| LED Digest 2034: Defining SEO, also Google's Sandbox |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest post, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. October 11, 2005 Issue #2034 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Google Sandbox Effect ==-- ~ Jonathan Webb "I've been Google sandboxed since May 25th and cannot find the reason why." --== SEO is Dead ==-- ~ Steve Pronger "...your visitors are the ultimate judge, not the search engines." ~ Ken Evoy "Some people never got past the headline and into the real message." --== What's Wrong with DMOZ ==-- ~ Michael Motherwell "DMOZ isn't a library, which store books, it is more like a librarian..." ~ Scott Wang "Do they want editors or not?" ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== AskDatabase Experience? ==-- ~ Donald L. Baker ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Jonathan Webb Subject: Google Sandbox enigma > Have a bit of a dillema here. I've read in some places > that the Google sandbox doesn't really exist and I wanted > to hear more opinions on this. - Claudiu Spulber, LED 2033 I've been Google sandboxed since May 25th and cannot find the reason why. Additionally the Sanbox effect in the last couple of weeks has taken effect in a strange way with most pages sandboxed but a handful are not. Therefore as well as the usual cry for help, followers of Google may be interested in my Google results. The website is a gallery of UK aerial photographs organised into sub galleries with a section for each town. Before May25th these town galleries usually came no1 in Google in a search for "aerial photographs of town name" and post sandbox they are anywhere from 50 to 450. With such a specialist subject and the lack of competitors for most towns I should come high even if not perfectly optimised. I still do very well in image search results on google and all searches on Yahoo and MSN. I did post to LED some months ago and received excellent advice especially related to 301 redirects from my old domain, but these have long since been deleted and the problem persists. I do have too many pages with similar text and am slowly re writing and "uniqueising" each page but with no visible benefit. There is a site map here with links to each town; http://www.webbaviation.co.uk/sitemap.htm Now here is the funny thing, originally the sandbox effect applied to all searches but now about 4 towns have sprung back to no1 without any reason and also all my German Language pages have spring back to their previous position when searching in Google.de for "Luftaufnahme von town name " The sections that have sprung back are Ossett and Shrewsbury. Halifax was also back at no1 for a UK search but is today hidden again. Extra strange is Stockport which seems to swap back and forth from position 1 to position approx 250 and swaps several times a week and even in the same hour with no changes on my part. I can't find any significant difference between my non sandboxed Shrewsbury page and my many blacklisted pages and the German pages differ only in language. All my pages are crawled frequently by googlebot and I have kept adding content and building real inbound links (I've been giving away my pictures for free in exchange for a link ).... has anyone an idea? Is it possible for my pages to be downgraded as a result of any third party action such as posting links to my site on a link farm or bad neighbourhood. I see no evidence of this but it the only thing I can think of which would explain why 4 or 5 pages and my German pages are unaffected. I have no evidence of any problem with my shared IP. In case your wondering about what I was doing immediately prior to sandboxing I was setting up a Forum and it was linked through the flash Menu to all UK galleries(not the German)... could a forum be a problem? I have last week removed the links to it and by the time you read this I may have taken the sad step of deleting the whole forum. When it was running I was very careful to delete immediately any irrelevant spam posts of which there were only a handful. And one last question... does Google have any legal duty to be fair? Is there a legal recourse for unfair blacklisting? Thanks and regards, Jonathan Webb http://www.webbaviation.co.uk ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: SEO is dead > Up to 2 weeks ago, I had a #1 ranking in Google. It has been #1 > for more than five years. What was my earnings? Zip, zero, nothing... - Bill Davison, LED 2032 There's a reason for my old mate Bill's lack of earnings from this top ranked position and it has nothing to do with SEO being dead or any "false premises" webmasters may have. It's because no one actually searches for the keywords he enjoys high rankings for. Presumably, he is referring to the phrase "commercial internet websites" which is the title of his home page. This phrase does indeed bring up a page 1 position on Google but draws a blank on keyword analysis tools because there aren't enough searches. And take a look at the sites which share that page 1 listing. None of them have anything to do with Bill's business of designing websites for local real estate agents in Florida. A high ranking for a relevant, in-demand keyword is the cornerstone of a profitable online business. In other words, get found for what your potential customers are actually searching for. High rankings for abstract, low competition keywords are indeed meaningless. Sorry guys but I just can't buy into this notion that SEO is dead, and I have the utmost respect for Key Evoy, being an SBI owner and affiliate. As long as getting found for relevant keywords which deliver decent quantities of free, targeted traffic matters - and it DOES - then SEO is very much alive and kicking. Sure, your site won't convert if your visitors don't find quality, relevant content at the end of their search. After all, your visitors are the ultimate judge, not the search engines. But even if you do no more than put your researched, targeted keywords into your page title you are Optimizing in order to be found in the Search Engines. The engines themselves will tell you you should do this. Basic on-page optimization and linking will always be an essential element for any successful web business. Instead of forever portraying the SEO industry as "hucksters" and waving his "I was right" banner, if Bill Davison were to actually try optimizing his site for "website designer Florida" he might just build some search engine sourced customers who are seeking the service he is providing. