Google and Content BS!

So basically, create bad content and low authority sites?

"Build a great site and people will come and love your content and link to you and you will naturally rise in the search engines..." Actually, this statement is true, IF you have good and valuable content. I can say as a witness too.

and obviously you have to do a little linking at the beginning, but don't be spammy about it. Post on blogs with actual comments relating to the subject, post to forums, twitter etc. Google doesn't care if you naturally send your link out.

I have, several times. In fact, it's the only approach I will ever use and it does work. I had sites that were wallowing under poorly written ones for a year or so, until Panda slapped them silly. I hadn't touched these sites at all, mind you and suddenly one has been in the number one slot since Panda and the others have all moved up to page one or two.

The truth is, it was never a level playing field as long as there are big boys who can throw more money at it than you BUT it is the only playing field we have.
The good news is as long as we have places like this forum and we share our information, we are more adaptable and we outnumber them!

The bigger the business, the longer it takes to react to changes in the marketplace, due to proposals, meetings, budget, approval, implementation. That is their weakness and our strength. We make instant decisions and act upon them every day.

If more people here were more willing to share their pratical results like split testing rather than lecturing endlessly to newbies that would make a huge difference.

I do not think it is about becoming a collective, it is more about a change of attitude and realising that it us against the big boys and our best chance of increasing our own profits is just looking out for each other.

just my two cents
John

Honestly I just tend to take Google's advice.

As Nicholas Cage said in "Lord of War"
"The hardest thing about making an honest buck is that there are too many people doing it". LOL

It takes hard work, time, creativity. I wish I was better at all 3.

Build a abundant website and humans appear and adulation your agreeable and hotlink to you and you will acceleration by itself to the seek engines. Actually, this account is true, if you accept a acceptable and admired content. I can say as a witness, too.

The only difference between the "big boys" and ourselves is that they hire top SEO companies to get them ranked and in most cases the little guy does the SEO work by himself.

Every IMer engages in greyhat tactics -whether they admit it or not- because whatever we do to manipulate our rank in the SERP's is an attempt to game the system.

How many marketers will engage in blog commenting if there wasn't an opportunity to gain a backlink?

How many marketers submit press releases for products that are not news worthy and have been in existence for years?

How many marketers post on Web 2.0 properties that do not allow any promotional material?

Most of what we do with regard to off-page SEO falls in a grey area!

Amen! We're all in this business to make money. Do what needs to be done. Google is what we're competing against so who cares what they want, do what works.

BTW a robot will never ever be able to decide what I think is good content and what you think is good content so this whole idea of "good content" is completely ridiculous. Ya know whats good content to me thefu$k!nweather.com, I like it better then weather.com so let Google figure that one out.

I hear what you say and although I don't know where you're coming from exactly what you said has a lot of truth to it.

It gets tiring having to deal with people's false beliefs, their criticizing of "bluefart" (which is not the same as illegal) and the baggage they bring with them from places they hang out and things they read online and the things they don't understand.

Maybe they fell into group mentality and play the part because it makes them feel like they belong to something or makes them feel smart?

It's also funny to see people and groups criticize certain small things people do and yet they admit to doing things like setting up review sites, making up reviews or basing them on what others say without ever having actually had any experience with the products they promote - and yet no one says anything.

I'm not saying people can't or shouldn't do that but you know what they say about people who live in glass houses...

To be honest I've seen things, in SEO for example, where two polarizing mentalities are both right in different circumstances.

I've seen content sites do better and I've seen sites that do not get updated and are actually clones rank right beside the site they've copied.

In an experiment I nearly cloned a merchant's site, got a keyword domain, competition in quotes wasn't super high and not low either, also used some of his articles and did a little basic on page SEO and the only backlinking I did was one digg and submitting my RSS feed to an aggregator.

He probably beat me cause his site was older, maybe because it was registered for more than a year, no doubt he had more backlinks especially considering all his affiliates and he had a ton of articles on his site that I was to lazy to bother and copy.

I ranked number 5 and he number 3 for the same keyword with the exact same sales page. That ranking didn't take very long to achieve (a month) and it stayed there until I decided not to renew my domain.

