Check yo sites rankings yo
- Thread starter rusvik
- Start date
Your "clean" sites clearly aren't clean then.
There's a pretty big margin for error in these updates. If there wasn't, too many legit sites would be raped, and the SERPs would turn to shit. I've not yet seen a site's link profile hit by something like penguin, where it's not painfully obvious without any reasonable doubt that they were actively link building.
The problem is the "grey" area in the middle. "Long term" grey hat shit is what's being eroded away by these updates. (i.e. most of the stuff people do when they're trying to be "safe")
If you want to stay in the "SEO" game, either go full-on black and exploit holes with a churn n burn model, or go full-on white and do shit properly. It's the people in the middle that never get anywhere, and consistently get raped by updates. This isn't news, and has been true for a long time now.
The only people that will be able to describe themselves as pure SEO's a few years from now will likely be black hats, incidentally, IMO. Everyone else will be "content marketers", "inbound marketers", "relationship marketers" yada yada. The easy, build a blog network, buy a load of links in BST and rank your site for months/years and earn "passive" monies is dying.
Rankings are up for several sites I haven't done anything to in a while. FeelsGoodman.jpg.
Shoutout to Matt Cutts - thank you.
Shoutout to Matt Cutts - thank you.
Fixed that for you. Otherwise, complete agreement. Reading the threads over on WMT forums, the white hats got pwned too. Actively building links puts you in the danger zone it seems, no matter what kind/type/rate. Adwords tho...
I believe you're right. I don't see the value in trying to build a long term brand site for affiliate stuff anymore. It's not worth the risk and effort. I'm officially on the churn & burn bandwagon.
The problem with white hat for affiliates is that you're competing against the people that get a bigger cut of the pie because they're higher up the chain.
The white hat winners have big budgets, and aren't just investing in SEO because it's all they know, but as part of a combined strategy across paid, social, email, etc. That almost immediately eliminates most of the "spam" markers that pure SEO's tend to get labeled with, meaning that penalties aren't really a concern for real businesses with real online marketing strategies.
If you want white hat success, you need to be building a real business behind it. Sell a product, service, or whatever. If you're just another affiliate, you're most likely going to struggle. You have no value add to the customer, what-so-ever, no matter how long you've spent trying to fool yourself that you do. Your content costs $0.02-$0.05 a word from oDesk just like everyone else's, and is rewritten from the first 5 pages of search results for "best weight loss supplement", "best online casino", "payday loans online", "raspberry ketones review" or whatever other industry you're in. That "high quality content" may be written by a super human English college grad who makes one grammatical error per million words, but it's not high quality. It's the same bullshit on every affiliate site.
The whitehat affiliates that do thrive are the affiliates with clever software or in depth industry experience that add value to the buying process. Think Skyscanner, Compare The Market, Kayak, Poker Affiliate Listings, etc..
Affiliates need to realise that their industry is being cannibalised, whether they're in PPC, SEO, Social or whatever. As the industry matures, and the companies themselves become better at marketing themselves cross channel online, they're going to progressively price affiliates out of the game. There will remain a place for the people that can do the blackhat stuff that real brands don't want to be associated with (no matter what channel it may be), and the gurus who have built up cult followings, but the whole PPC direct to a standard lander, or SEO to do much the same, Pinterest spam, yada yada... I have my doubts.
I see grindstone has been learning you while you've been hanging out in the rape cage. Lucky you!
none of my sites were affected negatively. Managed to recover several Penguin 1.0 penalty sites to pre-penguin 1.0 rankings.
I'm not sure what those of you who keep getting nuked are doing. Are you BST only guys? Do you sites have different content styled? UGC content sections built in?
I'm not sure what those of you who keep getting nuked are doing. Are you BST only guys? Do you sites have different content styled? UGC content sections built in?
The Chinese counterfeit guys(gang) care not about animal updates -- they crank so much, so fast, that it just won't be stopped while links are still a majority signal.
Penguin is exceptionally good at hurting my cleaner efforts though; good thing I've gone upstream on those and relish anytime I can assist in diverting traffic away from Google. If you guys knew how much Fortune 500s are using disavow and neg SEO to take each other and smaller players out -- the house of cards a million miles high is already falling, it'll just take time to see it fully crash down.
Penguin is exceptionally good at hurting my cleaner efforts though; good thing I've gone upstream on those and relish anytime I can assist in diverting traffic away from Google. If you guys knew how much Fortune 500s are using disavow and neg SEO to take each other and smaller players out -- the house of cards a million miles high is already falling, it'll just take time to see it fully crash down.
I agree, I walked through the Google supplemental results, I saw the horror, the promising websites and projects as disembodied corpses. I saw my brothers and sisters, my sons and daughters - all amongst the dead… Something needs to be done… by someone... the SEOers need a hero. Perhaps not the hero we deserve, but a hero we need…
