Am I at least in the ballpark?
There's all kinds of ways to make money online but one of the things that most, if not all, people agree upon is that FREE SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC really just rocks. It's some of the sweetest stuff that no-money can buy because it's pretty freakin' targeted and the price is just right! AND, the people who are visiting have already been making an effort to find what you're selling.
Whether it comes from MSN, Google or Yahoo, we still affectionally call it GOOGLING because GOOGLE is the household name and most of it comes from GOOGLE anyways.
So just imagine some poor guy like, oh say, Joe Dough, has 170 websites and, in the middle of the night, Google decides to change some silly constant in it's elaborate algorithm from (let's just make this number up) .02 to .01 and, instantly, in the blink of an eye, 159 of Joe's websites plummet off the side of Mount Google and disappear into the dark abyss, never to be heard from again.
Sounds rather dramatic doesn't it? But that's EXACTLY what happens! Here, read this:
What a mess! Now if you're Joe Dough, you've invested your prior earnings properly and you've still got 11 sites pulling in some money and 159 sites that need some serious TLC, ASAP! That is IF they are salvageable. But who knows, right? And who wants to spend all the time they came here to SAVE analyzing 159 websites in hopes of getting all, or even some, of them topranked again? Not me...! You?"Over the last two years, Google has introduced a series of algorithm and filter changes that have led to unpredictable search engine results, dropping the rankings of many clean (non-spamming) web sites.
Google's algorithm changes started in November 2003 with the Florida update, now remembered as a legendary event among the webmaster community. This was followed by the Austin, Brandy, Bourbon, and Jagger updates. Google updates used to occur monthly; they're now carried out quarterly. But with so many servers, there seem to be several different results rolling through the servers at any time during a quarter." ~ Rodney Ringler, Sitepoint Tribune, May 2006
In fact, he's lucky he had 170 sites. Imagine if he only had 10 or 20? Or 5? Or 1?
Ok, so that version of Google's "fiscal kick to the groin" took place way back in 2006, right? And, it doesn't really matter much now because a year in web-time is like a dozen years real-time, right? Sure, tell that to the hard-working people, just like you, who watched their sites, AND their bankrolls, take a trip to the deep south that year! That money is GONE, and gone forever. It could have gone towards building new sites, paying for a home or a car, or simply hanging out in the bank and multiplying.
And just in case you thought the shenanigans were over, just have yourself a nice look at this:
But more importantly, right from a Google guy, Matt Cutt's, lips to our ears:"Setting up incoming links to your web site has long been recognised as a fundamental way to increase your search engine rankings, but I'll go further than that: if your site doesn't have links coming into it, then (in Google's eyes) it doesn't exist.
But now Google is looking to test a few ways in which they can police people buying and selling text links, and a request by Google guy Matt Cutts for webmasters to turn snitch hasn't gone down very well in the web community..." ~ Brendon Sinclair, SitePoint Tribune, April 19, 2007
Whoopsie! That doesn't sound good! And a lot of guys, far more geekier than I will ever need to be, realized it, too, and spoke up!"I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links..." ~ Matt Cutts
But let's just collectively pull our heads out of the sand(box), folks. I've already said it - I know you came here believing in the "work-at-home" dream. It's no different than every single bride and groom believing in "'til death do us part" even while the divorce rates are at 50% and climbing. Believe me, I'm not trying to depress you. I'm trying to open your eyes and, gosh forbid, even HELP you, albeit a very limited number of you, with a virtually unstoppable solution."How many more trojan horses Matt? Nofollow was supposed to help us point out links we can’t vouch for, now Google wants us to use it on paid links. Now, the spam report - which we thought was supposed to be used for reporting spam activity - is to be used to report “suspected” paid links?What’s next? Asking us to share our Google Analytics data so you can weed out the pages that users don’t find interesting?
With all due respect, this is going too far!" ~ Andy Beal
"Back in 2003 you could launch a site, put some nice content on it and then get some traffic. In 2003 Google decided to punish the content builders and white hat seo`s by creating something that has commonly being known as the sandbox.
I joined an seo forum to find out why I was having problems getting traffic and it turned out that Google decided to screw the white hat seo that was making the internet clean and full of content by putting a penalty on new domains, content and links.
The option to build content rich sites was no longer there for most people unless you had a real fat wallet or you were prepared to eat bread and water while the sandbox released you." ~ Earl Grey from Syndk8
I hope you're starting to get it, folks! Google might sometimes APPEAR to be a nicey-nice company with some really cool people running it but you have to take 2 very, very important things into account:
- They are a company. And, as such, are, by necessity, more interested in their bottom line than in you as an individual;
- And, they never asked your permission to use your websites in a way that would make them money.
They key is take whatever advantages you can find from the outset, until you are making a decent living, and THEN you can put away all the stealth tools and do whatever the heck you want. But just beware - Google will ALWAYS be dancing and only the smartest will survive!
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