Does Your Website Work? Does It Make You Money? There are NO Magic Bullets Anymore ...

What's New?

Beaver and Beaver arranged an ecommerce conference at the Sandton Southern Sun Hotel on August 31st. I was one of the speakers and maybe you would like to view a video of the presentation I did. It's simple to view just click on the image below or on this text link ... click here to view video. It's just over 1 hour long and will start to play as soon as you click the link.

Ring me on 011-454-0105 for a friendly SEO chat. If I'm away in the Kruger Park leave a message.

The END of the Good Old SEO Days ... How Much Longer to Go?

You can read my recent (quite long) article here on why I believe the demise of traditional formulaic approach to SEO is rapidly approaching ... and, I for one, am quite pleased this is the case.

"Oh, for the Good Old Days when ranking in Google was easy and when MFA arbitrage sites were GUARANTEED to make their website owners money within 1 hour of starting the process."

It's time to make your website work the right way and with so many competing websites out there you DO need help. Get that help here ... and if you really need convincing then get Mike Grehan's book.

Now most of you will not have a clue what I'm taking about. The reason is that unless you've been a successful player on the search engines for quite some time you won't even know when those days were never mind what worked in those Good Old Days. Do you know what terms like MFA or arbitrage mean? You see them every time you search Google but maybe don't recognize them.

It's getting to the stage, at long last, that the vast majority of SEO spammers and search engine spam techniques no longer work so well. The first major wind of change was the "Florida" Google update. A bit lower down I've created a short list of what has happened since "Florida" first blew in November 2004 to make life better for searchers on Google and more difficult for so called SEO'ers.

For newcomers to the SEO world "Florida" was a major update of the Google search engine algorithm, it was named by the SEO community after the real Florida Hurricane because of the damage it did to so many websites.

Websites by the tens of thousands that had enjoyed very high rankings on Google suddenly and without warning disappeared off Google page rankings ... overnight and permanently and just before the peak Christmas season as well.

This was the first big hit Google made in its ongoing battle with SEO spammers. These hits have been ongoing ever since with "BigDaddy" that started in March 2006 being the latest.

Read full article here.

On July 11th 2006 the "long awaited" attack on PPC MFA sites started.

Just a few of the techniques that no longer work on Google and BE WARNED these are still being touted as ways to make fortunes overnight are listed.

1. Meta Keyword tags have not been used for Google rankings at all for about 2 years (although most South African webmaster still push these as the way to rank well on Google.)

2. Link farms and web rings have been made taboo.

3. Guest book spam has been obliterated

4. Auto blogging abuse has been made redundant

5. Word stemming was introduced about a year ago.

6. Abuse of comment spam on blogs has been made a waste of time

7. Auto directory creation has been made a futile exercise

8. Google scrapers and scrapers of websites in general have been punished and those remaining will be

9. Benefits of reciprocal linking have been downgraded substantially to make it almost a waste of time trying to get reciprocal links

10. MFA sites have been demolished overnight. This is to the massive advantage of genuine Adsense publishers and Adwords advertisers and probably to the short term financial disadvantage of Google. These sites are also known as Arbitrage Sites.

11. Mini sites geared to exploit Google PageRank made ineffective and another waste of time

12. PPC affiliate abuse controlled better.

13. Broad based and widespread buying of links has been penalised.

14. Importance of the very important "Title Tag" has been downgraded with the advent of LSI (latent Semantic Indexing). This artificial intelligence approach to discovering top web pages is still in its infancy at Google so expect more big changes here.

15. All well known automated SEO tools geared to making webpage creation easy for webmasters have been identified by Google which means if you use them they can be potentially devastating for your business. My advice is don't even be tempted to use any such automated tool. Be careful with any tool. If it promises a quick solution and replacement for hard work then walk away. If you think it's too good to be true then it probably is.

There is no doubt whatsoever that what worked to get high free rankings on Google even 6 months ago (end 2005) is no longer enough. Take a look at many search results these days and you'll see that the SERP's does not even include the keyword you typed in.