The SEO Mistake That Wiped Out 80% of My Traffic | Hacker News Reader

The SEO Mistake That Wiped Out 80% of My Traffic

ecommercefuel.com

93 pointsamerf151 comments

In SEO as in life, if your success depends on gaming the system, you will only be successful until the system changes.

and unlike the government, Google can't be lobbied to have their rules bent in your favor.

I'm not so sure, in the EU they have already had a little bit of pressure[1] but we have seen them change, 3 years ago, if you put in TSLA.US a finance.google.com result would have been the top link.

This isn't the case today for google.co.uk

[1] http://searchengineland.com/eu-antitrust-chief-google-divert...

Fact is, SEO is a changing game. It's part of the package to change with the times. You change or you perish.

But it works the other way around too. If the system is gameable, the system will only be successful until the gamers change.

That's Google's problem in the eternal arms race of search. Google identifies a property that good content has (inbound links, keywords in the url, age of domain), which improves the rankings for a while until the spammers figure it out and morph their content to match. And then we're left in the wasteland that everybody has to do SEO just to keep up with the junk peddlers.

I have an irrational hatred towards SEO. People should stop investing money and time in trying to influence an algorithm that constantly changes and actually invest that time and money in creating better content or a better service that people actually want.

It will also make for happier web developers because we won't get stupid clients come in and ask for us to do some crazy stuff they read in a pdf somewhere online on a guru's website ... btw.. stay away from whoever calls himself a guru (SEO guru, code guru .. what-not-guru)

And it will also cut down on the amount of link and content spam generated (under the hood of SEO) making things better for everyone. But this is what happens with open systems. Some people start gaming the system, others suffer as a result of it and then everyone starts doing it.

EDIT: After reading other posts in this thread, I can certainly say that I have always shared your anger towards SEO. Web is an open resource for everyone to communicate and share knowledge on. I hate when some people just come in and start abusing it for their own gain at the cost of others. Down here someone is discussing about linkwheels and link pyramids. While spamming away this shit, they don't realize that they are making this open space dirty. While they make profits from their clients and their clients make some short term profit, someone else has to do the cleanup part and waste time behind this. Its like running around in a library and filling in the shelves with junk content and advertisement. It overshadows and make it difficult to find the real content.

Yes but if you choose to stay out of it (i.e. invest in content and not bother with SEO techniques which cannot really be approved or disproved, unless you work for a search engine) you don't suffer when the algorithms change, because you don't care about it. Your clients/visitors will still come to you because they like your content/service. They will probably share you with their friends. People tend to help each other and if I find a nice website that does something I need, I will share it with my friends if i think they will benefit from it.

As for spam, I have become immune to it. I just ignore it and try to not affiliate myself with websites that generate it (i.e. I don't even bother visiting the websites, let alone purchase their service or what not). The Internet is like a big city... if you contain yourself to a certain area (where all your needs are met), you can live your whole life without going in the slums or the rough neighbourhoods.

That is true. Good content triumphs in the long run. But still, other people with crappy content and links can rank above you and take away the traffic that you deserved.

>I have an irrational hatred towards SEO. People should stop investing money and time in trying to influence an algorithm that constantly changes and actually invest that time and money in creating better content or a better service that people actually want.

The problem with this approach is that it's entirely possible to invest a lot of time creating wonderful content people want to consume and then have it fester in obscurity because no-one gets the chance to see it.

I think this is not the case anymore. With facebook, twitter and all the other social networks people interact more easily and exchange resources and information. It's a lot easier to publish something nowadays.

Don't confuse marketing with SEO. Marketing, even if sometimes looks dodgy and it's filled with those awful magic words and phrases, even if most marketeers tend to be full of sh*t and not really know anything about what they are doing; marketing is still very important. That is the key of how to get out of obscurity, not SEO.

I think this is the biggest problem in web development nowadays, clients are really undereducated and believe SEO is a synonym for marketing. And this is encouraged by marketing companies who, to earn more business, fill the clients' heads with crap about SEO and how that is the most important thing online.

And they do this because with SEO you can't go wrong: - if the website loses traffic: "well that is Google changing their algorithm, it's an external factor, not our fault" - if the website earns traffic, even if it's because the content is good, the SEO company will try to absorb all the praise.

That's why I hate SEO.

I remember seeing a sales page for a backlink generating script a while back, before the penguin update. They had a section with the heading "Can this hurt my traffic in any way?" saying something the lines of "Of course not! If it could, your competitors could do this to you to destroy your ranking, and google wouldn't let that happen."

