Totally 100% Useless versus Absolutely 100% guaranteed results.

I have noticed lately that many posters seem to be going from on extreme to the other over what works and what does not work for google anymore. There seems to be less and less middle ground with posters defending their positions with an almost religious fervor.

Some cases in point:

Social book marking – The new totally free and easy way to shoot up rankings 100% guaranteed.

Authority site links (including edus etc) – 100% answer to all your SE problems. Get a few universities to link to you and straight to the top for any key term.

Article sites – Dead as a Dodo bird. 100% useless do nothing for you.

PR – Serves absolutely no purpose 100% useless.

Press release – Totally useless 100% waste of time…

Directory links – Wastes both time and money so worse than 100% useless.

Meta tags – Total waste of time 100% useless.

Link exchanges - 100% useless. Some even seem to argue that worse than 100% that it can generate penalties. Ie worse than useless.

Blogs – Seem to a bit of both here. 100% great link bait generates vast quantities of free links. Or 100% useless the modern form of link pages, crap useless content that no one reads.

etc etc etc

My advice is to realise that most things are not that black and white. It is getting more difficult to gain advantages in SERPs. Things that once worked very well do not work as well anymore. This does not make them useless... Just less useful than they used to be. People please try not to be so extreme. It is misleading to inexperienced people reading the forum. Please try to put some balance into putting forward your views.

I totally aggree gazzahk people say all these things then the less experienced people such as myself remove links etc and see thier results drop. In your opinion out of the list you have written which still work? I ask as I have been reading this forum for over two years and have come to trust what you say.
Regards

I would say that anything which does not cause a penalty is not worthless.. every small detail counts and at the end of the day SERP's will be determined by a numerical score against a search term, so throwing away any amount of scoring is a bad thing.

However as with everything you have to balance up your time and other resources available when deciding where to concentrate your efforts.

If you are developing a site for the long haul (which is my tactic, I develop sites that I look to see a ranking return on over 2 to 3 years) then you will use many more techniques to slowly build your position. The benefit here is that you spread your ranking over many factors and are much less vulnerable to swings in the Google algorithm, the downside is that it takes a long time to achieve.

If you are developing a site and need it ranking as highly as possible as quickly as possible you will want to be finding what is "hot" in the Google algorithm at the moment, the benefit being you can rank quickly, the downside being that you are much more vulnerable to algorithm swings.

So really its horses for courses, I am interested in even the smallest ranking factors (i'm a long game player) others only look for the current big ranking factors (the short game players).

Great advice from a Great Person
Everyone posting here from his or her own experience and point of view. Someone may not be agreeing with other one. Rather than be so extreme, it’s better to say that what he or she feeling about that.
I think this will make this forum much more interactive.

I have been reading this forum for a while and different people have different experiences, some things have worked for some people and maybe not for others.

It seems to me that it's important to try things out for yourself but use people's experiences and advice as guidance.

This forum is a fantastic resource and I think it's all the better for people posting their experiences. If someone says something is a complete waste of time I won't completely discount doing what they have done, it is only one persons experience. If a lot of people are saying the same thing I will take it more seriously. You have to be selective in my opinion.

Ya know I'm not offended if you actually say what you wanted to say:



Absolutely GUARANTEED CRAP

Article sites – Dead as a Dodo bird.

Press release for links

Meta tags

Link exchanges - to a degree

The one I sit on the fense.. PR

Pagerank has alot of value but not for what most use it for.

The problem many have now days is this idea that "if it don't hurt me then it must help me somehow and must be worth doing" -
Link exchanges still have value if you only perform them with related sites but it is dangerous if you do not personally know the owner and site quality. I reciprocate with many blogs(not so many on my seo blog) but it actually isn't the way most go about it, we both happened to like what we saw and linked, neither one asked for the link. That type of link exchange has good value still.

Rofl... I did not have you in mind... It was a general comment..

since when articles are – Dead as a Dodo bird?
Have to disagree.

Article links as in PRWeb etc these in my opinion have no value as well. but an article on a related website which is about your target keyword, with a link to your website would be an unbelievable link.

Many of the inexperienced people who come to this forum hopefully read beyond the first post in a thread, the balance would come from others replying to it. (As in life, if the person is trying to get all the news from the headline then misguided he/she will be) Many times those replies lead to more questions which are generally asked and answered. SEO is a science, a study of an ever changing target. The statements of supposed fact may be true today but could and more than likely will change tomorrow.

Google, as an example, stated there is about 200 measures used to generate a search listing, concentrating on just one won't get it but at the same time if you make them all a priority then nothing is a priority (if of course we knew what the 200 were). The things I consider 100% must do (will work), 100% waste of time (not worth any effort) and a bunch of things somewhere in the middle are my own based on time, oppertunity and resources - cost and gain.

If the webmaster who has visited this forum decides to choose a SEO company to do work for them I assure you that most of the companies will state the work they need to do, the priority of the tasks, and that they are 100% needed. When the webmaster is confronted with the task list hopefully they remember the debate which may have taken place and ultimately make choices based on some level of knowledge.

