LOL.
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.
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."
Spamming sites still worked pre-hummingbird and infact it works even better now.
Even Negative SEO works just as well. Have a competitor you don't like? Give him 100k blog comments with "Buy Viagra" and suddenly he will be de indexed in 3 months or less.
I think half the reason she quit is that SEO is so damn unpredictable now. You can make a spammy site and might rank or might get de-indexed. But at the same time you can make a 100% whitehat site and it probably won't even rank and can get just as easily de-indexed as a blackhat spam site.
You need to read up on BlackHatWorld a bit more Mr Cutts.
casamundo.de + .nl - auto generating texts and internal, irrelevant links. Outranks every player.
independer.nl/autoverzekering/merken/opel.aspx - generating doorway pages with minimal / none added value
veiligonlinegeldlenen.nl - just check their back link profile and site, and you know enough
meinestadt.de/berlin/ - great start, until you find stuff they really rank on:
meinestadt.de/berlin/dsl - no value add
And many, many more. The German market is competitive but with smart spamming and automated content generation, you can outrank anyone.
Yes, that's black hat SEO. It's very different from the Search Engine Land world. The idea is burn/rinse/repeat of sketchy affiliate sites, people make a very good living off it. Even still. Matt Cutts can surely find all he needs to know about that world on Black Hat World, I don't think that these guys are keeping much from them. But I also don't think it's easy for them to fix without potentially having negative consequences for the rest of the world.
The flip-side of this is the "white hat SEO" world. I don't know about Jill's own practices, but the conference/publication world with which she's a part of is frequented by people like Matt Cutts. And I think she hits the nail on the head for that: it's driven by content/PR now. There is still a place for on-page SEO for a corporate site if you're strong with the technical stuff (for example, schema.org type stuff is just getting off the ground with the Google Knowledge Graph). But it's not the sexy / easy to sell fast salvation that it once was.
> It's gotten more sophisticated and therefore is more difficult
sounds like you agree
Note: I mean no slight to the folks who provide a genuine optimization service, just those who are essentially scammers.
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?
The information is clearly presented and easy to scan/parse.
The real answer to problems like that is more personalization, which doesn't go over well for many. I do miss that personal blocked-site list google used to have :(
It makes perfect sense if you break it down over the years...
1) Spammers found out they could manipulate rankings with the meta keywords tag.. shortly after, google started to ignore these keyword tags..
2) Spammers found out they could manipulate ranking with the meta description.. shortly after, google stopped using this description to rank sites..
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..
4) etc etc etc
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.
Turns out I wasn't the only one. gettheyayo (dead comment) remarked
> 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.
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.
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.
I mention this because it kinda-sorta reflects the good and evil twins of even white hat SEO.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
PS if my site only ranks for my bubble and readers here simply cannot find it, please let me know.
How bout this example website:http://www.seroundtable.com 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
1. Thin Content 2. Copied Content
So how bout banning this blog?