Is this obviously not the case anymore? You could easily cause a lot of grief to smaller startup websites by setting up a server to constantly generate spammy links at them. And maybe I should delete this comment before it inspires someone to be a jackass.

This is called Negative SEO. Matt Cutts discusses the topic here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H...

Ah gotcha, I guess that's pretty much all google can do. They also unfortunately validate it as a tactic against people/small companies that wouldn't otherwise realize: 1. They have a bunch of spammy links pointing to them, 2. That the links are negatively affecting them, and 3. They can do something about it.

Maybe it would be nice of them to email webmasters to notify them that they're being punished by spammy links, but I guess this would defeat the point of punishing it in the first place (as opposed to just not counting them towards the page rank).

They actually do send an email alert. I didn't find an authoritative blog post on the subject, but here's a post from a reputable SEO site discussing these email alerts:

http://searchengineland.com/google-warning-more-about-bad-li...

So essentially he is saying, "do not worry, this is not a problem for you."

Just for fun decided to look into inbound links in webmaster tools for my site. Out of 3.3k links almost 3k links with all kind of non-relevant keywords from obviously spammy sites. Not sure why it is done, probably something about google's bot to see legitimate links next to spammed ones..

It is nice they have this new tool to devow links, but it is not linked anywhere from webmaster tools and you can find it only after you watched this youtube post (thank you BTW, just sent request to devow all these spammy links)

I always thought Google was smart about this and witch-hunts will not have an effect. But seems like that’s not the case. In any case relying on a sing provider for the majority of the traffic with a plan B to survive a disaster is a great learning. One that we always forget when we are sailing the success boat.

This is a real issue and it's being taken much too lightly; I think Google should ignore incoming from sites with an over the top [outgoing links to distinct domains]/[original content] ratio. So site directories, those 'how much is my site worth' sites, made for adsense blogs etc. It's very easy to get millions of worthless / spammy links for a site and it does ruin the Google standing. You also cannot mail all of them; a) it would be a fulltime job b) they don't care; they won't remove the links anyway, because that would be a fulltime job for them.

that's why they developed this tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?p...

Yes, but, in my experience, that doesn't work very well; it's still taking them into account. But that could be only my experience, maybe it works for others. It actually says that 'it is not enough' to do that, so what does that mean? A lot of spam-site webmasters pipe their mail to /dev/null, so you cannot remove them.

hi, during summer i'm going to give a talk at a digital media conference here in austria http://summit.werbeplanung.at/2013/franz-enzenhofer/, the tagline "fire your linkbuilding agency, especially if you are in a competitive vertical" i'm not going into full detail here as it's mostly still in my head, but the argument will go something like this (oh, and as an additional restriction, i won't use any hollow terms like algo-update, pinguin, panda, caffeine, magic unicorn, mayday, ... as these terms kill all and any serious discussion)

    1. for SEO success you need links
    2. but not a fixed amount, but growth over time
    3. paying a linkbuilding agency enables link growth over time
    4. as long as you pay
    5. if you stop paying, link growth will stop
    5a. probably your links will decline
    6. in the meantime you haven't developed any assets 
      (know-how, connections, brand-recognition, internal 
      ressources (people)) that enables natural or do-it-
      yourself link growth
    7. you depleted your ressources (money) for external quick-fixes
    8. you are dependent on your external agency
    9. this is not a healthy business relationship, but something else
    10. called addiction 

    solution: 
    a. if you are a customer / addict: go cold turkey,
       start from scratch (link-building wise) 
    b. if you are a link-building agency: change-or-die

feedback welcome

As I see it solution for the customer is not clear. How do I do link-building myself if have no expertise in the field?

So tl:dr; don't be a scumbag with SEO and build quality websites with relevant content.

Pop-up ad offering a download of an ebook by the author within a minute of viewing the site.

I'm not so sure this guy has learned 'how not to be spammy'.

Hey! OP of the article here. And good call - you may be right.

HOWEVER, if you download the eBook and don't think it's one of the best free resources you've ever received, let me know and I'll send you $10 via PayPal for the hassle. ;-)

But, again, point taken. I could probably make more tactful use of the popup.

I just wanted to chime in and say that I also found the popup very disruptive and annoying. I didn't download the ebook. I bet putting it at the end of the blog post will get you better results (you should A/B test it and do another blog post).

After all, the people that read all the way through the entire blog post are your target audience. These are exactly the type of engaged readers you want to capture.

Good, valid advice. Thank you. For now, at least, the pop-up has been disabled.

It looks like you had been downvoted, so I upvoted your comments for being civil in the face of criticism and open to their suggestions.

