How to Google Proof Your Business
First of all, this is not meant to slight Grizzly in any way. What he teaches as far as how to make money with adsense is hand sdown the best FREE information that you can get online. Hell, what he teaches far surpasses most of the paid stuff out there in regards to making money with adsense. However, that said, I want you to understand that some of the things that he admonishes and that many of you believe so whole heartedly in relation to social marketing is wrong. Flat out wrong. And it is easy to criticize what you don’t fully understand (think of all those bloggers out there that say that the adsense doesn’t pay off and you will get the picture.)
Making blanket statements like they don’t rank so therefore they aren’t relevant is absolutely crazy. Organic listings can be an important strategy. But if they were the only strategy, people like Frank Kern (who is considered one of the top online copywriters today) would be broke rather than pulling in 7 and 8 figures. The reason why I mention this is because there is this prevailing attitude that organic search will play a vital role to making money online. It could make you money online. But make no bones about it….organic listings is just one method to funnel traffic to your site.
I am not going to argue the fact that organic listings will generate income. That is a known fact. End of discussion. If you have the discipline to “game” Google by generating links and lots of them, then you will rank for your keyword and hopefully, make money funneling traffic to your site via organic listings. But to state that it is the “best” way to generate income is to overlook so many other marketing models that work as well.
And, frankly, it is something that I would like to address….using social platforms to make money online…..
Why would you want to become social in the first place? After all, if organic search is where it’s at and building a thin affiliate site is easier than putting in the work of “socializing”, what would be the chief motivator?
Well, diversification would be the biggest reason…
One of these days, Google is going to devalue links to an extent and start adding other things into its algo (such as bounce rate, time spent on page, ect…) as it accumulates more and more data. Google’s mission is to give the searcher the most relevant information. Do you honestly believe that they will keep the current algo of “the one with the most ‘votes’ wins in place indefinitely?
Google hasn’t made a major change in about 10 years. For those of you who remember the last change, you can also remember the heartache that it caused. Many marketers and businesses went from making six and seven figures to nothing overnight.
Now the above scenario may or may not happen. But that said, do you really want to be THAT guy who’s eggs are all in the Google basket banking that backlinks will continue to be the reason why you rank?
Using social marketing can, in effect Google Proof your business, especially if your business is building your brand as an authority in your market.
But, let me make something clear here. The kind of social marketing I am talking about is not about getting worthless visits from Digg or the “I follow you, you follow me” twitter strategy that everyone seems to want to push. That stuff doesn’t work and will never work from a scalable point of view.
How to Make Money Online with Social Media…..
A decade or so ago, my first taste of internet marketing came in the form of social marketing. Back then, if you were interested in something and wanted to surrounded by others who were interested in the same thing, you went to forums.
If you said things that made sense and was an active member in the forum (or various forums in your niche), eventually people would follow you and respect you.
If you built a site based on the niche and “advertised” it via your signature link, you would get visitors and if you really knew what you were talking about, you would actually have people referencing you and your site for better information.
You give good information that people felt was valuable and you would get traffic. People would trust you and in turn, you would suggest things that would make you money. If the things you suggest help those you suggest them to, then your credibility is enhanced and your “brand” begins to grow.
Eventually, those that are the “tribe” leaders in your niche are forced to notice you (because of the number of times you are metioned), agree that you are a good source for information and you become a “tribe” leader.
Pretty simple AND it makes sense,right?
My first “social” site netted me 60k by accident (I didn’t know or understand what I was doing then) the first year using the strategy above…..
I also didn’t “rank” for any of the niche terms. In effect, all of my “business” came directly through referrals….No SEO because I didn’t understand it and didn’t know about its importance.
In fact, an acquaintance of mine e-mailed back then with a laundry list of things that I should do to become more visible. My title tags were ugly….my headers were off…I wasn’t using my meta tags (it was important back then)..no descriptions…ect…
…and yet I was stupidly just making money from it by simply being a part in a market that I was highly passionate about and actually liked….
By the way, this is a viable way to use forums to make money online and build your brand even today…..
Once again….
- Find where your market congregates
- Say things that make sense AND have value to your market….
- Gain Exposure through casual mentions (either by networking with other bloggers or through the forums) to increase credibility
- Sell things…casually….
