Hello Jill,

As much as I enjoyed your pages and all the responses to your opinions, I have to say that you and everybody else have no control over long-term rankings. The search engines can and do change their criteria overnight. You can be the best SEO in the world and when Google changes its criteria...you are the worst SEO in the world...for Google. I appreciate you are trying to make a buck as we all are.

In the real world have you noticed that Google has stopped using the PageRank algorithm to rank its pages? Link popularity is no longer relevant...although Google still affirms the PageRank system on its help pages. The results are coming up randomly...or it seems to me based on page title alone. Hypertext linking appears to be penalised whereas in the past it was the bee's knees.

I assume this is down to the fact that Google needs money, and is trying to get the money from all the sites that have made money in the past from their high Google rankings. I was one of them.

I can understand Google doing this...we all want to be paid and Google is the..., or was...the best.

Our company will definitely give money to Google by way of sponsored advertisements in the hope of getting back to the sales we achieved while we were one of the favoured few. But our high ranking was not down to SEO but just down to the old theory of "chuck enough *** at a wall and some of it will stick."

I suppose you could say that the SEO earns his bread by analysing why ***(1) stuck and ***(2) didn't. But that's about as much as the science goes. When the Google man changes his criteria, then the top page becomes the bottom page.

Please forgive the crude language (***), but I thought it necessary to get across the message.

Regards,

Bernard

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Bernard,

It sounds as if your date for the Google Dance went home with someone else!

I actually agree with some of your statements, but not surprisingly, I vehemently disagree with many of them. Let me take your points one at a time:

"...you and everybody else have no control over long-term rankings".

Agreed! How can anyone control rankings? I've never claimed to control them. In fact, this is the main reason why I don't offer any guarantees for rankings, and why I don't label what I do as "search engine positioning." I don't "position" anything. If I could actually position or guarantee a particular ranking (not counting pay-per-click ads), I'd have quite a little racket going for myself! It's important for people to realize the distinction. If you enter into a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign thinking that you will suddenly be #1 for any and all keywords forever and ever, then you'll be sorely disappointed.

"You can be the best SEO in the world and when Google changes its criteria...you are the worst SEO in the world..."

I only partly agree with this statement. It's true that fluctuations in the rankings are a normal part of the biz. However, if you've truly done everything you can to optimize your pages for high rankings, you shouldn't see huge differences from month to month. Ups and downs of plus or minus 20 positions are to be expected.

When your rankings drop out of sight for more than one month, it's usually due to one or more specific reasons:

1) You've optimized for extremely competitive or general keywords.

These types of sites can show huge fluctuations in rankings in any given month. You've got to optimize these pages for all they're worth, and continue to build high-quality inbound links if you feel the need to rank highly with competitive words. Better yet, stop trying to shoot for the moon and take advantage of the ability to gain lots of "little traffic" for keywords that aren't quite as competitive.

2) You haven't actually optimized the site's pages to be the best they can be.

Very often, people *think* their site is optimized when in fact it's not. Just because you know some SEO doesn't mean there's not a whole lot more to learn. Doing a few rudimentary things like putting keywords in your Title tag may work for a while, giving you the false impression that that's all you needed to do. However, you've really only put on a Band-Aid! It was better than doing nothing, but a good Title tag does not make for an optimized site. I've put together plenty of in-depth reports on sites that have done a little bit of SEO. Many were even getting some high rankings. However, I've always been able to find things that they hadn't thought of yet, or that they didn't know existed. Since SEO is cumulative, each and every little tiny thing can add up to one great big ranking somewhere down the line. Sometimes it just takes a fresh pair of eyes to see these things, and sometimes it takes someone who lives and breathes SEO to understand the various nuances.

3) You've tried to trick the search engines, as opposed to working with them.

This will almost always backfire in the long term. Tricks can work temporarily, and may even be good for a quick shot in the arm. But if you're serious about your business and your Web site, you'll want to plan a long-term ranking strategy that doesn't involve trickery. A good percentage of sites that fall from page one rankings to page 100+ rankings have gotten there through the use of less than honorable SEO techniques. If this is the case for your site, you know what you've done and I don't feel sorry for you. Say bye-bye to quick fixes and hello to long-term successful SEO strategies! C'mon...you can do it!

"In the real world, have you noticed that Google have stopped using the PageRank algorithm to rank its pages"?

Nope. Of course they haven't!

"The results are coming up randomly...or it seems to me based on page title alone. Hypertext linking appears to be penalised whereas in the past it was the bee's knees".

From my vantage point, there has never been a huge correlation between the PageRank you see on your Google Toolbar and your page's ranking in the search results for a particular keyword phrase. As my friend Mel recently stated in my forum hangout, PageRank does NOT equal a page's ranking. I can't stress enough to you that PageRank is only one ranking criterion out of many, many ranking criteria. Yes, PageRank can affect your ranking, but not to the extent some people believe. And no, this is not something new. It's just that "PageRank" has suddenly become the buzzword of the year, giving it some sort of god-like status. I believe that PageRank has the same relevancy (or lack thereof) that it's always had in Google's ranking algorithm. (I have plenty of thoughts on PageRank which you can read in my PageRank Mania article.

"I assume this is down to the fact that Google needs money, and is trying to get the money from all the sites who have made money in the past from their high Google rankings".

If you're saying that Google is removing, banning or penalizing sites in order to get the companies to advertise using Google AdWords Select, I don't believe it for a minute. Perhaps I'm just naive, but I don't think that Google got where it is today by operating that way. If they were out to make a quick buck, they'd institute a paid-inclusion program like every other spidering engine has done. The reason they don't want to even do that is because they believe in the integrity of their search results and would prefer not to have money taint them (or give the impression of tainting them). Every time someone believes that their pages were banned from Google for that reason, they are simply wrong. They usually don't want to admit what they've been doing behind the scenes. It's very simple, actually. If you play by the rules, you won't get banned. If you break the rules and get banned...then too bad for you. Stop making up excuses for why Google is bad and take a look in your own mirror.

Before you jump down my throat and tell me you were banned and didn't do anything wrong, there have been some instances of sites being zapped by an over-zealous Googlebot, even though they haven't done anything wrong. These sites are few and far between, and Google has tweaked things a bit over the past few months so that the chances of this happening are fewer and fewer. If your site's suddenly missing, it's likely that there's a technical reason why. It's highly unlikely that Google is just trying to mess with your head!

"...our high ranking was not down to SEO but just down to the old theory of chuck enough *** at a wall and some of it will stick".

Well, there's your answer right there! Sure, some stuck and then it eventually fell off. Duh, that's what *** does when it gets thrown at the wall. But it's NOT what SEO is all about. In fact, it couldn't be further from how I and many others perform SEO. There are tried and true SEO methods that work...every time. I don't even look at competitors' sites when I start an SEO campaign for a client, because what they're doing is irrelevant to me. I only need to worry about what needs to be done to the site at hand. I realize this is not the way many of you approach your SEO campaigns, but if you think about it for a minute, it makes perfect sense. If you are comfortable with your optimization techniques and know that they work, then why do you care what the competitors are doing? What they're doing won't enable you to optimize your site any better than you were already going to optimize it (assuming you know exactly how to optimize a site).

I believe that last statement is critical for anyone who wants to move toward the future of SEO, i.e., making your site the best it can be for the search engines AND your visitors. Isn't that what matters the most? Put it all together, and that's what will help your bottom line. I guarantee you that if you shift your mind to this way of thinking, you'll be surprised at the positive results.