Yeah, I did too. Thanks for responding to criticism in a prompt, civil, and understanding manner. :)

I work with a very good online marketer who runs an agency between New Zealand and the UK at my co-working space. With their UK clients they saw a lot of flagging over a year ago so adjusted their practices and moved on, this hasn't happened much in NZ yet. He predicts a massive amount of bloodletting here in NZ as google are only just starting to pay attention and flag sites for doing dodgy link building and, apparently, that's what most local SEO's here do.

Are you saying that Google applies these algorithms differently in different geographical locations?

Google has confirmed on multiple occasions that this is the case. Different languages and geo-graphic regions require tweaks I am sure. US English != UK English.

See - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-qual...

For an example of Google announcing that the Panda update was now launching globally (as opposed to the US the prior month)

also UK sometimes is a test market, why? (nearly) the same language as in the US, but not as a dominant market as the US. (the same reason why we german natives test new websites with switzerland)

A POPUP pane with a book ad just have interrupted my reading. My reaction? Immediately closed the tab, will never come back.

Am a SEO guy here- been doing this thing since 2-3 years ago. To myself from what can be seen from the post itself it appears that the SEO company that the OP's been using is actually doing a pretty good job- Drop on 80% of traffic with anchor texts that don't vary that much. What the SEO company have probably done is probably to just go ahead and blast links directly at the site with automated tools[SeNuke and the likes] It could have been easily averted had there been layering and tier-ing of links done and varying anchor texts and keyword variations. Your aim of getting links that also drive traffic is actually a very good idea, since it'd definitely boost the credibility of the site itself.

However I see people on here clobbering the idea of having link farms. Of course nowadays Google have been on a roll de-indexing major link networks (ALN, BMR and the likes). Public link networks can be used, but they cannot be seen as a long-term solution. A more sustainable option would be to build your own blog farms and link those to your main sites as funnel. Those could also serve as a very good platform of tier 1 links to do automated blasting to.

Just sharing my link strategy. And OP good job at doing a relaunch. Did you manage to use the Disavow link to take away the similar links with similar link anchors?

Nice to see a SEO article around here from time to time.

Hey smalboy! OP here.

To your question: Haven't started using the disavow tool quite yet, no. When we really went through and did our initial clean-up, it was before the tool was released. I need to go back through the audit we did and tag / disavow links that are potentially hurting us.

But it's still difficult: which links are hurting, and which are providing great link juice? You can guess from the anchors given that's the majority of the problem / penalty, but sometimes it might be a better approach to build new links with varied anchor to a page and - once you start ranking again - have it be even stronger as you haven't hashed all your backlinks.

And I agree. I'd love to see more SEO posts here on HN. :-)

Hello OP! :>

I'd suggest since you have already had a nice amount of links built to the site and with only 1 type of anchor text then just build more links at a steady pace to the site itself with varying anchor texts and link types (hxxp://www.website.com, www.website.com, website.com) and ther variations. Vary dofollow and nofollow too. While doing all of this don't forget to build backlinks similar to he ones that you have built previously. Stopping to build links with a certain combination of anchor text will seem to Google as being very very unnatural.

Also, begin building your own blog network- and then build links to the blogs in the blog network. I like to call those sites "Buffer sites" since they will be taking the load of my linkbuilding efforts. Load these sites up with content, full on blogs with regular posts, privacy policy and the works. Have content that is valuable to visitors and hen funnel the visitors on to your main site. You would then be able to have a bunch of blogs that bring in traffic to the main site itself since the blogs would've been jam-packed with content and would funnel the users into your ecommerce site. This would have a couple of benefits: When you rank the blogs you get them up for your keywords, and since the blogs link to your ecommerce store the store climbs up there too. So basically using this by doing 1 set of linkbuilding you can dominate the whole of page 1 for your keywords.

Would be awesome if we could connect. You seem to be a very interesting person to talk to :>

Please don't call yourself an "SEO guy" and then tell the OP to build what is effectively a very poor, easily identifiable, link wheel.

If you think that's a 'sustainable' tactic then I suspect you won't still be in the SEO industry in a further 2-3 years time. All you'll be doing is waiting for the next Google algo update to kill your clients rankings.

Linkwheel? Did I tell him to interlink any of his web properties? It's a pyramid structure that have always worked for me, and of course I do vary a lot more factors that I have listed here. I am, however, really curious on your definition of a linkwheel.

It's pretty telling that of everything I said, you get hung up on the definition of linkwheel.