- Happy customers = more credibility and repeat business
- More credibility = even more exposure & more sales
Busting the Social Marketing-is-Not-Targetted-So-Therefore-Does-Not-Make-Money Myth
A lot of organic search marketers will be quick to point out that people who do searches for “money” or “buy” keywords are looking for something specific to buy and that social mavens aren’t. They are right, you know…and then again,they aren’t.
The trick is to look at permission marketers to see how they set up their net….
You see, unlike organic/search marketing which can be a one and done kind of affair (someone has an issue-you provide them with the answer via contextual ads, your actual product or affiliate product-they purchase it or don’t), permission based marketing is not necessarily concerned with an immediate sale. Instead, they just kind of hang around, prove their value and ideally speaking, make repeated sales….
And the same thing applies with the so-called social blogs that catch air and fly. They get their “followers”….their followers “vouch” for them or think they are crazy cool in forums and their own web properties…people who visit think it is more believable to come from a third party source and check it out….they get more fans and so on and so forth….
But when do fans become buyers??
The answer is whenever you suggest something, provided you have enough sway. Think of it this way….if Grizzly, who is by and large an adsense guy, suddenly put out a post saying I really like so-and-so and think that it would be a good tool for people who are using my adsense system, how many people who really respect him would buy or in the very least strongly consider it? My guesstimate would be a lot. And it wouldn’t be those who arrive at his page via organic search either(although the amount of comments he would get and the ensuing discussion would surely help “proof” him).
Now that seems so elementary, right? Suggest stuff that someone in whatever market you are in may be interested in and sell them stuff because they trust and like you.
Now, I am sure that you are thinking at this very moment…..doesn’t every friggin’ blogger and newbie make money online person state these kinds of things?…the answer is yes…but they miss the one key element in the whole thing….
The Key is Value and Perception of “BRAND”
Value is the equation that most marketers (and bloggers) miss. You hear it thrown around like “value” is something that is clear cut and tangible. Make your stuff “valuable” and people will love it. Pass value to your customers. But what exactly is value?
The reality is that value is determined by the visitor right? Some reading this right now will get absolutely no value out of what I am saying. Others will get some…maybe one will think that this makes perfect sense and will be the reason why they go out and take action today. Hopefully, others will get pissed at it and write something on their site about how wrong I am (..and link to me….after all, in the world of google, there is nothing wrong with a little bad press here and there).
Oprah Winfrey is valuable to millions of women who watch her…hence, why anytime she mentions a book, it is an automatic bestseller.
Frank Kern, Mike Filsaime, Dan Kennedy is valuable to thousands of internet marketers…hence, why their seminars sell out in minutes despite the fact that they cost $1,000’s of dollars to attend…
Darren Rouse (love him or hate him) is valuable to the photography world…hence, why he is on pace for a $100,000 dollar month…
None of these guys are “product specific” like organic search marketers would shoot for. Instead, they are Market Specific. Oprah Winfrey can turn a book into a bestseller one day and have everyone making a mad rush for the organic grocery store for a certain type of B vitamin the next.
Frank Kern freely admits that he knows nothing about SEO. He doesn’t have to. He knows his market. He knows what moves his market. And he understands the verticals associated with his market…..and the final piece?…….
His market trusts hims, likes him, and as a consequence, buys stuff from him….
No SEO required……
The “value” you give must be unique OR your brand needs to be strong…
All those mentioned above have something that most of us don’t…they have all managed to become a brand all to themselves. Those are extreme cases though. Chances are you will never reach the ranks of the Oprah’s in terms of brand acknowledgement. But that is not to say that you can’t brand your name in smaller markets.
Remember me mentioning my 60k in the first year accident? Well, that was due largely to the fact that my name (in this case, it was my forum handle) became branded to the market I was in. I wasn’t at the top of the market either….more like the middle. But if you had been in that particular market 10 years ago, chances are good you would have heard of me and visited my site…hell, you may have even talked with me personally.
Some Key Concerns…the greater the ‘Ambition’, the harder it is to get there and the more value you need….
Competition in certain markets are fierce. They are fierce not only in trying to gain a foothold via social marketing…they are also fierce in terms of ranking for it in the search engines as well.
Case in point…the make money online niche…..
