White Hat is Pointless When..

A third party can influence your sites rank in a negative way.

After spending some time snooping around in a black hat forum, coupled with Google’s recent fuck-ups I’m beginning to wonder if continuing to build white hat content sites is an utterly pointless endeavour that can, and will, lead to disappointment and misery.

Asides from waiting out the sandbox release (which may never happen despite links, updates, quality factors etc..), there is the fact anyone with a little know-how of the dark side can literally fuck your website out of Google using simple techniques that apparently work like a charm.

Picture the scenario: You build a great content website, updated it daily with good content that costs you hundreds of dollars/month, garner plenty of healthy links and over the period of a year you managed to built a large resourceful site that Google accepted as a quality site, releasing you from the sandbox and you begin to enjoy a nice income from the site.

Now that you’re riding high in the search results for all of your targeted keywords, your competition takes note of your presence, some of which also dabble in black hat practices, or know of people who do, and are able to knock your website out of Google.. and there’s literally nothing you can do to stop them.

A few weeks or months after enjoying the lucrative earnings your sites traffic plummets and your earnings bomb to a few dollars/day, receiving only traffic from MSN and a handful from Yahoo.

It’s enough to make you think “fuck it, if you can’t beat them join them”, not to knock your competitors out of search results but simply so you have a back-up and another revenue stream that isn’t so reliant upon steady long-term rankings in Google which is any content sites bread and butter of traffic and earnings.

Remember: Google doesn’t give a fuck about you or your livelihood and third parties shall always be able to fuck with your website while Google state “there’s almost nothing anyone can do to affect your rankings”.

I’m feeling very pissed off with Google right now. If it isn’t for the de-indexing or the not re-indexing plenty of quality pages, fuckin’ up my page titles or handing the Chief Engineer a 5-week ‘vacation’ in a critical time.. and now I’m sat here wondering if the Google Toolbar that I have installed is capable of sending all of this right back to Google where they could easily spot who I am, what websites I own, which AdSense account to pull.. simply put, I don’t fucking trust Google anymore and I resent them.

Targeting Keywords could get you Penalized?

It would be all too easy for Google to determine which sites are targeting keywords and which are putting up content in a more natural way.

As SEO’s we’re told to build links naturally, while we still use every trick in the book on our sites to achieve higher rankings, which includes using keywords that are highly searched for (to some degree or another) in the titles etc, causing an un-natural looking site in regards to content.

Google know how often certain keywords are searched for and there popularity and they can surely detect websites that have a highly disproportionate amount of content or links that are targeting keywords that are searched for often, which may well trigger a filter - perhaps a longer stay in the sandbox or just added suspicion placed on the website.

Perhaps it’s time to forget keywords and ignore Wordtracker and Overture ever came on the scene as it makes our sites look a hell of a lot un-natural. Perhaps we wouldn’t even notice a sandbox existed if we didn’t litter our sites with popular keywords with obvious efforts to target them.

Remember: All of these spammers and folk who scrape content are all populating their pages with keyword after keyword after keyword, and that’s a pattern extremely close to every site we build when we’re targeting them ourselves.

Whisperings Solo Piano Radio (free Beta)

Here’s a little tip for piano or online radio lovers - if you need some cool music to relax to while you’re working check out Whisperinigs Solo Piano Radio. This is actually free (it’s currently in beta) until they finish testing the servers and set-up a subscription service, so take advantage and listen for free while you can, there’s some great piano music on there.

My blog can’t all be about Internet marketing and website bollocks now, can it!

If anyone knows of a similar solo Saxophone station, let me know..

Pete

Already Have an Established website? Duplicate it!

For those with established and popular websites hosted in the US and scoring medium to good rankings, you may wish to consider duplicating your efforts and using a UK host.

When I say duplicate, I don’t mean copy the entire site and contents causing alsorts of duplicate content penalties and potentially wrecking your current or new site.. I aren’t crazy! I simply mean take your keyword list, get a UK TLD domain, go with a hosting company with servers located in the UK and then employ your favourite content writer to re-write brand new articles for each of your keywords, create a new design, stock the site up and then upload it and begin the link building.

Almost instant results can be had from MSN.co.uk, with Google.co.uk and Yahoo.co.uk lacking behind, but once you’re past their various age filters you will be soaring in the UK rankings.

Reasons to duplicate your efforts in the UK or another fair-sized country:

- Weaker competition in country-specific searches such as Google.co.uk, Yahoo.co.uk and MSN.co.uk (it’s so easy to rank in the UK for great competative terms in MSN especially provided you’re hosted in the UK)

- Increased and more stable traffic and earnings due to the above

If there’s one thing that’s lacking in this game it’s stability. I believe this tactic provides us with that. Sure it’s lesser earnings then our global counter-parts but the stability is there, and that makes for a good reason to relax.

Welcome to my blog!

After Pilkster of DigitalPoint kindly donated some hosting for my own blog and assured me some folk may be interested in what I have to say, here it is.

I’ll try to keep it as useful and interesting as possible - watch this space for the first ‘real’ entry!