“When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.” - Bob Dylan
When your website’s got no rankings, you got no traffic to lose
You’re website is invisible now, you got no links to conceal.
Do not let another organization’s self-serving (and hypocritical) guidelines control your every move…especially if you are so new and unestablished that your biggest risk is never gaining traction.
I saw a link-bait article at the top of TechMeme this past weekend entitled “”Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet”.
The article outlines how internet advertising will fail because it (apparently) holds people captive and forces them to watch ads (huh?). I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the jist of the conclusion reached by the author, Eric Clemons, of the University of Pennsylvania.
Part of the reason so many people beg, borrow, and steal for search engine traffic is because so many people have the same thin business models offering the same stuff. Rather than thinking of ways to differentiate or look within for ways to increase value, we figure just getting a couple more links will be all we need to do well. And it may be in the short term, but that is not enough to stay competitive.
Yahoo! has guys like Jeremy Zawodny marketing their fresh new search platform, and yet they remain behind the competition. Microsoft jumped into the search field way later than Yahoo! did, so why is it that Microsoft rankings for well promoted sites often roughly track Google rankings, while Yahoo! still has yet to give many of these sites an opportunity to rank?
In the past many Google penalties were blatantly obvious. You either got traffic or you did not. But as time has passed penalties are getting blurrier, meaning your site can be penalized and still get traffic from Google. Some traffic reductions are due to competitive market forces, some are due to algorithm changes, some are due to automated filters, and some are due to penalties. If you are new to the market (and in some cases, even if you are experienced) it is hard to know which problems, if any, are holding back your ranking potential.
When I did a recent Q&A thread one of the recurring themes with sites that were struggling was AdSense ads positioned above their content. Many websites are never given the chance to grow because they monetize too aggressively and look to spammy to enjoy the benefits of organic growth and community building.
The Website Health Check tool aims to provide a simple and intuitive interface to seeing if your site has any major SEO issues. The site queries Google to grab pages you have indexed in Google, and looks for issues amongst the first 1,000 results.
Tips on How to Use Google Indexing Date FiltersThe Google advanced search page allows you to search for pages that were recently indexed, letting you filter through days, weeks, months, and years. Here are pages from SeoBook.com indexed in the last week.
The Evolution of Natural LinkingWhen the web was younger is was less spammy. When the web was less commercial a larger percentage of sites were created out of passion, and those who spammed generally were not link spammers. Most new websites are spam.
This morning brings news from around the web of losses to the Google Toolbar PageRank (the little green pixels displayed in the toolbar) for a myriad of sites. The best coverage I’ve seen comes from Andy Beard, as well as SEJournal and SELand (which has a comprehensive list of sites discussing the update). Read the rest of this entry »
