How do you guys do it?

[ericwoo]

I have been doing seo for a few years now and at 1st loved it. But now it seems to be getting harder and harder.

I drive hundreds of thousands of free organic traffic each year with some of my clients and own websites using pure white hat techniques, but with the Penguin update- it really slowed down.

Seriously, how do you guys do it? With all the constant updates, content updating, social media conversations, and noise everywhere- man its tough. Building links is about great content development and relationship building but that stuff can take hundreds of hours building relationships before it pays off. And a lot of bloggers are so stingy with linking to other great content on my site even if I use the "Reciprocity" marketing principle as talked about in Robert Cialdini's book "Influence" by offering them something free. People act like giving a link is worth a million dollars. Its ridiculous.

Like I almost rather be doing drywall work for 9 bucks an hour.

Okay, enough of my whining (I know you guys are going to ridicule me about this), but is anyone else feeling this angst?

I might switch to paid traffic instead or email marketing strategies alone.

[jsteele823]

http://www.insidesocal.com/friendlyfire/homerbeer.jpg

[ericwoo]

haha- that's probably the best answer I'll hear. I will be grabbin a few here momentarily yo help cool off.

http://www.insidesocal.com/friendlyfire/homerbeer.jpg

[Test-ok]

It really hasn't changed that much, it's the blackhat that keeps going on the roller coaster, even unsuspecting clients get caught up in it. It's the people who take advantage of the loop holes that dive when Google closes them up.
The Penguin IMO is trying to stop all the sites that make money off of that type of internet advertising, spammy link building, blog posting etc....Google is just watching out for #1..Themselves

If you have a business on the internet and you wanted to be on page 1, you do what 95 percent of what most people do...take any measure to get there...and usually at the cheapest price.
Google says to themselves...humm, if we get rid of the paid link schemes these aggressive companies might start buying our PPC to get to the top.
Google is hacking at their competition.
But I could be wrong.

[ericwoo]

I totally agree. But I am actually anti-black hat almost as much as google is. Anymore, I am starting to believe we shouldn't put our attention into SEO anymore except for the basics like having a clean optimized site and just pay attention to marketing.

It really hasn't changed that much, it's the blackhat that keeps going on the roller coaster, even unsuspecting clients get caught up in it. It's the people who take advantage of the loop holes that dive when Google closes them up.
The Penguin IMO is trying to stop all the site that make money off of a type of internet advertising, spammy link building...Google is just watching out for #1..Them

If ya think about it...If you have a business on the internet and you want to be on page 1, you do what 95 percent of people do...take any measure to get there...oh and usually at the cheapest price.
Google say to themselves...humm, if we get rid of the paid link schemes these aggressive companies are buying and make them fall in the SERPs, perhaps they will start using our PPC to get to the top. Google is hacking at their competition.
But I could be wrong.

[KernelPanic]

I totally agree. But I am actually anti-black hat almost as much as google is. Anymore, I am starting to believe we shouldn't put our attention into SEO anymore except for the basics like having a clean optimized site and just pay attention to marketing.

respectfully Mr ericwoo: If your traffic "really slowed down" after the Penguin Update then you have been penalized for using black hat tactics and in truth you are not anti black hat at all.

I'm not trying to pick on you, just in general I see this a lot
here.

[ericwoo]

KernelPanic- I respect your opinion, but its complete gibberish, considering you have no idea of what I was doing or what my sites are.

The facts are that even if one is doing pure white hat and google changes its algorithm, it might shift how much rank it gives to the links. For example, if I was doing guest posts before when it ranked high, they could later change their mind- giving less weight to those and reduce my traffic.

I forgot to mention, Penguin didn't destroy me. It just took me from number 1 to about 10. So I am getting about 50% of the traffic.

panda didn't effect me at all. I think it actually helped.

[DarrenHaye]

I forgot to mention, Penguin didn't destroy me. It just took me from number 1 to about 10. So I am getting about 50% of the traffic.

Did you go overboard on keyword anchor text?.

[ericwoo]

Yes, I thought that might have been the problem with my internal linking, so I cleaned it up by either removing it or completely changing the anchor text.

And there hasn't been any ranking improvements. I read a lot of people removed this type of onsite optimization and it boosted them back up again, but not for me.

I also had a lot of unique content on the site but could be considered similar and placed on one page, so I removed the similar content and did a 301 redirect.

Still no benefit. Not sure what to think anymore. I think I just need to start focusing on more quality link building.

Did you go overboard on keyword anchor text?.

[DarrenHaye]

Yes, I thought that might have been the problem with my internal linking, so I cleaned it up by either removing it or completely changing the anchor text.

And there hasn't been any ranking improvements. I read a lot of people removed this type of onsite optimization and it boosted them back up again, but not for me.

Do you know of any examples/articles/testing that has shown internal linking to cause a site to be slapped by penguin? I can't see how that would be possible, but I'm open to being wrong.

[thegodfather]

Test-ok is right, the fundamentals havent changed hugely in their purest sense: quality content and decent links are still the be-all, end-all of our industry. What does change is the way Google analyses all of our sites and the shift of metric value from one aspect to another. and we all know how quick these transitions can be!!

I'm not trying to suck up to the forums, but logging on every day and seeing what the latest news is is absolutely vital in my day to day working life..

My best advice is to keep on top of the game! These forums are invaluable to that end.

[Cantufind FSS]

respectfully Mr ericwoo: If your traffic "really slowed down" after the Penguin Update then you have been penalized for using black hat tactics and in truth you are not anti black hat at all.

I'm not trying to pick on you, just in general I see this a lot
here.

Just thinking out loud here, but is it concievable that the OP has inadvertanly employed what might be construed as Black Hat SEO techniques which haven't got past the all seeing eye of the Google algorithm?

Analogy. I'm a perfect driver but the speed camera that caught me inadvertanly doing 35 in a 30 zone penalized me for being a 'bad driver' and fined me for it.

OP, if you really are convinced you've done nothing wrong then I urge you to look up the previous posts by DarrenHayes on here. THe one that contains two links to Matt Cutt's videos on how to go about appealing to Google on where you've gone wrong. Sorry I don't remember where they are.

Good luck in your endevours.

[KernelPanic]

KernelPanic- I respect your opinion, but its complete gibberish, considering you have no idea of what I was doing or what my sites are.

The facts are that even if one is doing pure white hat and google changes its algorithm, it might shift how much rank it gives to the links. For example, if I was doing guest posts before when it ranked high, they could later change their mind- giving less weight to those and reduce my traffic.

I forgot to mention, Penguin didn't destroy me. It just took me from number 1 to about 10. So I am getting about 50% of the traffic.

panda didn't effect me at all. I think it actually helped.

I don't think this is a penguin issue if all he lost was 9 spots

[joshz]

I don't think this is a penguin issue if all he lost was 9 spots

No, I highly doubt it. I'd be more inclined to believe linking webmasters got warnings/paranoid and started to clean up their links by removing other links. Thus, the fall is from a loss of links rather than an unnatural array of links.

[FreelanceSEOSX]

new to this forum and interesting to see that other SEOs are finding it a bit of a struggle at the moment. i reckon just stick with content marketing approaches for the time being and you can't go wrong (famous last words...)