January 28, 2011
By Khalid
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Why SEO is getting harder…
Over the past few months I’ve been working as a ghost link builder for numerous companies in addition to managing my own clients and my employer’s website(s). The beauty of having multiple sites in different niches is that you can apply what works on one site to another, within reason off course.
I also own a small collection of sites myself, some of which are geo-domains focusing on a particular area. My first difficulty was to accommodate Google’s recent obsession with local listings. The problem is, Google hasn’t stopped at geo-sectors. Now, on an increasing amount of searches local listings appear.
Whilst this is fantastic news for small business owners and nearby shops/services, if you want to order something online do you really want a shop 20 miles away coming up first with no idea if they have the product in stock or if their price is competitive?
A number of pessimistic views have been posted on the likes of UK Business Forums to suggest SEO is dying, or indeed has died. However, the death of such a huge industry is extremely unlikely and tactics can be adopted to assist in ranking under local listings. The beauty of SEO; you’re constantly learning.
As the World Wide Web grows at an alarming rate and as social media sites blossom – YouTube says that 35 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute – search engines have more and more content to chew and rank. So, when it comes to outranking these sites more time and money is required to achieve the same results you could do with your eyes closed previously. Competition is not the only problem, Google is definitely clamping down on links it previously gave juice too and people with quality sites are demanding top dollar for advertising.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for change and growth. But, do we need Twitter feeds or YouTube videos getting preferential treatment in search results? It has even been suggested that Google gives preferential treatment to its own products and services. Mind you, if you were Google wouldn’t you?
Some people are even taking things a step further and instead of attempting to outrank a competitor fairly, they’re using negative SEO to devalue other sites. Talk about sneaky!
The exact match domain boost that webmasters – including myself – have ridden on for years could be coming to an end, but again that’s talk just now. Those who perhaps have spent considerable sums of money on such names could see their value cut overnight, simply because of a tweak here and there by the Big G. The only good that could come out of this is that webmasters will be forced to build brands around their site and not simply rely on web traffic.
Perhaps these changes will force greater investment by webmasters to go beyond creating a site and doing some SEO. Perhaps in years to come Google will find a way of chucking out the crap and focusing on sites with more than an exact match and a few backlinks. A clean up is in order and I think it’ll happen, so if you’re serious about the future don’t sit on your arse and pretend everything will be fine. Change can happen, and it will. Oh, and when Facebook launches its own search, there will be another competitor in the running.
Good luck with your pursuits,
Khalid.
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