And if you have entertained or even built a blog in this lucrative niche (it has a very hungry, albeit naive market), you have probably figured out that it is one thing to build it and another thing altogether to gain a following. And it is even harder to get casual mentions (largely because the MMO and internet marketing niches like to keep who they link to close to their chest..who wants to give up a sale, right?)
The reason why most Make Money Online Bloggers fail isn’t about persevering….while it is true that the “dip” (as Seth Godin calls it) is much deeper making getting to the proverbial garden of eden (or “A-list) much, much harder…the reality is that most don’t have a unique selling position. In effect, they can’t sell themselves. And the reason is because the…here-comes-that-word-again…value that they are giving isn’t really valuable at all……
How to know if you aren’t valuable-
If your content is being peddled on 1,000’s of other websites, you can pretty much bet that your “value” is very close to nothing. If you are delivering this kind of content, one of two things will happen:
- Your Readership will eventually “outgrow” you.
- You will never develop a readership in the first place
Who Wants Readers again?
Thinking that readers are a waste of time is a lot like thinking that no one makes money with adsense because YOU don’t make money with adsense. Readers, in and of themselves won’t make you money. That’s true. But, what you have when it comes to “readers” (provided the readers aren’t simply bloggers looking to use your site as a bathroom with their comments in a vane attempt to leech traffic), they are still a community of like minded individuals with common goals, directives, wants and desires.
That’s important to realize because IF that reader values you and IF that reader believes what you are saying and IF that reader feels enlightened or smarter when they read your junk, THEN you may make indirect sales through passing products that will help with their common goals, wants, directives or desires.
And IF you meet the above criteria, it is all about the marketing model. Adsense won’t work that well with this model because frankly, it is too impersonal. Affiliate programs do work though. So does selling your own stuff.
Bonus points if you are smart enough to build a list and use the list as another way to pass value and entertainment (and stuff) to your readership.
The more competitive the niche, the more value you have to give. Value can be entertainment (like Allen Gardyne’s Video Blog) or it can be actually informative OR the best case scenario is it has both (nickycakes).
The value equation is also the primary reason why so many marketers opt for adsense and thin affiliate sites. After all, it is much easier to throw down some crappy rewritten (or spun) article, toss some links to it and rank for a long tail keyword. If you can get top listings organically, who cares about value or uniqueness, right?
It is much easier to say the same thing that everyone else is saying and simply opt for “gaming” google by generating links than it is to create your own “tribe” of folks who trust you, believe what you say, are willing to talk about you online, and buy from you or your brand.
Building a brand, making yourself an authority and connecting to your readership (or list) may be harder but it insulates you from the funny permutations and fickleness of the search engines because you aren’t relying on it for your income. It is a long term strategy. And the only variable that can mess it up is you….not google…..not any other search engine….
….You become Google-Proof…..
Smart Marketers Build Lists
I will probably keep this section short as I intend to really get into list building techniques at a later date (and no, it won’t be the usual paint-by-numbers bullshit you are used to seeing) but if you have a website and are looking to really “connect” with your audience, permission marketing will by and far give you another means to…well, be “connected”.
That is the secret of the marketing gurus who don’t focus on SEO. It really is as easy as that. But once again, where most marketers get it all wrong is their list is all about “them” and not really about the person they are sending it to.
In a nutshell, the “blueprint” looks almost identical to social marketing:
- Build a landing page with an over-the-top offer OR a website with a ton of value for the market you are courting…
- Collect e-mail addresses
- Send your list content that is considered valuable
- Sell them stuff that they are interested in
- They buy stuff because they respect you, like you and believe that you are going to give them value no matter what…
Reading that makes you feel like you have seen it before,right? A little deja vu in action….
And once again, I am not hosing ranking organically…I am just trying to give a different perspective on ways to build an online business. It is too easy to place one marketing method above the rest as the “best”. It is easy to make blanket assumptions like so-and-so doesn’t make money because they don’t rank. It isn’t the case. And thank goodness for that. If it were true, there would be a lot of businesses and brands out there today that would be broke.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays Everyone….
20 Responses to “How to Google Proof Your Business”
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I’m not too happy with this post but I guess it is reality. It scares the living daylights out of me.
