The Best SEO Tactic is to do Nothing at all?
Not true. Google may be slow to rank a site. They may even temporarily or permanently dump websites for aggressive promotion.
While many people are still stuck on the mindset that Google is search, there are many other sources of traffic. Some sites get banned by Google and lose less than 10% of their traffic.
MSN and Yahoo! are fairly easy to manipulate right now, and Google can only throw out a limited amount of baby with the bathwater before their search results become irrelevant - causing them to lose market share.
When Google talks about how PageRank uses the uniquely democratic web blah blah blah... they fail to mention how they sometimes are willing to dump a million websites to plug a hole. There is nothing democratic about that.
Many of the people who are going after algorithmic exploits are focused on conversion. If a site has a 30-40% conversion rate there is no legitimate way a search engine can state that they filtered it out to provide a good user experience.
Yahoo! and MSN seem to understand that. Google seems a bit behind the curve on that concept though.
Google got ahead because they placed user experience ahead of profit. As they twist about figuring out how to extract profits from the value they created - they should recognize why and how they built that wealth - and realize it is just as easy to lose it.
