I don't understand SEOs who don't try everything they can I mean doamins are like 10.00 a year and hosting is like 1.00 a month, I will try anything and everything. If every site I used the coop on got kicked out of every engine today, I would still be way ahead. On a whole, although it would suck. I will try anything , becasue you never know. Back a few years ago people were scared to trade links. Imagine how much I would have missed out if I listened to them. I will consume and abuse every seo technique I can get my hands on. The only reason I have not tried cloaking is becasue I frankly cannot see how a cloaked site would perform better then a non-cloaked one. Although I will probably try it once I get caught up on other projects. To me if you are not getting penalized now and again then you are not pushing the envelope enough. How do you know any of the stuff on forums is true unless you try it yourself. Have you seen all the misinformation thats out there, people will tell you anything. One of first seo tests I did was trade links with a bunch of unrelated sites to see if I get penalized. Guess what, I didn't and my rankings went up. Thats when I realized 99% of seos were full of BS. You can go to almost any seo forum and post a question link "I have flower site and I am going to trade links with a whole bunch of viagra and gambling sites, what will happpen" and see what reponse you get
You have a point there as the myth that unrelated links will hurt you had spread like wildfire. Meanwhile those same SEO's are getting tons of unrelated links in secret. Related links are good for other reasons that have nothing to do with SEO and that makes them valuable in their own right but the relevancy drum is beat a bit too often IMHO.
Care to explain how you got banned and what engine it involved. Did your website get reindexed or ...
I remember a converstion I had wil Ferret over a year ago about link trading... I was wrong (I was also pretty rude, so sorry about that)... Believe it or not I used to follow the high and mighty "white hat" road... Only for a couple of months mind Ferret is 100% right. Black, white, it's all BS. Conversions are what make a difference. If what you are currently doing isn't getting you those conversions, I suggest that you try something new.
yfs1 related links are way better in terms of traffic, site image, and probably will have more future value if the engines every really implement theming. They may already be worth more, but I havn't actually measured it. Well crazy horse, I honestly havn't seen a lot of real bannings, but I guess I havn't really cloaked or blog spammed any sites. I think removals are pretty rare. Usually when people lose their rankings they think they are banned. for google A lot of the time my little penalities have come for no reason I can figure out. One time I was arguing with some seo on forum and we got in a dumb pissing contest and bragged about all the web design and seo terms my homepage ranked for. Shortly after I disappeared for all those rankings. After awhile(months) I came back , but 5-30 spots lower except for one term I have had bunch sites get hammered with duplicate content penalities in google, they went from 1000s of affialte pages to one page without a title. some of those have come back, without changing anything 2 times I had sites go pr0 and pretty much lose all their rankings, then come back a month or 2 later. I guess could be from trading with all the unrelated sites, but now the sites are back and ranking good. I didn't change a thing on them. Google is werid, do abc on one site get ranked do abc on another and lose rankings. Then was the florida update which no one still seems to know what happend, lost like 10 sites at once, and then they all came back a couple months later. I have had like around 10 sites kicked from yahoo for thier rankings in the past couple months. I am clueless to what the pattern is. A few of the 10 are totally removed from the index. the rest just lost their rankings. I have feeling the ones removed arn't getting second chance.
From Google's webmaster guidelines page: It is not saying seo doesn't work, they are not discouraging anyone from trying to rank someone. They are simply saying: don't use tactics that don't benefit your site in any other ways than seo. If you want your site to be easier to navigate, faster to load and so on, then implement the right coding which will help you get crawled easier at the same time. When you have a client, why not make some changes right away to get their conversion rate up and help them get new business while waiting for the new rankings to kick in. The seo tunnel vision can be very hurtful and keep web sites from living up to their full potential (see a few website reviews in here where the sites looked bad and the owner justified the look with his seo tactics). If you go overboard and then get dropped, you're screwed. If you cover all bases, have GOOD links from sites which give you traffic that converts to sales, you will NEVER be on the bottom wondering how to get back up. I personally don't even feel comfortable with the term seo. I look at it as web development and marketing as a whole. Never miss out a chance to make your site more user friendly and getting your business seen. It is great to learn about what search engines use to rank you and keep it in mind when you develop or alter a site. I don't do the black hat thing for many reasons. One being is that my clients don't have 10 domains on 10 IP addresses so I can "try things out". There is more at stake than just rankings. It is reputation, image and much more. my partner is a marketing consultant who implements changes beneficial to the overall conversion rates, we get designers to make the site more visitor friendly and I go out there advertising them. While waiting for rankings, we already see an increase of business for them. It's a win/win situation and what every business wants is sales. Search engines are a big part of it but if you build your house on sand (or something like that), you're chances of fallling apart are very high.
See I am try to avoid takng any clients, the stress me out. I have pretty much phazed out of designing and developing websites for other people. People have no taste, and they un realistic views of the internet. Doing revisons on websites and clients who are picky aobut the dumbest stuff that will have no effect on the success of their website, give me nervous condition. They make lay awake at night and give me ulcers. I find the less I deal with people the happier I am. Plus web design is gotten so cheap, its crazy. But if you out source their is still headaches, bad contracters etc. Plus then you have schedules, have to call people, and explain stuff. I have couple SEO clients I will continue to work with forever hopefully. One just signed a 5 year contract which is prabably the biggest contract I have ever had. I think for the most part I will bet everything on free searh results for now. I just won't take out any big loans or anything. Worst case scenerio I go back to being a programmer. That reputation and image stuff isn't really my strong point. I have no marketing skills at all.
needless to say, black hat gives you faster result but good only for few days. white hat lasts longer and the links are permanent.
White Hat SEO - devoted to properly optimize a site to attract crawlers attention and to build long-friendly relationship with search engines. Black Hat SEO - don't follow rules and regulations. It uses unethical ways just to get high rankings. Door-way pages, cloaking, keyword stuffing and invisible text are just some of the techniques that falls under black hat.
White hat and black hat, there is the discussion again. I think that you will have to utilize white hat SEO techniques and sometimes you will have to work the borderline of black hat a bit (mostly the link building process) in order to achieve higher ranking or to compete with the rival.