I have tried, on two seperate occaisions, to brand myself and actually get a following with 2 different MMO blogs. First time (when I didn’t know what I was doing) I actually got a small following but made no money. Second time (when I did know a little more what I was doing) I failed miserably to get any following at all and couldn’t even rank for my keywords, LOL.
I gave up that route and after following Griz’s advice, have been able to make good money through organic search. I think if 100 people try to get a “following” as you suggest, 99 will fail. It is VERY hard. I think if 100 people try Griz’s method, only 95 or so will fail.
All I can say is that I hope nothing drastic changes with Google for another 10 years. If it does, I’m in a lot of trouble. Merry Christmas.
@ Jessie
There is no reason to be upset or not upset about it, man
Find what works for you and work it.
This post wasn’t directly meant to talk about building a list though. It was more focused on building a brand for your site. The list is just icing on the cake.
You are actually right in regards to building a following being hard. You build it one member at a time. The key thing is entertainment and value that you give. The best marketers can make a living exclusively from their list with not so much as a blog online. But it is hard when you think of the MMO world…..it is a very competitive market and in order to do stuff, you need to not only know how to market effectively and under the radar but also how to relate to people. In the end, if your “tips’ and “tricks” are like everyone else’s, you lose. If someone who subscribes to you feels smarter after reading your e-mail, you win. That is a rough road.
Organic search is the bee’s knees for the moment. I do organic search marketing. But I know that unless you are building something big….like an authority site…it is just a matter of time before you watch your earnings start to dwindle. And just like list marketing, authority site’s are absolutely no joke in terms of time you have to put into it and sometimes money, depending on how competitive your niche is.
The reason why I even wrote this is because I was thinking about the last time google’s algorithm made a huge change and the effect it had on the marketing world. Plus, everyone thinks that the only strategy you can implement when it comes to niche marketing is solid SEO. It isn’t the case. You cast the net and draw in the “fish”.
Frankly, the best chances you have at making sales is when either someone verifies your site as credible or they decide to trust you. That is a fact. I can tell you that broadcasting a message to my list with an offer can net me a 25+% conversion rate. Try getting those numbers with a niche site getting traffic solely through organic traffic. It may be plausible but it is in no way “average”.
I really like this post and agree that not everything is about getting to page 1 of G (even though that seems like my life’s obsession right now).
Before I found Griz I was a email marketer and built quite a nice list using ebay, article marketing and having my own clickbank product (btw: please don’t buy it if you are reading this, it’s old techniques now).
But email marketing just didn’t sit well with me. Yeah I made some good money and yeah I got lots of subscribers but I didn’t really like the model I was using. In fact I’m thinking of quitting Aweber next year and dumping all my lists. I know – radical huh!
I’m still an affiliate marketer but I mainly promote Amazon products these days. Why? Because I like the model I’m using, I enjoy it and it makes me money. But primarily I use SEO (and article marketing) to drive traffic. It’s just a better fit for what I want to acheive right now.
Perhaps down the track I’ll want to try something new (and that’s very likely as I tend to jump around often) which is why it’s good to know there isn’t just ONE way to do it these days.
I hope G doesn’t change it’s algo anytime soon too, but yes there are many other ways.
Top notch post once again Leo,
I think I have heard from you more in the last month than the whole year before. LOL
It seems in a SEO/adsense model it is desirable to be in several different niches in order to spread your efforts around. For example, hemorrhoid treatments, hubcaps, and dog leashes would be a good mix. If one is down maybe the others would be up.
With branding it seems like, at least at the beginning and maybe forever, a person would be concentrating on only one niche but really building a presence in that niche.
So is the question, “what is the niche I should try to brand in?” I mean, it would hard to be famous talking about hubcaps I think. Although maybe there is a big enough group of hubcappers out there that you could develop a market.
What type of niche would lend itself well to branding do you think? Probably something with residual sales I would assume so you could continue to interact with your following.
Good advice here, for those of us who read it and think it through. Also, if you check closely, on the ‘make money for beginners’ blogspot blog where Griz first captured my attention … from a ’social’ link, not from an organic search … Griz is running strictly affiliate deals. No AdSense there. Of course I expect his ‘oil filter’ sites are still cranking in the daily clicks, but, of course, they are very hard to connect with him … he doesn’t want them to be connected.