Hopefully enough questions/statements of "fact" continue - it has helped my progression immensely.

Articles included on article sources "do have value" -- "IF"...

they can avoid supplemental results.

If it goes supplemental your link on the page isn't credited because the page is not in the primary archive.

You would need an extremely special relationship with the article source owners to bias your author's account and articles so to avoid supplemental results...

Searching can still occur in the supplemental archive but these are "off the beaten path queries"... meaning the article source still has great value for longtail query -- and they are so thankful for you to being so loyal since you get "absolutely nothing"...

Be that as it may, that position is backed be empircal evidence at every major "general interest" article source - their root site & category pages plus some author pages that write an enormous amount are in primary results and most articles and nearly all authors are in supplemental... and since the link can't help you from there... what go you get for including your articles?

Thanks for that..

So I will try to give what I think because you asked so nicely..

Definatley should be used. I think that google is currently treating links from some SB sites as authority site links. Can give quite a boost. But do not think it will last...To easy to manipulate

These tpye of links do wonders. But if you can get these type of links so can your competators.. Get them wherever possible.

Artilce sites can sttill be used just more difficult. Firstly just submit to a few. Write decent article. When it is published social bookmark it. This will work for as long as SB continues to be important.

Look for old articles that can be republished that have been dropped from the google index. Put the republished articles on your website. SB them. great source of free legal uniques content.

Write to people who have wriiten good releated article on article website. Offer a link from you site if they write unique article for you site.


Not even going to commet on this. read http://forums.seochat.com/google-page-rank-47/stop-asking-about-google-pr-read-this-first-141413.html this thread by DJstreet says it all.

dont know never used them

Total rubbish. No oneway link is a waste of time. Money depends on ROI and opportunity cost.

have many uses. Wont help rankings.

I exchange links quite freely with qulaity related sites. i think it benefits everyone.

Don't no. I would guess good blogs that are regulary updated with qulaity content are awesome. Poor blogs with crap stale content are useless. But I have never personally tried it.


The above were just meant as examples. Not a list. Just that my experince is that is getting harder but for example if you submit to free directories, article sites, press release etc and you competator does nothing its probably enough. It all depends on your competition..

For any still doubting the death of article directories try it out... I have and submitted one article per site on a site that had stayed pretty much in the same place(as far as rankings) for the past 7-12 months. After submitting these 5 articles I saw absolutely no ranking change, absolutely none. After 2-3 months later there was still no change.

I can't hardly believe that was a fluke. If any one has contrar feedback I would be interested to hear it.

Less about "update" more about quantity (or lack of).

A blog is the same as an article source/directory where you go to include an article for a no-added-cost "one-way link"... let us not forget that is why we wrote and gave away our writings -- we needed the link.

Unfortunately, a website adding content for the sake of adding content has less of a reason to be archived in primary results...

Google's answer to link manipulation by way of article writing... for the sake of getting a link that you wouldn't have normally gotten (not to mention "in volume" e.g. same article included at numerous archives) -- all that is, is just another way to manipulate Google into thinking you are more important than you really are... so they developed a secondary archive where pages that are not the more important pages of a domain are kept... manipultion problem solved.

(Back to the blog)

The "blog" could end up like that BUT they tend to have far less new pages added in any given day simply because "authorship" in limited... had article sources remained "limited" they may be worth including content in... course the moment that "I can get a link" is tied to the value offer by the source - they tend to be inundated with content so millions can get that no-added-cost "one-way link".

In any case "Google isn't overly proficient with "what is quality content" - that is determined by the "link structure toward the page only" -- it can't fathom awesome content beyond "it got great trusted links to it" -- it must be good...

When I started my content network in January I started at:

4 pieces/day/blog (2 unrelated topics e.g. different categories in the same theme each with a PDF version).

Google gobbled these up but by end-March early-April older pages started going supplemental... while I could get them out "more links to sup pages" it quickly became clear the problem was the rate of inclusions.

In April started at:

1 pieces/day/blog (30 pieces/month) with a PDF version.

This went well for a time but for every page I added into the blog either the html page or the PDF would go supplemental.

In June started at:

1 pieces/business day/blog (20-23 pieces/month) with a PDF version.

I also started a PDF template so that the PDFs were always different from the html pages -- adding a sidebar and a header or footer of (tips or fact) - once the archive had a selection of similiar 'older' article posts I would snippet these replacing the tips & facts on the new articles so all PDFs didn't have the same reoccurring information.

For the time being I have stopped or at least reduced the number of older pages moving from primary to supplemental results.

Supplemental Results is not a bad thing - it works great for longtail queries... the problem you will always face is "link lose"... if I can't control or at the very least predict what pages will be supplemental next (and when) I have (we all have) limited hope for doing anything with our growing archives.

I started "blogs" for advance link strategies (ad space)... the retailing of ad space is the one product/service that requires you to "do nothing" customer wise... you setup them up -- that's it... course supplemental pages aren't worth anything to a third party (a bit like search engine submission services)... still working on this but:

...as I noted in the opening lines far less about continuous update, content quality and much more about lack of update/quantity of pages and the mostly 'the ability to attract ramdom links'.