How Google Cost Me $4 Million
inc.com
inc.com
In one paragraph he says they didn't do anything and the algorithms must have changed.
And then he called his SEOs.
There are plenty of ethical, reputable freelancers and companies who advice businesses on SEO related issues like getting title tags right, producing compelling content, good file name structure, and beneficial white-hat stuff like that.
I generally turn down SEO projects when there's another firm involved.
I consider SEO as part of the design of projects I consider, I don't consider it a service or something I might hire someone to do, but then my perception is that outsourced SEO means spamming links around. I admit I may be ignorant and maybe you can enlighten us.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/
Patrick is a member of the excellent seobook.com community, which is also a great source.
I would have thought one would need to do well over low 6 figures to justify such an expense.
Edit: I see Patrick is a moderator, so I assume it is a "barter" deal.
BCC does substantially in excess of $3.6k a year due to advice I got from Aaron. YMMV.
http://www.slideshare.net/luigimontanez/searchfriendly-web-d...
2. Maybe it's lame.
3. Rarely successful? Any data there? It has certainly worked for the people I've done it for.
4. PageRank is not the goal. Qualified, revenue-producing traffic is the goal.
Lame or not the proof is in the search engine result position.
Your presentation has lots of solid on-site SEO stuff, which is great. But if you're going to do an active SEO campaign--i.e. you're trying to get the maximum amount of high-converting traffic--it's not enough to have a site that's fully indexable. That's one coefficient, so you ought to maximize it, but it's not the only one.
There are three groups of people who should have an interest in a given site:
A) The site owner, who wants it to get relevant traffic and generate business.
B) People who write online, and need new content to write about--especially if it's useful to their target audience.
C) Potential customers of A), many of whom are part of the target audience of B).
Now, it is in nobody's interest for A) to refuse to speak to B) on the grounds that C) will somehow find A) naturally.
I believe this guy was punished because his "experts" used paid links. Can you find a reference for the assertion that he was punished for hiring someone to help him rank well, or that Google believes in punishing such activity? Bear in mind that the head of Google's webspam team routinely speaks at SEO conferences, where presumably all of the attendees are in the results-gaming business. If your worldview is correct, that's really weird; like the CEO of Brink's making a habit of speaking at safecrackers' conventions.
If you want to put a lilly-white hat on, the question you can ask is, "Given how valuable my content is, what lists, indexes, blogs, etc., would be interested in telling their readers about us?" Better yet, concoct a system where people are rewarded for linking to you in some (ideally pretty natural feeling) way. Yelp badges, the UrbanSpoon spoonback program, 37Signals' penchant for picking fights with the establishment, etc-- all great examples.
You can wait for linkers to stumble onto you-- but you'll never get to page 1 of any desirable phrase that way unless you are truly an order of magnitude better than your competition in terms of linkworthiness... Because you can be darn sure that they know the value of seeking links rather than waiting for them.
I think that's generally a bit of a myth - you/your service have to have not just good content but interesting too - a lot of stuff is just never going to fit that last requirement. Just because I'll never give a shout out to whoever makes my socks (I don't even know) doesn't mean they have no claim on the keyword.
Some people consider driving traffic to your site to be a part of SEO, you don't.
The confusion therefore is caused by the use of different terminology.
http://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/Gift-Baskets-Cleveland-Oh....
I also find it odd that every page features 20 logos from media outlets. That doesn't get them anything and I seriously doubt mentioning the Colbert Report helps sell gift baskets.
Link trading is still advertised, which seems risky considering that's very close to what got them in trouble in the first place.
How we admitted to violating Google's trust and threw away $4 million in business.
Would they have had the opportunity to lose $4M if they hadn't gamed Google?
Classic SEO world.Google rocks... you all know it.
John, just to debunk your question, I had no idea that this article was coming out. To the best of my knowledge, no one at Inc. asked Google for a comment for the story either; certainly I didn't hear about it if they did ask for a comment, and normally I would.
Also, I wanted to ask, what is the difference between advertising on a website by the way of them putting my link on their site, somewhat like the google link ads I suppose, but on a more permanent basis, that is, at what point does direct link advertising for exposure to the traffic of that certain website become link buying?
Should google not try and rely on other variables which are more reliable determinants of quality than links?
Oh wait, I know this one: with the second one Google makes billions.
To your last question, Google absolutely does have hundreds of signals that we use in our ranking; we don't rely only on links. It's a hard problem to assess quality accurately, but we try to find different ways to do it.
One of his big "lessons" is doing social-media. Can't imagine how much money he spends on FanPage and Twitter.
Only can wonder if that expense pulls him any clients (especially compared to Google's search).
In this guys case, it may not even have been an update that did it, but the results of their competition sending a report to Google's web spam team - I've seen this happen to people I've built sites for in the past. It's a morally questionable tactic, but I've seen sites benefit by focusing on bringing their opponents down rather than boosting their own ranking.
SEO isn't bad, Google themself has an SEO guide they released for webmasters. Building links is not a bad thing, Google created the entire link building game by relying on them for determining ranking.
Some of you need to step down from your damn pedestal and realize that marketing makes money. No one is going to link to your site if they don't know it exists. Link building and SEO is not illegal, and is a very valid way to make money.
I would imagine the vast majority of you have nowhere near enough experience to even comment on the use of SEO as opposed to when it comes to something like another Haskell VS. OCaml post.
EDIT: for misuse of a word
The majority of people here think the only morally acceptable form of seo is using h1 tags and making sure to have alt tags on their images. There's a whole different side of seo that must be used in order to even tread water in most markets.