Another thing that might be noted, which ties in directly with this article .. for many months now, Griz has been very ‘reclusive’ (he moved to civilization, bought a house, etc.) … hardly posting and creating very little controversy.
It would not be scientific to say “consequently” (because I have no proof), but as an interesting ‘factoid’, during this period of low activity, Griz now is well down into the second page of Google SERPs for ‘make money online”, as is Carl Ocab, the virtually unknown teenager who always ran neck and neck with the Griz, often holding the spot above him, actually.
Just as another ‘unprovable’ coincidental fact, Carl, who was a very visible ’socializing’ guy has been very, very quiet in past months,(busy with school, running off-line seminars and such) and guess what? He now ranks down on the second page along with the Griz.
There is no way to prove that these two guys who were always alternating number one and number two positions for months on end and have now slipped to page two, lost their position due to ‘going silent’, results certainly speak for themselves.
nice one, again
To my best knowledge, approach you described is pretty much linked to the personality of the blogger (or marketer if you wish).
I can hardly imagine the guy who is not social in (real) life will be social on the internet. Sure, there are exceptions, you can always use the “anonymity” of the web, but in general, if you dont like to speak with people (offline) you wont speak with them online.
Leo,
In a sense, the social marketing that you are advocating is more like brand-building in real-world brick-and-mortar businesses than what Problogger and Copyblogger are doing (which is more similar to pyramid marketing [which is a different beast from MLM in theory]).
If I understand you correctly, we first need a passion (that can make money). Then we use that passion to find (and piggyback) on a community (like a forum) and build authority there. We build authority by helping other members of the community, hence providing value and building up our social standing. That way, when we (once in a while) recommend a product (e.g. drop an affiliate link) that is useful to people in the community, some of them will buy and we will make money.
This kind of “social marketing” sounds quite reasonable to me. The biggest caveat I can think of is to be careful that our niche does not become extinct like the dinosaurs (e.g. cloth-making in the US, manufacturing film for cameras, making horse buggies, etc.)
*Sigh* If only I had a passion that has lots of money-making potential.
J,
If I understood Leo correctly, this kind of socializing is different from having a face-to-face conversation. To be an interesting conversation partner offline, you need to ask questions and listen to people. When you share of yourself with others, you turn them off – they get bored, or feel that you are bossy or sticking your nose into their business.
Online, in a forum, you find a post where someone has a problem and then you help them to solve that problem. In other words, you build authority and social standing in the online community by acting as a consultant sharing his/her expertise. You would be more like a doctor or some other professional that people visit for help, except that unlike the real world you chase them instead of the other way around.
@ Tracy
Email marketing can be very tricky, especially if you are close to your list (the farther away you are, the less receptive they are BUT the more shady offers you can throw at them). There are certainly some upsides and downsides to it.
As far as email marketing is concerned, most internet marketers for whatever reason, concern themselves with all the “little fish” who they compete with and what they are doing. I have never understood this. Who cares what they are doing and how they are doing it? Besides maybe a handful of internet marketing personalities, most of the lists I concentrate on are the ones run by big corporations….anything that Rodale puts out is a better blueprint that even some of those guys that claim to be email marketing gurus.
Paul Myer’s newsletter is a great example of what to do in regards to connecting with your list. I dunno anyone else who does it better. He gets you to buy without realizing that you are being pitched to…gotta respect that kind of marketing.
@ Andy
Yeah, I have been a bit more active on this site lately. It is partly because I just got finished with a marathon writing session that lasted almost 2 months…I am frazzled and burned-out…this blog helps me recharge and refocus. To be very honest with you, you can only write so many articles on how to kill carpenter ants with borax or whatever before you are pulling your hair out.
As far as what niche to brand, you are on your own
@ Dave
Dunno if there is any coincidences or conspiracy theories in regards to Grizzly and Carlocab….I imagine that Grizzly is just kind of hanging and getting used to being around people again……
I don’t think that Grizzly posts on his blog b/c he “likes” writing or finds it therapeutic (like me). I think that his posts are more methodical…to drive traffic to them when he wants to. He has gone for a couple months without posting on more than one occasion.
As far as his rankings go, he is still #1 in my datacenter in the south.
@ J.
