Probably very basic but…

Yes it’s true. Content is king, as well as a user & seo friendly designed site.

@ixian 165252 wrote:

Yes it’s true. Content is king, as well as a user & seo friendly designed site.

unfortunately since the latest Google update this is Totally untrue.

Google is now not worried about content, quality, or where links come from… (some of the top 5 sites for one of my keywords just have a massive volume of IBLs from totally unrelated sites.. and the sites have little to no related content.)

A lot of webmasters are going nuts with Google over this update tbh.

pm me if you want examples!

If you had to physically publish a magazine you would need to attract both readers and advertisers. So you would want to create a quality designed and printed product with quality content to entice readers to purchase your magazine. Supermarkets only give shelf space to magazines that sell quickly.

The same is true for websites. You need people to visit. People visit because of content they need. Advertisers will advertise if the numbers are there.

Google is like the supermarket and displays results that the “customer” needs. I think they may be moving the display around a bit at the moment though. :Cry:

Sadly, Alex is right. The last Google algo change really messed things up. Whether they’ll change it back again no-one knows but as it stands content most definitely ISN’T king.

I can give you one example of a site with less than 10 pages that ranks #4 in Google for a very competitive term and has PR5, just through thousands of paid-for irrelevant links.

The supermarket / magazine analogy is only half right. Of course, you’d want to produce a high quality informative magazine that people would want to read but if you can’t afford the advertising or distribution costs it won’t even reach the supermarket shelves.

People can only read the content that they’re directed to…

@alexross 165270 wrote:

unfortunately since the latest Google update this is Totally untrue.

Google is now not worried about content, quality, or where links come from… (some of the top 5 sites for one of my keywords just have a massive volume of IBLs from totally unrelated sites.. and the sites have little to no related content.)

A lot of webmasters are going nuts with Google over this update tbh.

pm me if you want examples!

Yeah, but if you jump to change everything at every google update, you are going to ruin your site and it’s rankings.

My guess that the last update was step one of several and as it proceeds a lot of sites will be left in the dust.

You always need to balance SEO with customer service. In the end, the sites that give visitors what they want and need will always prevail.

I agree… Short term you may see some sites come and go in the rankings, but if you focus on great content and great links you will be there in the long haul. Sure these fluctuations suck, but if you have some solid links and content worth linking to you should be fine.

I have also seen some whackjob sites ranking for good terms lately, but upon checking out there backlinks I see they are just blackhat spam sites that spam blogs and forums.

So fwiw good content is important if you plan on being here for a while. Links are also important, but what is important about links is where they come from. I remember Marcus Tandler saying in Cyprus that your site’s link profile is important. ie if the majority of your links are of low quality then you can count on your site not ranking much if at all. He also said (something like) the more high quality links your site has the more low quality links you can get away with.

What I took from that was it’s about the ratio of good quality links to bad quality links which will determine overall if your site is worthy of ranking highly in the serps.

Google could be giving a new site the benefit of the doubt when ranking it, only to drop it’s rankings later on once it has determined that this “new” site’s links are mostly low quality/spam. This could also explain why some new sites shoot up in the rankings only to fall a few days/weeks later.

Content is king in the sense that it takes some REALLY good content to get some REALLY good links.

sorry for the huge post, that’s just my interpretation of the situation

inbound and outbound links will always have weight with how many ‘votes’ your site gets according to goog’s ranking algo.

from my own experience, uploading your sitemap using google webmaster tools is an easy way to get google to spider your site more often and add your urls to their index, which may increasing your rankings ultimately.

Cheers,

Allen

Back to the content versus links and ranking issue:

I’ll bet you that on many, many keywords I make more $ sitting on page 6 than any of the folks on page one.

The whole idea is to rank well enough to create enough income to support yourself while working on relative indepencence from the engines.

If you have a site with solid content that provides actual information that interests your visitors, they will bookmark you and come back for info and for picking new places.

I think the engines are catching on slowly too and are starting to watch visitor behavior.

Yes, I will continue to try to make things as easy as possible for the bots, and, yes, I will be in compliance with google rules and requirements as much as possible.

But for me content will always rule, because I strongly believe the quality site will win out in the long run.

I see is as a choice between spending my time trying to keep up with all the twists and turns constantly handed out by algo and other updates and spending my time making players happy.

I’d rather make players happy, while making sure google is still watching.

I don’t see google as the god I am trying to appease, I see google as someone desperately trying to learn how to put my site in first place because searchers will be happy that way. As such I will do things to help google do this, but it’s not my main focus. My main focus is to always be the site that deserves to be number one.

Yeah unfortunately on the last Google update they switched things up from the norm. With that being said, that is why we have to stay up to date on our marketing techniques. ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

James,

Links are just one small portion in the Google algorithm but they still need to be addressed. Stick with as many one-way related links as you possibly can and try to have them in good locations on the other the websites that are linking to your site. Also try to switch up your targeted keywords in the anchor text so that all of the incoming links are not the same. Remember to not only link to the homepage URL, links to your internal pages are great as well.

Things change but solid incoming links from similar content related websites will never hurt. But for the most part just try to get as many links as possible and not just on high ranking websites. Diversify the page rank sites you are looking for links on as well. Think of it this way; if your website was NFL.com, you would have links pointing to your site from websites with all kind of page ranks, 0 and higher. Links will never hurt, get as many as you can.

@james 165249 wrote:

there’s so much hype about links and backlinks etc, and then yesterday a friend of mine said that it doesnt matter. you can have as many as lyou like but if your website is rubbish and the titles arent good enough – you might as well not bother. is this true?

Dammit!

That’s the last time I read a post by you Brad…..you left a bug crawl into my laptop screen….LOL

Very good points Brad.

Rick
Univerrsal4