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Ken Evoy Subject: SEO is dead Hi to all, Glad to see I stirred things up a bit. People's replies are Rorschach tests. I'm fascinated by the answers to an e-mail that was merely an enthusiastic reply to Dirk's terrific post. It's clear that some people are unable to handle... 1) an "attention-getting" headline that has a message behind it. Some people never got past the headline and into the real message. The truly core elements have yet to be dissected and rebutted. And the other level of discomfort... 2) the answer to the scenario I posed about whether they are comfortable with a truly intelligent search engine. If they are, then they sure missed the core message of my post, because we have nothing to argue about. On the other hand... If you're NOT comfortable, you're really not ready for the future. And wailing at me won't change the future. And folks, I'm not just making this stuff up... No other company in the world has a database like SiteSell's. Our db controls and tracks every submission, spider visit, re-visit, indexing, rankings (for over 10,000 sites averaged over the past five years, and for far more than that average today). We know more about how and why a rapidly increasing number of SBI! sites work so well, far better than any other hosting service (and as I said, I hate to even use "hosting" to describe what we do because it's all the software that is interwoven into the hosting that helps SBIers succeed). And now we're the first to gather the same data on the impact of Sitemaps by Google and Yahoo!'s bulk-or-mass submit program. We make the technology to execute the proper, work-WITH-the-engines approach, disappear. So we're not "web hosts," not in the classical sense of the word. I say all this because I only took umbrage to your very personal brushoff, Shari... We do far more than "sell well." So thank you, but I won't be following your advice, to quote... "Ken, stick to sales. That's what you're good at." Shari, no other "Web hosting company" delivers success, empowers average small business people to thrive online without expensive designers, Webmasters, SEOers, and so forth. Not even close. So I owe my continued commitment to them, Shari. I would go so far as to be quite confident that we have far more hard data on SEO than you, if I had to actually measure who was more competent to write on this. But do we have to go THERE, Shari? Based on what I've read about your writings, we are likely on the same page. So look past the headline and the self-defense instincts it rose, and really read what I wrote. I suspect we're on the same page. Back to our data-mining. The trends are obvious. In five years, the definition of "SEO" will be the basic practices that SiteSell has promoted for years, backed by all the tools that allows the average business person to execute... Content - Traffic - PREsell - Monetize --> Basic explanation at... http://ctpm.sitesell.com/ If YOU already define "SEO" that way, terrific. We are on the same page, except people's definition of SEO varies, from white hat to black hat. I prefer "no hat" common sense... Give the engines what they WANT... high-value content that pleases engines, yes with enough hooks (nothing complicated and no "secrets" here) because the engines still need those to understand. But they won't be needing them for much longer. They are getting "smart" and that trend will only accelerate. When I do see "SEOers" even begin to latch onto "content" as a way to rank highly at the engines, many first instincts are to reduce it to a formula, and not on how to write better, how to position/market it, and so forth. They do NOT write about pleasing the humans, just the engines. If that's NOT you, we're on the same page. Meanwhile, I'm glad it's obvious to so many. I'm also glad that so few actually DO it and that those who do it well enough to deliver the kind of results that our product does without requiring our customers to pay any consultant fees, are simply too expensive for the mass market small business. That's why we're growing so quickly, NOT because I "sell well." SBI! actually sells itself. The proof is in our pudding... unparalleled success for us because of our clients' success. Over the past two years, we have experienced tremendous growth. It has been 100% based upon affiliate-and-customer word-of-mouth. We do not advertise, except as experiments to pass on to our affiliate base. Why? We don't compete with them. Period. For most companies, affiliate marketing is a very small add-on to their mix. The answer to "why" is contained in every word-of-mouth marketing book you'll read -- they do not have the product to sustain it. We do. So I'll let the success of our clients, average small business people who do it right from Day 1, speak for itself. They outperform most small businesses with far larger budgets. Here's the bottom line... SEO, however you define it today, from good hat to black, will have morphed into "no hat" common sense... good design, usability, and delivering great content. Some would argue that white hats are already there. And