Personality is important. It is what draws us to certain people. Think about it. In most cases, we either want one of two things:
We either want something that someone else has like their wealth or lifestyle and think that by learning what they know, a little luck will rub off on us…
They know something we don’t and we think that if we learn it, it will somehow improve our lives in some way, shape or form
@ Calvin
Broken down like that, it makes me feel a little stupid, lol. But yeah, that is pretty much it. And yeah…as crazy as it sounds, what works offline will work online as well.
In the beginning that is the case….eventually you are the one getting chased though, lol.
Hmm. I have no idea where the ‘conspiracy theory’ came from. It’s just a simple fact that both have been blogging a lot less in say the past month than they were six months ago, and they both have certainly slipped down in the SERPS
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#17
Perhaps we are talking about a different blog/domain of Griz’s … I should have been more clear, perhaps, but this is the domain that first brought him to my attention 6 or more months back.
I’ve yet to see any site differ by more than 10 positions, like your results and mine seem to be, by virtue of different data centers. usually, I never look to see what data center someone’s results are on .. I have a tool somewhere to do that with, but don’t find it of nay value. I care about the results when someone types keywords or a keyphrase question into the main Google.com window, because I perceive that is what 99% of my visitors are going to do. Maybe I am misisng something of importance here, becuase I never thought that great a spread would happen. Live and learn.
If you us ‘make money online” in quotes, makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com/ improves to number 3 and http://www.carlocab.com/ improves to number 7
Perhaps this makes my assertion that the inactivity has hurt them both less viable, because, from my end, they are still solidly on page one, and that, in itself is pretty darn impressive.
But it’s interesting none-the-less, because Carl is about as ’social’ a blogger as there is, and Griz (at least claims) to be an “anti-social” blogger, yet look at where both of them have been ranking for months and months on end.
It seems to be that is a pretty good testimony that either basic stategy can work …but just to wind it up more toward your main point, Leo … social or anti-social, branding is absolutely a very key ingredient in the mix. Agree most emphatically with that.
@Calvin: You say; *Sigh* If only I had a passion that has lots of money-making potential.
My suggestion is, perhaps you have to build passion. I can’t really think of a real passion that can’t be turned into money. Cast your net wider … perhaps your true passion hasn’t shown up yet? Best of luck with that in 2010, and to everyone else reading.
You do get paranoid playing the SEO game, and any SEO’er who isn’t aware that their business is completely reliant on Google and the other search engines is living in a fantasy world. That being said, I’ve gone over this issue a thousand times in my head while always making sure to keep up to date with all of the recent developments in search, and with Google.
While I think that factors like bounce-rate, etc. etc. will play more of a role, the bottom-line is that links are the currency of the web, and there still isn’t anything close that a search bot can look at to determine rankings effectively, and efficiently. I think Google will continue to get much better at deciphering the good links, from the lower quality ones, and they will also continue to get better at evaluating a site’s trust. Links are also perhaps the most difficult factor to game, can you imagine what the blackhatters will do if they find out that a user’s time spent on-site plays a significant role in getting rankings?
@ Roland
I dunno what the SEOers would do if links were suddenly devalued. I do think it will eventually happen though because as technology improves and search engines get smarter as to determine what a page really means (which is pretty much the purpose of links…to determine and/or authenticate relevancy), links won’t be the butter on people’s bread so to speak. Don’t know if it will happen this coming year, but it will happen eventually and we are overdue for a google earthquake.
Speaking of backlink schemes, I was recently talking to a buddy of mine who is the head of internet security for a fortune 500 company and who happens to also be a mathematician (he actually solves a lot of the firm’s fraud issues with math equations). Anyway, he was talking about how he solved a recent case using a formula called Rossmo’s theory. Without getting into the meat of what the formula computes, how he used it was to determine where they were going to strike next.
The premise behind it is that there really is no such thing as “random” and the more you try to obfuscate and cover your tracks, become “patternless” if you will, your obfuscation becomes a pattern. (sometimes when I talk to him, I just sit there in a daze….it reminds me that there are people WAYYYYY smarter than me)…Just like water coming out of a showerhead, while you can’t predict exactly where the droplets of water are going to land, you can guesstimate in which quadrant or area they will fall.
So, where am I going with this? Basically, the more we try to obfuscate our links, the bigger “pattern” we show when we build links which in turn helps the likes of Google (supposing that they would use this formula) recognize linking patterns as “fake” or “gamed”. If that is true, then it explains why things like “link wheels”, “link triangles” and other link schemes don’t have a long lifespan.
