@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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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?

How to Make Money Online for Beginners
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#12

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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.

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.

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.

In the beginning that is the case….eventually you are the one getting chased though, lol.

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