Still, two spots behind him isn't bad.

This was two years ago and maybe Google has changed things since then but what people are saying now is what they said back then, too.

Probably helped that it wasn't obvious I was an affiliate.

Site was never updated.

Fresh content? Duplicate Content?

This is what Google says is duplicate content straight from the horse's mouth.

Duplicate content is not necessarily malicious in origin and not penalized but they pick and choose what gets shown when it gets out of hand however when it's malicious or deceptive the deceptive site's rank may suffer or be completely removed from results.

Google are a little too vague for my taste but most people never read what they say so I guess it doesn't matter.

If you want to play with Google just try your best to give them what they want.

Guess what, sometimes Google is right and it would be wise to do what they say.

So the next time someone says "That's duplicate content bla bla bla!" you can say "Yea? What's your point? Oh really? OK, thanks. Have a nice day"

It's not worth arguing about. You're not gonna change the world.

You can do it until you get tired and jaded. I'm already tired.

Sometimes people won't listen to you unless you charge them for it.

For real.

I have a theory on why some sites without updated content do OK and only a few pages thick but it's just a theory. I'm not an SEO "expert" and I hate SEO but I know what I've seen. There's a basic recipe I follow, try to be realistic and when I'm too lazy or hate certain parts I out task the rest (like link building).

There's just more than meets the eye and my guess is a lot of so called SEO experts (which I am not one of) know barely more or no more than a lot of people here.

It might not be wise to ignore Google but push comes to shove and it's definitely possible to not rely just on Google.

Just be creative.

You shouldn't have all your eggs in one basket anyway.

PS. HTML sites ("regular" sites) can do just as well as blogs - sometimes worse and sometimes better (Tip: Get an XML sitemap on there, submit it, have an RSS feed, submit that, have the most important links on all or most your pages and always a way to get back to the homepage, try not to bloat it so it isn't too slow)

PPS. Thanks for knocking Wikipedia. It always annoys me when people say "I found out on Wikipedia" It should be used as a springboard when really wanting information but nothing else in my opinion.

Hi StreetBacon,

I will disagree with your basic assumption. I don't believe very act of building links is against any Google "rules".

Yes, they do dislike self-promotional spam, particularly when it's only purpose is to manipulate the PageRank algorithm. However they do encourage meritorious link building. Here is one post from Google engineer Matt Cutts:

SEO Advice: Getting Links

Here is a summary of this post:

"Okay, here are some ways to get high-quality links without emailing, paying, or even paying attention to search engines:"

• Provide a useful one-time service.
• Provide an ongoing service
• Become a resource
• Provide valuable information.
• Be the first. Be the first means coming up with a creative idea that catches the fancy of the web.
• Get an article written about you

You may note that the last item in that list is essentially a self generated backlink. He also recommended blogging which builds links.

Google doesn't mind that you are promoting your website as long as it is through meritorious links, which implies useful "content". It is when you attempt to build links that add no value and are only self serving (not useful to others) links, that they consider it as web spam.

IMO, when ranking a page in Google SERP it doesn't matter what color hat you wear.

Every business no matter If online or offline has it's own bag of tricks to bring in traffic, other than the bare bone basics of just doing business.

SEO is, do whatever it takes to get the job done. As long as your not breaking real laws (not Google laws, lol, who cares what Google thinks) it's all good.

I've always done my own seo (year after year), it's a never ending learning experience. Like right now, I've been working on an advanced seo project for two days straight, that with no doubt will have a huge impact on my SERP CTR.

More than 1/2 my traffic comes from none organic search sources, like niche forums. The Google traffic is just extra traffic, & I can get by just fine without them. Still, I like the seo challenge & it keeps IM interesting.

Don't feel so bad, I have published the best content I can (maybe crap compared to others stuff, but it is the best I can do), thrown thousands of links up to promote it. And I am still not in the first 100 pages of Google. I am too stupid to give up though. Sooner or later I will do something, probably by accident, that will work. But so far it has been frustrating to say the least.

But what the hell else am I going to do with my time? Watch TV? At least this keeps me a little busy and off the streets.