It's still a crap tactic regardless of whether it's a pyramid or a wheel. Here's an idea - why don't you work on providing actual value to your clients instead?

Aha. White-hat all holy guy detected.

I care about value as much as you do. Value is important as far as things goes, but if one does go all holy about providing value and "somehow" the visitors will come, forget about it mate. They won't unless you pay through your teeth for PPC/PPV traffic or you do SEO. White hat SEO? People say that, but do they really know what "white hat" means? White hat means you do nothing more than spreading your links on social networks. If you do ANY form of linkbuilding it's grey/black. No two ways about that mate.

Where did the colour hat conversation come from? I didn't mention anything about white/grey/black or whatever. It has nothing to do with it. There are lots of innovative black hat (according to Google) tactics that are killing it right now, but they're a million miles away from anything you're talking about.

The fact remains, you're advising somebody to use poor tactics that will only lead to wasted time and eventual loss of rankings.

And as for this: "White hat means you do nothing more than spreading your links on social networks". You serious or just trolling? I really can't tell.

Either way, this conversation is getting boring. You continue doing your 2008-esque blog pyramids and let me know how that goes for you.

As a matter of fact it works really well. 2008-esque? I really don;t care mate. They word pretty damn well for me with link diversity. It's not the how you build links, but what kind of links you build, and the anchor text and the sort of links. It's all just making it look natural. You're probably just trolling here so I don't really care. Good riddance.

I don't know much about SEO; is "over-optimized" just a euphemism for "spammy"?

I would take it to mean that they basically went too far past the gray area of "legitimate" SEO in any or all areas. Spammy links, low quality links on "link farm" sites, keyword abuse, etc.

OP here. And not necessarily. You can be "over-optimized" without being spammy.

Over-optimized refers to having your SEO optimized to rank for a very specific, targeted term. Take "trolling motors" as that's the site of mine that was penalized.

Even if I built all my links via white hat, legi methods - but the anchor text of all the links to my home page said "trolling motors" - I'd likely be penalized. That's because in a naturally linking backlink profile, people would link with a wide variety of different words, not just "trolling motors". Because the concentration is so focused, it's almost a guarantee that someone was trying to game the system. Google algorithm updates like Penguin have really started cracking down where's it's obvious the owner is trying to rank for a word by optimizing the links, title, headings, copy in a way that appears dramatically non-natural.

Often, however, spammy link campaigns are also over optimized as well.

Hope this helps!

Essentially the moral of the story is to pay attention to SEO and do it the right way. Cheating the system may work now, but the next iteration of Penguin may end up getting you.

1. And what would the right way be? Is there a right way to influence a search engine's results? I find it to be wrong/deceiving from the very beginning. The only acceptable things in my opinion are:

* using clean urls, for ease of typing/reading/sharing

* using proper semantic html tags to structure content. I don't really know if search engines look for them but having content neatly structured will help people get the most of a website (especially people with disabilities; screen readers and other accessibility enhancing software)

2. Penguin update... what about other search engines? Shouldn't a SEO "guru" tackle other search engines as well? What if google "dies" tomorrow? I know it's very unlikely, but as programmers we strive to cover all possible issues/scenarios/errors.. why don't SEO "gurus" do the same?

I'm sorry if I come across as offensive but I really don't understand this hype regarding SEO, and more importantly why clients chuck their money towards something that in my opinion is superfluous.

Also, how would you quantify the success of a SEO campaign, how do you differentiate from traffic/sales/success generated by the content of your website and the one generated by a SEO campaign? (I am not being a smart-ass here, I am genuinely curious as I have no idea how you would do that!)

I worked for one of the largest SEO firms in the country; we built almost all of our links using BuildMyRank (a super-spammy service that thought it was invincible). When BMR went down, I looked at the books I was working with and realized I was personally responsible for the plummeting ranks of companies that had paid about $1 million over the past year for SEO work. All of that was pretty much worthless now.

Account managers promised that they would get the ranks back, and then we went to work building more links. Using Linkvana, which is basically the exact same thing. I didn't last long at that company.

Be very, very careful outsourcing SEO.

Lol BuildMyRank and LinkVana. Good old days huh when you could just buy links from public networks. Nowadays people are getting hung up on SAPE and the likes. The best way that's the safest way IMO is to build your very own link network for provate use only. These would most definitely serve as a solid tier 1 of links and then do the blasting and whatnots to those. Makes the entire structure more stable

This is a prime example of a concept called "marketing debt." Your link building efforts didn't match the risk profile for your business and you got burned. For a better explanation, http://joshuaziering.com/why-marketing-debt-is-expensive/

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