I see a lot of people get penalized or ignored by Google. Obviously, if you put a lot of work into chasing a keyword, it’s really frustrating if you don’t get to where you want to be.I remember when I first started, I did everything right (minus the black hat part which I don’t do anymore) but, I didn’t know about the delay algorithm for un-established sites.
I can tell you, I was confused and upset when I saw my site bouncing up and down in the rankings. I did end up ranking above the fold for that keyword for as long as I wanted to but I’m not doing anything in that space anymore.
Details Matter
It’s actually kinda crazy the way people hate Google when they don’t get what they want. I’ve even seen people hate Barry Schwartz because they didn’t rank the way they wanted to.
The thing about that is, Barry’s site (seroundtable.com) , covers every little thing that happens in the search space and it’s basically a good place for more advanced SEOs to keep up with what’s going on.
When you’re new and just started learning SEO, you have to be very thorough and you have to make sure the information is up to date, because Google changes their algorithm almost every day. It’s not enough to read a few blog posts.
So many bad teachers make it hard to even learn SEO.
We’ve got people saying things like “article spinning is white hat” and “fake ‘Likes’ will boost your rankings”. If you’re having trouble ranking, it’s definitely not Barry Schwartz’s fault but there are some bad teachers out there.
Understand what Google does and why they do it.
This is one of the things that really holds back some would-be SEOs. They don’t understand what Google wants.
I’m gonna try to explain it real quick.
Google wants to give their users the best results possible for their queries. In order to this, they follow links. They don’t just want to follow any links. They want to follow links that the site owner approves of. Not links that anybody and everybody can place without any moderation. A good example is when Matt Cutts indicated that guest posting for links is okay and they DO want to count those links – as long as the content is high quality.
What they don’t want is: people buying links, paying to have their link stuffed articles placed, or links placed in ‘free for all’ website directories and article banks.
Let me put it another way, they want to follow links that site owners place because they think that the page will be useful to visitors.
It’s hard
Once you figure out and thoroughly know what Google is looking for and why, it may seem all seem pretty simple. But the hows and whys of the algorithm and predicting future signals certainly aren’t simple.
Some people say you shouldn’t chase the algorithm and this is true to a certain extent but, if Google dropped the link graph tomorrow, at the very least you’d need to figure out how to promote your content in a way that would satisfy the algorithm.
For example – if they dropped the link graph and switched completely over to the social graph (which is a terrible idea), everybody would become hardcore social media marketers overnight.
FYI – social media is a great way to earn links because, more people seeing your content means more people linking to your content.
Another good example is the way we make sure our keywords are in our URLs for people who link using the URL as anchor text. That’s a trick we use now and if Google started using different signals tomorrow we’d certainly learn new tricks to help rank for what we want to rank for.
Now back to what I was saying about SEO being hard.
Producing content and/or services that people will talk positively about isn’t easy. No matter what, somebody is working hard to build the popularity of any site.
Whether you’re a blogger who’s producing great content every day or a software developer with an army of affiliates and are constantly having to release compatibility updates and new features.
Building a great site and earning backlinks isn’t simple or easy. If it were SEOs wouldn’t be crashing and burning every day.
Image by USACE of public affairs – License
