sites and found the techniques which resulted good and implemented good ones on clients sites for safer side. Last week I was cleaning my webmaster account and found one of my test site was getting higher impressions and that site was under "rejected techniques". That amazed me! How the hell this can be possible? I did some research and found that particular site which failed impress me in my test run is actually now started giving great results. How that can be possible? The reason was "quality" over quantity. The site is having just 35+ articles but all are unique and SEO optimized. And most importantly "socially optimized". All other test sites were targeted on "quantity" but this one was quality based. So I came to a conclusion that the google algo is much refined and now one should focus on the quality. Some Advice: -Don't throw out spam links on your main site. They will degrade your site. -Don't go for cheap services. Because when it's cheap, quality will be compromised! -Focus on Social media. Google + is a great social site for ranking good. Please leave your reply. If you have any questions, please feel free to as. You can PM me or leave here and I will try to reply asap. If you find anything wrong in this post please do not hesitate to highlight and that will help me to get more knowledge. Cheers! Adikul
Yes, you are very true just 2 years back ranking a site isn't in Google isn't that much tough within weeks you can pop up in the Google Search Engine ranking, what you just need is some directory submission, article submission, blog commenting etc... at that time what matters is the number of back links you have higher the number of back links higher will be the ranking. But ever since the Google Panda, Penguim and not to mention humming bird strikes into it ranking in Google seems to becoming much more painful now, I've seen people struggling just to keep their position in the search engine ranking. But still i am glad that these changes have arrived as previously most of the SEO guys are doing the bad things but now the quality of work in SEO is just improved. People are doing some good work, previously when we use to start searching in the Google the results were like .... ohhh my god what is this crap. But now results is much more search oriented.Work of SEO has now become a challenge not every one out their are smart enough to keep up with it and I am glad that there are only some of us left that can keep the process going !!
Adikul, I totally agree with your observations here. With the last assault on guest posting there are not many SEO venues left. Google is eliminating them one-by-one. Quality of content is certainly paramount, I am just wondering what do you mean by "socially optimized" articles? Thanks.
Actually, the modus operandi of SEO operators in grey hat and black hat SEO these days is to manually link from a small number of bona fide high PR/PA pages and Web 2.0 properties directly to the target website, while reserving the automated or quantitative backlinking to the higher tier (i.e., backlinking to the high authority pages/properties that feed the money site). IAW, mass linking has not died, just gotten more precise and structured. The Google formula has gotten more sophisticated because it is chasing the more sophisticated BH marketers, and is still lagging behind them. Carefully transferring link and page authority to target pages per keyword, while making it appear natural, is what ranks web pages, not "quality" content that has no page authority.
I know tons of websites that have no unique content and still rank higher for tousands of terms compared to their competitors that have unique content. It's just weird.. I've been working on one of my websites for a little over a year, implemented most of the newest SEO techniques and only have quality backlinks, I still haven't seen any spectacular results. (definitely need more links, hence both quality and quantity matters) as well as social presence.
I don't think google panalize all the blogs, one need to be very careful and stick to niche pacific. Backlinks should come from same niche only
In other words only build HIGHLY related links - High authority homepage links and in-content links will never die, that is what google is looking for.
Re "in-content links will never die": Nope, they die. If the website you are linking from doesn't link out to your niche exclusively (which is certainly not the case with most links sold here on DP), sooner or later they will get busted by Google and receive manual action due to "unnatural outbound links profile". And as soon as this happens, the webmaster of this site either deletes all outbound links or makes them no-follow. Speaking from experience The name of the game now is going after real authority sites such as newspapers, etc. But these are very hard (or very expensive) to get links from. Unfortunately, Google is getting better and better in eliminating any competition to paid advertising...
I know of a site like this. If you take away their forum, 100% of their content is press releases that also appear on a lot of other websites. I figured this would all be considered duplicate, supplemental content, but somehow they get away with it.
You are missing one point. It very much depends on top competitor link profile. If they do massive link building and they are on top, than you should do the same. It very much depends on this. Though good thoughts, quality and quantity should be balanced.
Absolutely spot on... and that's what google wants as well... links are for referrals rather than seo. Even blog comments still work great for seo if they are constructive and of good quality. People should finally change their mentality and think of building links for referrals rather seo.