I think Google wants to rank the most relevant document for a particular search query, but in my opinion the way they rank pages only takes the relevancy of a page into account on a very minimal scale. Page relevancy is essentially what you can do “onpage”, and in my opinion will never have as big an impact as you have suggested it will in the future, no matter how smart Google becomes. If all of a sudden Google did make onpage seo the bee’s knees then it would be all about writing beautiful 1000+ world essays on long-trail keywords that covered the topic so comprehensively that you couldn’t help from being ranked.
While I agree that Google is definitely getting better at determining what should be on a page for a search query, the way they rank pages has very little to do with the quality or relevancy of the document. In my opinion links only play a small part in determining the relevancy of a page, and instead serve as small drops in the bucket for what really gets a page ranked, it’s authority in regard to particular search term. While I think you are correct in that Google will continue to be able to better decipher the quality of links and overall patterns, they still are going to need a backbone mechanism of determining authority.
I still don’t think they’re close to replacing their system of evaluating a website’s hyperlinks to determine authority, and while domain trust is becoming more and more of an important metric, I think links, in one form or another will be the primary metric that Google looks at when trying determine authority for years to come.
I also think about Google’s market share, and regardless of whether or not they figure out a “better” system that doesn’t focus on links, a major shakeup is always very risky, and at the speed the net moves would you really want to completely overhaul your core product when it is already heralded as the best search engine ever known to man if you’re Google?
I absolutely agree that Google will get better at weeding out the junk sites, and the “link schemes” that are far too common right now in their index. For some this means a drop in opportunity and income, for others it is going to only solidify a business model that is based off of organic traffic. I mean seo isn’t exactly brain surgery, if Google can eventually understand that ezine, hubs, web 2.0’s, junk network-blogs, etc. etc. convey no real indication of a site’s authority then so be it, ten or twenty grand of promotion is still going to go as far as it does today if you know what you’re doing. It should never really be about “gaming” Google if you’re into seo, it should be about delivering a nice website that will benefit the searcher and at the same time out-promoting your competitors so that they don’t know what hit them.
What I’m more worried about is the devaluation of organic search listings, and how they could become obsolete, or pushed to page two or beyond in the future. They already are becoming pushed off of page one with more ads, stupid pictures, videos, and other media, as well as local search, etc. etc. In my opinion that is what truly threatens a business that is reliant on seo traffic, and once the search engines get better at serving up the information without any sort of “click-through” then the wheels may really come off. Sorry if I went on a bit of rant here, keep up the quality posts.
@ Roland
Man, I love it when someone gets me to think….
Google didn’t really care about the last “shake-up” and what it did to businesses. But that said, there are always businesses that don’t lose. Big brands don’t lose. Big mega sites don’t lose. It is the small guys…the niche marketers that are usually the most affected by changes in the algorithms. And to be honest, the change was needed. At that time, people would basically get ranked by stuffing keywords, meta descriptions, ect. ect. And because of it, the searcher was better able to find maybe not the most relevant but more relavant information.
Now, I am not an SEO expert. I do enough to get the job done and that is about it. I probably would put myself in the “know more than most (thanks to the fact that I actually read the white papers and patents that google puts out) but less than some” category. I am by and large a marketer. SEO is simply a necessary evil…
I tend to ask questions like “what would I need to do to get this site or product visible quickly with the least amount of work and expense?” If it’s SEO, so be it. If I can get a good margin via PPC, then I will go that route. If I can figure out a strategy that is more creative, then I will do that. In other words, I try to look at all my options and not just at one particular strategy. It used to not be that way though. Get burned a couple times and you start to figure out that different campaigns tend to need a different look. Since I have been doing this shit for so long, I have been fortunate enough to have enough knowledge in enough different areas to pick and choose (and test).
