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Am I Right? White Hat Sites Are Now Churn & Burn?

by TZ
18 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Do you think my theory is right? I think that white-hat sites are now 4-5 year churn & burn propositions?

When I look at all of our link profiles, keyword action, traffic levels, etc. etc., there seems to be a pattern.

The blogs we launched 4-5 years ago climb and climb and climb, and as they hit a peak exposure point the trackback spammers come a callin' - they start sending crap links at all of our pages hoping for a trackback. Of course we manually approve all trackbacks and comments, so they never see the light of day on our blogs, but the result is thousands of crap links pointed at our sites.

The result is the loss of ranking, and traffic slumps.

Then we see that the smaller blogs that are still under the radar somewhat are climbing the SE latter without a problem. They've never really been targeted by trackback spammers, so we focus all resources on these domains going forward.

The cycle starts over. Pure white hat sites on a slow churn & burn.

Am I nuts, or is does this have merit?
#burn #churn #hat #sites #white
  • Profile picture of the author Bisturi
    You are going nuts.

    Pure white-hat sites don't rank for chit; every site right at the top of the SERPs (that has been there for years) has done some form of search-engine manipulating: from knowing an editor on a big newspaper and asking for a little favor to mention their site to getting to be an editor at DMOZ to paying hundreds for a mention in an article on The Huffington Post to sending review products for a backlink.

    Pure white-hat sites are not churn & burn; people just get tired of receiving 50 visitors a day and just give up on their sites.
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    • Profile picture of the author TZ
      Originally Posted by Bisturi View Post

      You are going nuts.

      Pure white-hat sites don't rank for chit; every site right at the top of the SERPs (that has been there for years) has done some form of search-engine manipulating: from knowing an editor on a big newspaper and asking for a little favor to mention their site to getting to be an editor at DMOZ to paying hundreds for a mention in an article on The Huffington Post to sending review products for a backlink.

      Pure white-hat sites are not churn & burn; people just get tired of receiving 50 visitors a day and just give up on their sites.
      Not true Bisturi - our white hat sites are still ranking well (not as well as a year ago mind you) and they see an average of 3000 unique visitors a day from Google and BingHoo.

      There are many thousands of pure white-hat sites getting great traffic. We've been running blogs since 2003 and they've always ended up getting good inbound links if the content is good. Sites like Ehow for instant link to our sites a lot.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dellco
    You are right. Trackback spam is a growing problem. However the title of your thread should be changed. What do we do regarding trackback spam?
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  • Profile picture of the author Voasi
    I don't think many would agree with you on this one.

    It would take soooo many backlinks to off-set all the "good" links you've acquired to your white-hat site. Besides, you should be continually building new and better links to your white hat site. If you're not, then the "velocity" factor might kick in as well.
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    • Profile picture of the author TZ
      Originally Posted by Voasi View Post

      I don't think many would agree with you on this one.

      It would take soooo many backlinks to off-set all the "good" links you've acquired to your white-hat site. Besides, you should be continually building new and better links to your white hat site. If you're not, then the "velocity" factor might kick in as well.
      True - agreed. However, if you are building good safe-links your speed of acquiring them will be much slower than the trackback spammers.
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      • Profile picture of the author Voasi
        Originally Posted by TZ View Post

        True - agreed. However, if you are building good safe-links your speed of acquiring them will be much slower than the trackback spammers.
        Agree - however, are these pages even indexed with your link on them? If they have a ton of other trackback spam on them, is Google possibly degrading the link equity of all links on the page, in affect NOT harming you (and not passing any link juice).

        Is it possible it's happening, yes. You'd have to really piss some off for them to take the time to do negative SEO - that or you're playing in a very competitive space.
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        • Profile picture of the author TZ
          Originally Posted by Voasi View Post

          .....that or you're playing in a very competitive space.
          Loans, debt consolidation, credit repair, and credit cards. Are placements in the search engines are always surrounded by spam - these sites don't last long, but new ones come along pretty quick.

          But I don't think we have had negative SEO launched against us in any way. It's just the constant track-back attempts from spam domains and sub-domains. So they are not trying to hurt our sites - they're just trying get trackbacks, and I'm just geussing these garbage links are hurting the higher exposure sites.

          It never results in the compete wipe out of our sites/blogs - they still get a good amount of traffic from Google and of course BingHoo. It's just less from Google than in their prime.

          Seeing that so many pure white hat sites have seen a slump in traffic makes me wonder if having multiple white hat sites sort of below the radar of the spammers might be better than having just one high exposure, high traffic site.

