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What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

mattcutts.com

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Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#51

Post by nulluk »

OGinparadise wrote: post #35
nulluk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes probably I am, because we are talking millions of sites and statisticly your going to get anomolies. Then again if your business model is based primarily on your SERPs then you have a bad business model and should be doing everything you can to mitigate that risk. It's one of the risks you take which should of been identified if your a competent business owner that wants to survive.

Your post has nothing to do with the previous message or point, you're just switching arguments. Most e-commerce businesses cannot scale /downscale every 50% + or - organic search traffic changes.

Apologies your right. Trying to bring it back around to my original point by rephraseing my orgional statement then.

If your worried about this update then you haven't been doing seo right and If your relying solely on a 3rd party for the existence or profitability of your company then you have bigger issue at hand than just your seo.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#53

Post by nostromo »

tlogan wrote: post #43

This negative SEO is huge problem now and I'm concern about it. What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of "panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And whola.... competition is toasted... I hope this is going to be fixed somehow. EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" o…

It's hard to know if it's a real problem because when people are caught, it's hard to know if they're lying about how a competitor did it to screw them over.

Anyway, here's what someone should do:

Buy a bunch of spam links on fivver for keyword "matt cutts" and point it to his domain www.mattcutts.com. (He's one of the few people on Earth with plausible deniability regarding Google manipulation.)

If you successfully remove his domain from spot one on Google, this is potentially a real problem.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#54

Post by damoncali »

halcyondaze wrote: post #12

Black hatters these days don't really even care about long-term rankings, they're more about exploiting the inadequacies in the algorithm in the first month or so of a site's live. Build it, rank it, bank cash, and burn it out. That's the modus operandi right now...I don't see this update changing much of that. It's going to be great for those of us building out quality sites though!

Black hatters these days don't really even care about long-term rankings

Is that not because Google has successfully eliminated the long term viability of the tactics? Sitting on the sideline (sort of) it looks to be easier and easier to get rankings the "right" way and harder and harder to get them the "wrong" way.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#55

Post by damoncali »

programminggeek wrote: post #27

I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big economic incentive to "buy votes" by buying links. As long as there is a financial incentive to ranking well in google and that the mechanism to rank better is to get links, people with money will buy links in the same way they buy influence in the media, politics,…

As someone who has sold links and seen that income dry up completely, I would disagree.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#56

Post by dchuk »

znowi wrote: post #52

I hope SEO can be expected to go extinct in the coming whatever and be replaced with "good content" approach. It is unfortunate that Google even addresses the shady SEO community boosting their might and glory.

Writing "good content" that you intentionally craft in a way to get optimal traffic from search engines is inherently search engine optimization, so no, SEO won't ever go away as long as there are still search engines.

There is this movement lately to call it "content marketing" instead of just SEO, but really, content marketing is simply an SEO technique.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#57

Post by dchuk »

damoncali wrote: post #54
halcyondaze wrote: post #12

Black hatters these days don't really even care about long-term rankings, they're more about exploiting the inadequacies in the algorithm in the first month or so of a site's live. Build it, rank it, bank cash, and burn it out. That's the modus operandi right now...I don't see this update changing much of that. It's going to be great for those of us building out quality sites though!

Black hatters these days don't really even care about long-term rankings Is that not because Google has successfully eliminated the long term viability of the tactics? Sitting on the sideline (sort of) it looks to be easier and easier to get rankings the "right" way and harder and harder to get them the "wrong" way.

It's a little bit less clear cut than getting rankings the right way or wrong way. I personally know many churn and burn blackhatters, and the eventual demise of their domains is just part of their business model.

Google has never been good at handling short term black hat spam (buy viagra is the colloquial example always). They are good at filtering sites out after they've been ranked for a while though.

But when these blackhatters are making tens of thousands of dollars a day with their short term rankings, it's hard to convince them that they need to be focusing on the long term rankings avenue...

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#58

Post by bradleyjg »

mtgx wrote: post #47
programminggeek wrote: post #27

I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big economic incentive to "buy votes" by buying links. As long as there is a financial incentive to ranking well in google and that the mechanism to rank better is to get links, people with money will buy links in the same way they buy influence in the media, politics,…

How would you solve it then? By putting more focus on social media? They are doing that, too, but that can be even more easily abused sometimes. Google can distinguish between the less spammy and the more spammy links anyway, but it's a hard problem, so they can distinguish it to a certain agree. But Google's algorithm by now is certainly more complex than "giving each link a vote". A lot of SEO is on-page SEO, too,…

When google first started, or more accurately when Brin and Page were first working on PageRank, much of the content of the web was still written by hobbyists and professors. Sure there were web-rings and the like, but by and large putting together a page was a manual labor of love and linking was a personal endorsement.

Now the function of a link has changed entirely. Many of them don't even exist to be clicked, and many of those that do are either advertising or the functional equivalent.

There are a few places where a link really is still an endorsement: for example if I put together a hacker news comment that links a blog post I think is informative. Or a (genuine) blogger that writes about a topic.

However, anytime there's a useful signal to be found in something like that the SEO jerks come and flood it. That's why we've got comment spam, we have reddit sock-puppets, we've got blogvertisments and so on.

And the so-called white hat SEOs aren't much better in this regard. They are pushing their clients to go write mediocre "content" that is largely duplicative of what's already out there. People should only be writing content if they have something -- preferably interesting and/or informative -- to say, not because it means more people will visit their brochureware site, and certainly not as a means of getting (tricking?) people to click on no-value-add affiliate links or AdSense ads. That's putting the cart before the horse.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#59

Post by austenallred »

a5seo wrote: post #45
austenallred wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, a little bit. I'm not in the black-hat world anymore, and I'm pretty sick of people pretending like they're magicians or rocket scientists because they can rank something. Google has a system, you beat the system, that's it. In my mind it's really difficult to differentiate between what most people call "white-hat" SEO and what I used to do ("black-hat"). White hat SEO (which is basically posting links in forums,…

Eh, I disagree with your definition of "white hat SEO". White hat is about earning links. A arms length third party has to give you a link for it to count. That means it has a lot more to do with Public Relations than Page Rank. If you drop a link yourself in a forum or blog comment, that's fundamentally NOT white hat. That's just non-automated black hat. That's also been below Google's radar. This is the fundamental…

Fair enough, but if forum links aren't white hat then 99% of SEO companies/freelancers are black hat. I have yet to hear an SEO company say "We'll make your product great enough people will link to it organically."

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#60

Post by OGinparadise »

nostromo wrote: post #53
tlogan wrote: post #43

This negative SEO is huge problem now and I'm concern about it. What some bloggers are now doing is buying links to destroy competition. They don't even need to "order" black hat. They just go to fivver and order some of "panda optimized" gigs for $5 (these gigs just hurt - they dont help). And whola.... competition is toasted... I hope this is going to be fixed somehow. EDIT: Also is this is just an "urban legend" o…

It's hard to know if it's a real problem because when people are caught, it's hard to know if they're lying about how a competitor did it to screw them over. Anyway, here's what someone should do: Buy a bunch of spam links on fivver for keyword "matt cutts" and point it to his domain www.mattcutts.com. (He's one of the few people on Earth with plausible deniability regarding Google manipulation.) If you successfully…

His name probably has immunity, just as most large brands do. Small/er sites are fried. Deep fried.
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