I don't get that analogy at all but it does tell me that everyone seems to have a bit of a different view on this topic. think they can? They do and it does not always have to be getting to the very top to make money. Lots of MFA sites rank high for irrelevant high paying keywords and make tons of money from manipulating the search results.
And that is what they are trying to change! MFA is scum - I do not allow my Adwords campaigns to appear anywhere other than page 1 of Google itself - so I am with you on MFA - that really is SCUM.
At the end of the day all G wants is SERPs that give people what they are searching for. If SEO delivers this then G will be happy. ... because more people will use G and they will get more ad revneues. IMO G will move away from the traditional ways of determining a site's relevance and tend more toward the actions of the 'visitor' when a link is clicked on SERPS taking that visitor to your site. With some tracking data on the searcher's PC (G already has a degree of this with toolbar installed) they can see how 'sticky' your site is to the visitor, e.g. if the visitor stays for more than a few seconds then that's a vote for your site justifiyng its position in SERPs. So going back to some previous comments here, building content that your visitors want is key to longer term success. Link building and other SEO techniques work today, but will not be so effective in the months/years ahead ... IMO
This is the best post I have seen on DP since I have been here. (But I was keeping this idea to myself) It is so obviously the way forward - how popular your site is once the visitor actually arrives cannot really be gamed. Think - bounce rate, length of visit, depth of visit, trending etc. You dont think Goog developed the toolbar and analytics for OUR benefit do you????
And that is one of the most naive posts I have seen. You don't think SEO's will be able to game visitor response? The machinery already exists for this, although now it is only good for manipulating Alexa ranking. If all you have to do to get to the top is pay people to visit your site, paid traffic will get completely out of hand. It would be just like paying for Diggs, and people already pay $1 a piece for those. Any competitive system can be gamed. Right now the measure of a successful site is the labor resource that go into building links for it. Under the visitor-response model, paid traffic would be endemic. MUCH easier to manipulate than links.
Followed by the dumbest post I have read here possibly I am sorry - but you are talking crap and did not read my post Artificial stats can be gamed in the short term - but to game natural user metrics over a sustained period would be nigh on impossible. I am not talking about traffic - any fool can buy a ton of useless untargetted traffic. The data Goog can now collect thru its tools gives them vital data about the relevancy of a site to the query. And a ton of untargetted traffic will harm not help you in this respect
Well what I am basically saying is it would be a silly thing for Google to penalize SEO, just like washing your hands in the toilet would be silly. Not trying to take the mick' or anything .
Well I am not naive, and I do not profess to be an expert on SEO, but I do respect people having opinions. Sharing opinions without deriding members is key to the success of any fourm and is how "we all learn".
This is a very interesting question, and upon thinking about it, part of me says yes, they will probably try to ban all kinds of seo, but the other side of me also thinks they will probably only penalizes for things such as un natural linking, but who knows. as they say, google is god, and i think they are going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
Now wouldnt that be something!!! Back to the future!!! Matching metatags to page content is the way forward. No bulling with backlinks, no 'grey-hat' techniques etc. Take a page of content slap in your metatags and there's your results! Only those sites that had good, strong, unique page content with matching metatags would actually reach any decent position in the SE's. MFA sites and spam sites would disappear overnight!
I totally agree with that statement. Anything half a thought of being trickery is not worth it in my opinion.
It's interesting that the nasty end of the SEO game really only occurs with super competitive keywords. For regular sites accessibility, semantically intelligible file names, intelligent page titles and simple metatags will put good content into the top 20. Sure, you need a couple of links from PR 5 sites to get the spider over to your site; but if you do the basics right you will get decent SERPS. That said, in my own niche, I see site after site with no alt text, no meta tags, page titles of the form ::XXXX:: (because it looks so cool), onpage anchor text saying "click here" and so on. The tragedy is that these sites have cost their owners between 5-15K for ten pages.
I don't think that is true at all, you can make some serious coin on less competitive keywords with say 5k-10k searches a month. The pie is split less ways and you have to do less SEO to get to the top. I guess but it sure does hurt to see MFA spam sites ranking higher than your 'hard work'.