some are. Excellent. If you interpreted a headline intended as an attention-getting metaphor (a play on "God is dead") headline to mean literally THAT, or to make you feel personally attacked while you are in fact following all the ethical techniques of working WITH the engines to achieve success, I apologize. That was not the intent. Ironically, my cheering for Dirk's post makes me issue the same apology he issued in LED 2033... "My apologies if you took personal offense at what I said. My post was not intended to paint all who write and speak on the subject of SEO and linking with the same brush. That would be totally wrong." (That post was another knockout, Dirk. And we do provide proof of our clients' success... far beyond what any other "host" provides. Your insistence that small businesses seek proof mirrors our own. We have it as a core message on our home page.) Meanwhile, for those who DISAGREE with my core MESSAGE beyond that headline, hey... We'll all be around in five years (knock on wood). Set your clocks now to let me know I was right. It will be truly impossible to WORK the engines beyond good design, usability, and delivering great content. Their level of sophistication exceeds all the "advanced strategies" that I see in the Webmaster posts AND forums already -- Dirk covered that well too in LED 2033. Yes, of course you can Google-bomb special setups. How long will that last as proof of "manipulability?" And at the other end, of course, there will always be a need for good basic advice. So "SEO is dead" was simply meant to make this bigger point... "SEO," as defined by many to mean gaming the engines to achieve higher rankings, is indeed dying. It steadily takes more work and sophistication to achieve less results. That trend will continue until it will be a total waste of time and money and it will NOT overcome the proper ABC's of "content" (as at least one contributor claims to achieve nowadays) that I've been talking about, and that in fact others have agreed to while castigating my headline. All the best, Ken Evoy http://www.sitesell.com/ P.S. to Donald Baker -- the tools that the "SEO pros" you talk about are NOT for sale. And those folks are not semi-underground. They are deep underground. But even they shall fall as Search Engine technology continues in its relentless march to figuring out what is both relevant AND good. ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Michael Motherwell Subject: DMOZ > Excluding a site because it may duplicate some information > found elsewhere is a little like closing the Library of Congress > because all those books can be found elsewhere. - William Ernest Waites, LED 2032 Not really. DMOZ isn't a library, which store books, it is more like a librarian helping you solve your needs in the library. IMHO, DMOZ aims to be to the internet what a librarian is to to a Library: a way to find what you want quicker. Of course, that makes Google the annoying geek that knows everything, but that is another issue... Think of it this way: if you asked a librarian "which parody on war should I read" you would probably be told Catch 22. If you said where is the section on war, they would point you to it. If you asked for a recomendation on a book about war and the librarian mentioned every book ever written about war going back to the Iliad, would that make you happy? Course not, you would run away, while I chased you continuing to chant the list. The difference between a library and DMOZ is intent. Libraries don't judge books, the Librarians do. DMOZ job is to provide the best resources on a topic, like a good librarian will, and provide recomendations of the best sites and pages, where as a library as a whole tries to include all the books that space permits. So, back full circle, quite frankly many cats don't need more sites, and unless a site says something original and new, there is no need to list that site in DMOZ once a cat reaches critical mass. Sure, it is frustrating for the site owner, but really, unless one does something unique or something new, one shouldn't really expect much. Markets become crowded, and when they do, one more listing isn't acheiving anything for anyone, other than the person that gets the listing, and they aren't DMOZ concern. Michael Motherwell ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Scott Wang Subject: DMOZ > Moreover, despite notices on DMOZ almost begging for > editors, I have applied three times and never received so > much as an acknowledgement. - William Ernest Waites, LED 2032 I am curious about that too. Two years ago I had to apply twice (a month apart) before becoming the editor of my local town, http://snipurl.com/idew [dmoz.org] It's a small town and I was proud to be the editor - and I did a good job, at least I thought I did. Until one day I tried to login and a message said my account was "inactive" (can't remember the exact wording). I filled out the proper form to request a reason why I was no longer an editor - five times. Every month for 5 months I requested to have my account turned back on or a reason why it was deleted. No response. So I gave up, and to this day the category has no editor. It boggles me. Do they want editors or not? I'd love to edit my city's category again. It's not like it's a huge job, our population is 1,500. Scott Wang Scott's Computing ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Donald L. Baker Subject: AskDatabase pricing, experience? We're considering using Alex Mandossian's AskDatabase for some online market research, and would like to know what prices are like for a low-level campaign. Any tips or other info to share? Thanks, Don Baker NSI Partners www.NSIpartners.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Let your hook be always cast. In the pool where you least expect it, will be fish." - Ovid |
