The best SEO campaign strategy is actually a social strategy
Search engine marketers are continually throwing their arms up in the air every time Google makes an algorithm change. Unfortunately, these marketers will continue to drain the blood from their arms because Google does this over and over again, with no regard to how we market our content.
What never changes in the algorithm though, is the influence of real people on the web. When Google goes and gives EZine articles the boot that drops their rankings by 71%, we all cry, “but why!” We follow this up by saying, “I spent so much time writing keyword-stuffed, unhelpful and robotic content on that site so that I could get an inbound link to my own site!”
Hi, and welcome to the Internet, where the Google Gods will continue to take away as many “cheat” sites as they can. If you (and every other marker) spends hundreds of hours on a site that is temporarily giving you a boost in traffic, you better believe that Google will find it and dismember it.
As you may already know, JCPenny found this out the hard way, when they hired an SEO company who was buying links on other sites in order to get a boost in rankings. Do you think that JCPenny thinks it’s worth getting banned from Google indefinitely for the quick boost in traffic they got? Probably not.
Google hates cheating, and that includes link farms. A link farm is any site that is meant to create inbound links for your site, no matter how much extra effort (like writing a full article for Ezine Articles) requires.
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So if you’ve been spending too much time posting articles on sites like AssociatedContent.com (aka Yahoo’s Contributor Network who lost 163k rankings), Suite101.com (who lost 141k rankings), HubPages.com (103k loss), then you’re looking at finding new ways to build inbound links on highly ranked sites. Because sites like these are no longer considered credible.
Here’s how Google explains it:
“In the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
So how can you fight “the man”?
You don’t. Because Google will never kill your rankings for producing high quality content that high quality people are linking to.
Google will also never remove your site (like they did to JCPenny) for getting inbound links from other bloggers, who produce quality content.
All of this cheating in the SEO atmosphere is just one method of getting your website and articles highly ranked. There’s still a whole other part of SEO that is truly organic. By building relationships with other bloggers and getting inbound links from credible sites, you’ll always win. You’ll also always win when you not only choose niche targeted keyword for your blogs, but if you’re wrapping them with amazing content that everyone wants to read and share.
Is it more work? You betcha. Is it algorithm-proof? Yup.
Good organic marketing is real… and this reality is best defined by your peers…
Good content will always be the key to high SEO rankings and rightly so.
Great post!
Don
Thanks for your response Mike. What we can be sure of, is that we’ll never get ripped from the rankings by producing great content, that credible sources are linking to, which is my point.
A mommy blogger who has 100,000 hits a month and has inbound links from thousands of other mommy bloggers is much likely to get hammered by the algorithm than say, a blog about refrigerators who only gets inbound links from unrelated blogs and link farms and produces content that nobody would ever consider valuable enough to link to, or tweet about. Relying on keywords alone is a bad move, but relying on the production of your own inbound links is an even worse move.
As always, it comes back to producing great content, but you have to build those relationships with other bloggers, Twitter folks, etc. to get it seen in the first place.
No strategy is “alogrithm-proof.” Following white-hat SEO strategies will make it very unlikely that you’ll get the short end of the stick during an update, but there is always the danger that your website will be relegated to the supplemental index due to a false-positive. You should be able to get back with a reinclusion request, but who knows when or if that will happen.
There is also the chance that an algorithm change will devalue particular aspects of your on-site or off-site SEO strategy. Reciprocal links pages, adequate keyword density and meta-tags used to be a great way to get rankings and could be done without fear (as it seemed at the time). The 90’s ended and ten years later that strategy is a joke that is unlikely to get you anywhere in the rankings.
It seems like SE algos have matured, and are more consistent than they used to be. However, there are never any guarentees for ensuring your SE visibility.