Right now, the current system is not necessarily about links as much as it is about certain keywords in the anchor text of the link. As technology improves, I don’t think that it would be too far fetched for search engines to place more weight on relevancy from site to site (which it doesn’t do as much as you would think it does now). The big brother conspiracy theorists and black hat marketers hate the fact that google collects so much webmaster data, hates that they now have a browser AND is testing personalized searches. There is a reason for this. The more data Google collects on its own, the less it has to depend on what “others” (others meaning webmasters who fabricate their own links) are saying is relevant. Personally, I don’t care. I feel eventually the ones who will get hit will be the thin sites that don’t offer much in the way of value to the searchers searching. Good news for the searchers. Bad news for the good majority of marketers who peddle sites with little to no value.
Of course, this is all “theory” and “hypothetically speaking”…..something I enjoy talking about even if nothing comes out of it.
Universal search can become a problem for some authority sites but if you are doing what Howie does, targetting very specific products and lambasting his sites all the way across all media that google covers, then for the moment, you are in cash cow heaven. If you are a static site and don’t do much marketing in the way of video, product, news or “live” search, then you may experience a drop off in traffic because competition has now become much stiffer.
Of course, universal search isn’t prominent in markets where it wouldn’t make much sense to have it there. And for many who do long tail micro sites for adsense (as so many who read this rag), the chances are having to deal with it aren’t as high as some of the markets in which all of universal search is in the listings.
And as far as being reliant on SEO traffic only…..do you really want to be at the whim of google? It would be like having all of your income coming from adsense. Just not a very smart business move. You, in essence, are nothing more than a full time contractor for G.
Roland, I really appreciate you stopping by and adding your two cents. It is comments like this that really get those hamsters in my head churning. (I was trying to watch Christmas Story with my wife and all I could think about was your comment.)
@Roland:
if Google can eventually understand that ezine, hubs, web 2.0’s, junk network-blogs, etc. etc. convey no real indication of a site’s authority then so be it
I get the feeling that Bing already devalues content and links from EZA, etc. That’s assuming that I interpreted my results on Bing SERPs and Bing Webmaster Tools correctly. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I don’t exactly have enough web properties, time or experience to experiment.
It should never really be about “gaming” Google if you’re into seo, it should be about delivering a nice website that will benefit the searcher
Honestly, I feel that Google’s results a decade ago was much better (at least for non-money niches). For example, if I had a technical problem, I used to be able to type in the error message and come up with relevant and helpful results very quickly. Nowadays, what I get are page after page (in the SERPs) of forum posts from desperate people asking for help, but no solutions.
As regards quality of websites – I have some sites which repost content syndicated on article directories, and Google happily indexes them. OTOH, I have sites which have original content, but Google has de-indexed them.
@Dave Starr:
@Calvin: You say; *Sigh* If only I had a passion that has lots of money-making potential.
My suggestion is, perhaps you have to build passion. I can’t really think of a real passion that can’t be turned into money.
I do have a few hobbies and interests that can dominate my life if I don’t keep them under control. Unfortunately, they are not monetizable online. At least not in any way I can think of right now. All I can do now is continue building my niche sites. If I do enough of this, I might be able to find a money-making niche that I can become passionate about.
@Leo:
@ Calvin
Broken down like that, it makes me feel a little stupid, lol. But yeah, that is pretty much it.
Nearly a decade spent gathering and analyzing user requirements to turn them into computer programs can really twist a person’s mind. It doesn’t help that I have a natural predisposition to think and analyze stuff. Not exactly a good mindset for selling things, especially when a strong sense of ethics keeps getting in the way. Anyway, I’m glad I understood what you wrote about correctly. The copious examples certainly made it easier to understand the concepts you were explaining.
Fascinating – as Spock would say! Jesse – as someone who never tried to brand themselves and then ended up with one – I think the only reason I succeeded in doing what I wasn’t trying to do was that I was authentic. I was just being me -and people responded to that – I wasn’t “professional” – didn’t really know how I was going to monetize – but I did get an retain a readership – and its all because people connected to me and my honesty. Being completely and utterly anti-marketing – paid off – because it sounded authentic – it sounded authentic – because well yes I really am like that!
@J – I am heaps more social online than I am in real life – I like helping people online – its easy – they are usually grateful – and I don’t have to do all the stuff I really hate offline – caring about boring details of their lives (or worse their kid’s lives) – meeting 100 boring people to meet the one interesting one etc. I hardly bother meeting new people offline anymore but its continuously interesting doing it online
Still new here, Leo – and have to say, as “old” as this post is, how timely a read. Had to re-tweet. Thanks