SEO Tricks: When Best Practices Lead to Miserable Failures

[SEO Manager]

When Best Practices Lead to Miserable Failures
 

<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>How often do you ever hear the phrase worst practices? Probably never. </p>
<p>Everything is a best practice approach, right up until things change.</p>
<p>Consider AdSense websites.</p>
<h3>Hey Look, a Case Study!</h3>
<p>When you look at some of the biggest losers in the Google content farm update, many of them happened to be premium AdSense publishers which were even used by Google as case studies! For instance, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Everyone thinks that their content is the cream of the crop &amp; that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login:</p>

<p>We are confident that over time the proven quality of our writers' content will be attractive to users. We have faith in Google's ability to tune results post major updates and are optimistic that the cream will rise back to the top in the coming weeks, which has been our experience with past updates - Paul Edmondson</p>

<p>The problem is that for many businesses there will be no bounce back. Some are simply over. The web has evolved &amp; the algorithm has moved beyond them.</p>
<h3>Where is the Much Needed Disclaimer?</h3>
<p>What makes this worse is that when Google gives a site their premium AdSense feed &amp; sets something up as a case study others will see that as an explicit endorsement. </p>
<p>THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD DO IT.</p>
<p>Even after Google torches the companies that follow Google suggested best practices those case studies live on, offering what now amounts to maps to Google hell. </p>
<h3>Adding Insult to Injury</h3>
<p>What makes such filters/penalties even more infuriating is that in some cases when your site is slapped with a negative karma penalty, others who steal your content &amp; wrap it in AdSense will outrank you, since their site does not yet have a negative karma penalty against it. </p>
<p>Individually the splog sites may not live long, but collectively they can keep outranking you to ensure you are invisible for your own words, even if you poured years of your life into creating something beautiful &amp; important.</p>
<p>As Cult of Mac You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login:</p>

<p>As we noted yesterday, Cult of Mac was collateral damage in Google’s war on crappy content farms. For some inexplicable reason, we got downgraded when Google tweaked its algorithms last Thursday.</p>
<p>But today we’re back in. We’re on Google News (a very important source of daily traffic) as well as Google’s general search results. However, we still get outranked by some of the scraper sites that steal our content, so not everything’s perfect.</p>

<p>That part in bold is the most outrageous part of this new "algorithmic" approach. When Google whacks your site then someone who steals your content will outrank you. And You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login.</p>
<p>That whooshing sound you just heard was MFA sploggers making a mad dash to steal content from the list of currently penalized sites.</p>
<p>Cult of Mac is lucky they had enough pull with the press to get reconsidered. Most webmasters who got hit did not &amp; anyone who has contracts based on set traffic levels or tight margins which just turned negative are in a pretty crappy situation. Yet another example of the importance of not fueling growth with debt &amp; the importance of profit margins and a cash-on-hand safety net.</p>
<h3>Who Are the Opportunistic Maximizers?</h3>
<p>The problem with such an approach of maximizing everything you do to suck peak revenue out of the pageview is that things can change on a whim. I have seen some of Google's 1 on 1 AdSense optimization advice they sent to a friend of mine. I told my friend that the optimization advise was at best short-term opportunism that would end up crushing them in the long run if they actually implemented it. </p>
<p>Google doesn't care if following their advice torches your site if it makes them a bit more money, because ultimately there is another person standing in line waiting to follow.</p>
<p></p>
<p>My friend is lucky that they realized my advice was more trustworthy than the advice they were getting direct from Google. If they listened to Google back then their business might be destroyed today.</p>
<p>Google likes to position SEOs as exploiters out for the quick buck, but what honest analysis shows is that it is Google which is pushing the boundaries in terms of:</p>
<ul><li>You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login</li>
<li>You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login</li>
<li>You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login</li>
<li>pushing deceptive ads</li>
</ul><p>You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login. That is something you won't find on our website (and one of the reasons we will never put AdSense ads on this site)!</p>
<h3>AdSense Heatmaps? Look Out Below!</h3>
<p>One of the worst hit sites in the AdSense farm update was WiseGeek. Sure WiseGeek must have had something like a 20% ad clickthrough rate. But with traffic falling 75%, maybe they would have been better off building a cleaner experience with a 5% CTR.</p>
<p></p>
<p>That said, they were simply following You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login:</p>
<p></p>
<h3>Collateral Damage</h3>
<p>What was the most profitable best practices based approach suddenly falls short. And the results are not always predictable. When Google decided to attack content farms who honestly knew that: </p>
<ol><li>somehow You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login would survive</li>
<li>yet somehow Google's "algorithmic" approach would punt 10,000's of smaller websites that have far higher content quality</li>
</ol><p>In advance of the solution I was fairly certain eHow would survive, but what I underestimated was the Google engineers. Or rather the ignorance of same. I simply couldn't imagine such a content farm algorithm going live that missed eHow and decimated the lives of so many independent webmasters.</p>
<p>I guess we can simply view this as an extension of Google's you can have any web you want so long as it is corporate TM policy. I think Brett Tabke said it best in a recent AdSense thread:</p>

<p>When the rules and the enforcements are made up by monopolies in a make believe world - there is no cheating. </p>
<p>The only "cheatings" is when it gets outside the lines of the law. - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login</p>

<p>After the farmer update layoffs are already happening. Not only for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login, but even in organizations where the content is pure as the driven snow. </p>
<p>AskTheBuilder is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login. In spite of being a niche player well regarded in his community, Sistrix data shows the site off 87% after the most recent Google update!</p>
<h3>Who Caused the Content Farm Problem?</h3>

<p>Everyone likes to vilify the content farms and scrapers (and they deserve it) but the real villain behind all of this is CPC/CPM based advertising.</p>
<p>Can you imagine a world where your attention was sold off based on how long you stayed on a page rather then how often you switched pages? If google wants to fix their search results, they should focus on fixing adsense. The technology to more accurately measure a viewer's exposure to an ad are there, it just needs a trustworthy player to bring it to market. Someone trusted by both users and advertisers.</p>
<p>Google made click/impression-based advertising appealing to both groups and it made them what they are now. It's time to get away from it. - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login</p>

<h3>Smokescreen &amp; Misdirection</h3>
<p>I have long highlighted that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login &amp; that I felt the approach was nothing more than a scammy cover though which they can selectively exercise editorial discretion while claiming that "the algorithm did it."</p>
<p>Consider the following scenario:</p>
<ul><li>roll in an algorithm that aggressively penalizes tons of borderline edge cases</li>
<li>see who complains to the media &amp; has connections with the media</li>
<li>fix the rankings of those who you like &amp; those with sway, while ignoring the rest</li>
</ul><h3>Can You Trust Google?</h3>
<p>All of this leads to the obvious question: can you trust Google?</p>
<p>The short answer is yes.</p>
<p>The long answer is you can *always* expect Google to do what is in the best interest of Google. As they plow into field after field (payments, local, mobile, ecommerce, mortgage, credit cards, travel, weddings, fashion, etc.) &amp; use their search dominance to manipulate other markets one would have to be blind to view Google as anything other than a competitor.</p>
<p>Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But some day they will come. And it is never fun when it happens to you. </p>
<p>Until that day may come, if you always follow their best practices, just remember ... </p>
<p></p>
<p>Don't say you were not warned!</p>
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