          Like I said - these are all guesses. Not stating this like fact.
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  • Profile picture of the author godoveryou
    I think no matter what model you use, websites are mostly temporary affairs when it comes to Google traffic. Not because the admin is doing anything wrong, but rather because they have freedom to change anything they want. With it being such a moving target lately the whole thing is a gamble.

    I think it's a bet worth making, but it's not entirely steady. There are old,long term winners of course.
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    • Profile picture of the author PerformanceMan
      Originally Posted by godoveryou View Post

      I think no matter what model you use, websites are mostly temporary affairs when it comes to Google traffic. Not because the admin is doing anything wrong, but rather because they have freedom to change anything they want. With it being such a moving target lately the whole thing is a gamble.

      I think it's a bet worth making, but it's not entirely steady. There are old,long term winners of course.
      This is it in a nutshell. The time has long passed where Google is 1) the only game in town or 2) the best game in town.

      Trying to find stability in the SERPs is a losing proposition any more.
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      • Profile picture of the author TZ
        Originally Posted by PerformanceMan View Post

        This is it in a nutshell. The time has long passed where Google is 1) the only game in town or 2) the best game in town.

        Trying to find stability in the SERPs is a losing proposition any more.
        Right now DDG is providing better results for our family usage. (Duck Duck Go) Sort of like the old Google - clean and simple.
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
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        Originally Posted by PerformanceMan View Post

        Trying to find stability in the SERPs is a losing proposition any more.
        That's not true, at least not for the keywords I target on my own sites.
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        • Profile picture of the author RickCopy
          Originally Posted by yukon View Post

          That's not true, at least not for the keywords I target on my own sites.
          might not have hit your keywords yet... but it will. as is the fate of any site that relies completely on google for its success.
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          • Profile picture of the author yukon
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            Originally Posted by RickCopy View Post

            might not have hit your keywords yet... but it will. as is the fate of any site that relies completely on google for its success.
            That's silly.

            My oldest site is still ranking #1 for my best traffic keywords after 6 years, so I guess OPs 4-5 year theory isn't realistic. I have 3 sites in the same niche mostly targeting the same keywords, so at the very least I usually have 2 sites ranking + double SERP listings + multiple thumbnail images (in text search) for my best traffic keywords.

            I got this.

            BTW, I have about 50% of my traffic coming from same niche sites/forums, Google is far from being my only source of traffic.
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            • Profile picture of the author RickCopy
              Originally Posted by yukon View Post

              That's silly.

              My oldest site is still ranking #1 for my best traffic keywords after 6 years, so I guess OPs 4-5 year theory isn't realistic. I have 3 sites in the same niche mostly targeting the same keywords, so at the very least I usually have 2 sites ranking + double SERP listings + multiple thumbnail images (in text search) for my best traffic keywords.

              I got this.

              BTW, I have about 50% of my traffic coming from same niche sites/forums, Google is far from being my only source of traffic.
              well since my post was basically just saying "dont rely on google"...and....you dont rely on google....then it wouldnt really apply to you. lets not pretend that 75% of posters here dont rely 100% on google.
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  • Profile picture of the author dennis09
    Correct me if i'm wrong, but trackback spammers aren't leaving actual links to your site. They simply use a program to spam your page similar to blog comment spam. For example, if Site A starts sending out trackback spam, they aren't actually linking to your blog. If they were then this would create thousands of OBLs from the page, which would go against the purpose of the spam in the first place; which is to rank in the SERPS.
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    • Profile picture of the author TZ
      Originally Posted by dennis09 View Post

      Correct me if i'm wrong, but trackback spammers aren't leaving actual links to your site. They simply use a program to spam your page similar to blog comment spam. For example, if Site A starts sending out trackback spam, they aren't actually linking to your blog. If they were then this would create thousands of OBLs from the page, which would go against the purpose of the spam in the first place; which is to rank in the SERPS.
      What I seem to have noticed is this. Thousand inbound link looking for the trackback, and their script removes the OBL right after. This way they hope to get the inbound link and return nothing.

      HOWEVER....some of them link to you and they never get removed. These are the ones we see in Webmaster Tools - garbage inbounds from garbage domains.
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  • Profile picture of the author alvinchua91
    godoveryou is right. D*MN Google. They can change their algorithms any nanosecond they want and they don't have to give you a proper explanation. Penguin and Panda... I'm sure many white hat sites have been accidentally hit by them... Sadly, we can't really rely purely on Google traffic for a living or we will all be living on the streets soon.
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  • Profile picture of the author online only
    If you do things right then there is no problem at all to be in the first page of Google. Like Yukon said, some sites have been in top for 6 years. Some of the sites probably ten years.

    However, there's always a light flux that mixes up the SERP, but if you have strong links, good site and some social signals then it's no problem to say at first page, or top 5 for years without dropping anywhere.
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