"The tricks to beat and spam Google, Whalen said, no longer work as well."<p>LOL.<p>I know a half dozen guys who build millions of automated links every day. They say an easy term and they're in the top 5 results after 5 days, a hard term (a variety of diet pills, etc.) and it takes them a month. They get manually banned from time to time, but they just pull another URL from their pool and start over.<p>It's gotten more sophisticated and therefore is more difficult, but to say spam doesn't work is laughable to anyone who is or knows anyone in the blackhat SEO "industry."
I might be able to take comments like "rewarding content more" seriously if w3schools wasn't still at the top of almost every HTML, CSS, and JavaScript search query.<p>I realized one day that I just use Google to quickly navigate a few websites I actually do use. This is something like the 99.9% case. At that point, I realized my search queries where I include the website I want and keywords I want to find in that site were me specifically doing what Google was supposed to be doing for me: finding quality content. I know where the quality content is. Google apparently doesn't. What's the point of it?
As someone who first got into SEO about a year before panda and penguin rolled out.. I have to admit, SEO has changed ALOT and Jill hits the nail on the head. Easy keyword related SEO tactics no longer work, Hummingbird has made sure of it..<p>It makes perfect sense if you break it down over the years...<p>1) Spammers found out they could manipulate rankings with the meta keywords tag.. shortly after, google started to ignore these keyword tags..<p>2) Spammers found out they could manipulate ranking with the meta description.. shortly after, google stopped using this description to rank sites..<p>3) Spammers realized they could build artificial link profiles, so google had to get smarter and started incorporated social metrics and became smarter about how they attributed value to links..<p>4) etc etc etc<p>It goes on and one, but basically, the only way google will ever be able to defeat spammers is to create an algorithm that is so smart it actually understands not only what the user wants, but also all of the content in its index.. it has to go much deeper than a simple keyword match - it has to parse out the intent of the searcher as well as the meaning of its content.
The first thought that came to my mind was that she was unable to game the system anymore.<p>Turns out I wasn't the only one. gettheyayo (dead comment) remarked<p>> What's more likely to have happened: she lost her way of making money. She charged money and had to deliver. She no longer can thanks to Google.
Google only works well for English content. It is broken for other languages other than English. In my case, front page is full of spam content for a Turkish keyword that I want to compete. Even some sites are stealing my own unique content and somehow they are achieving better results than me. I suspect that Google needs more semantic data about language itself. I believe it will become more sophisticated as time goes. I understand that is not easy job to classify billions of keywords combinations for all languages.
Google works better than it used to, yes. Though, it also seems to be moving away from the permalink and title, keywords, description meta tags that we would use to help Google identify and classify our content. Google taking away keyword referrer info is the nail in the coffin for SEO services, as a business.
I am still a little confused on SEO and as this is a very slow last train home I would like to add some notes to my HN Evernote<p>1. I have never ranked well for anything until last year. Then suddenly a OSS project with about three articles got to the front page for "ORacle ODI source control". But it got there through a comment on a LinkedIn page.<p>I literally went back to the comment and said "BTW this solution now has a website here it is" and we ranked. admittedly no-one ever visits the site but we live in hope.<p>I mention this because it kinda-sorta reflects the good and evil twins of even white hat SEO.<p>1. Good side: we are / were building a genuinely useful OSS product (it puts source control into an oracle ETL product that has none). It has (yet!) no commercial upside to it but we just want it to succeed because. I have written a couple of articles saying what and why (odietamo.org.uk) but mostly it's hard to persuade people who are drowning that breathing water is not a normal state of affairs.<p>3. evil side - I went comment spamming. Shoved my link into a year old comment thread (admittedly that we had participated on a year ago but without a site to link to then) And afaik, it worked.<p>Now we are an incredibly low volume keyword search (IIRC it's "ODI source control" or "odi version control") so any good inbound link will have some big metric but even so<p>I think google is doing a good job because that search turns up a minimal amount of spam and a couple of threads and discussions - but it bothers me that comment spam in group forums can have such an outsized effect.<p>good remarkable content ought to rise to the top - but I am not sure if I know what is good content not if good content can be outweighed by other co-incidental metrics. (NB none of this is to do with link farms and blackhat SEO - just bumbling along white hat stuff)<p>PS if my site only ranks for my bubble and readers here simply cannot find it, please let me know.
@ matt cutts<p>How bout this example website:<a href="http://www.seroundtable.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.seroundtable.com</a>
All he do is copy content from forums and paste it on his blog by adding a couple of lines. This easily falls into following categories of Spam as mentioned by google<p>1. Thin Content
2. Copied Content<p>So how bout banning this blog?
Measuring the impact of introduced change is key to any optimization task. With Google no longer sending the search terms used to discover the page, SEO is more like a guess work - you follow the best practices and hope Google will start sending traffic one day. This leaves spammy black-hat approach as the only option. Not everyone is comfortable with this though.