Clint, who I do not think I know, has a pretty good rant thread going on at SEW about his Google rankings headed south and business drying up.

His post was a bit over the top, and I am surprised with that tone and frame anyone wanted to help him, but he got a ton of good advice.

One of the biggest problems with SEO is that sometimes for an extended period of time the free leads allow you to profitably run what would otherwise be a completely non functional business model. Too often people take success for granted and do not shore up other marketing methods. Out of nowhere eventually they pay for the arrogence or laziness as the leads dry up.

With this site for a period of time I was a bit arrogent thinking that it wouldn't fall. Many of my links had the same anchor text since many of my early links used my official site name and most people link to this site use the same link text.

For a short period of time my rankings headed south due too much similar anchor text and a new Google filter. Luckily I had other revenue streams and traffic streams. Even without Google sending much traffic to my site for about a month my sales were still close to 90% of what they were the prior month.

Some of the feedback people gave Clint:
Scottie

You can't base your livelihood on getting free listings in Google. It's time to put together a real marketing plan if sales through your website are that important to your life.

NFFC

You have had 1st position for a large number of keywords for years and years, you have mysteriously disappeared overnight from Google, through no fault of your own, and [despite having a very good run over the last decade] are merely days away from having to live on the streets.

Does that about sum it up?

Mikkel

Personally I don't like to have much more than 10-20% of the traffic coming from organic results. It have to be low enough for me (or my clients) to survive if they are one day dumped from the index.

DaveN

I would look at the footprint of your site... and try a find other sites in different industries with a similar footprint... see if they have been hit as well..

Every time a search engine tries to fight spam, there is always a collateral damage... you could be in that % . and make no mistake Google just released a new spam fighting post filter

DanThies

The main reason why I don't put much emphasis on SEO for my own business is that we need to be able to manage growth, and the predictability of PPC is perfect for that. If we suddenly landed on page one of Google's results for the right search terms, I'd need to hire 15-20 more people to deal with the flood... then if we dropped back down again, what exactly would we do with those people? No thanks! For me, it's just as important to be able to turn the traffic off when we're growing too fast.

If some of the best SEOs in the world look for alternate marketing channels then it is probably best if other webmasters also create diverse marketing & revenue streams to help pull them through bumpy patches.

While Clint wanted to turn back the clock search algorithms continue to evolve. This is another reason why some of the worst SEO clients are those who used to rank well when algorithms were less sophistocated. Some of them believe:

• that its easy to do

• they know what to do (since they used to rank well)
• and you should be able to work for next to nothing

meanwhile their revenue stream has got cut and they are worried about paying their bills and have little to invest.

While I could probably afford to hire people now, I never have because I wanted to keep costs low in case anything ever fell out of favor. When it did I was still fine because I minimized costs, had other revenue streams, and have diverse traffic sources.

Last year was the first year I made profit from the web and I am already saving up and am still working hard to create other revenue streams.

RSS is eventually going to come under a heavy load. As marketers:

• create more and more RSS content generation tools (this one was announced today)

• the tool functionalities increase
• competition will cause prices to drop

huge numbers of people are going to be using RSS to create automated content streams.

RSS will become the next blog comment in the evolution of search. Since the content is legible, and some technologies make it easy to grab many related posts on a given topic, it might be a bit hard for search engines to distinguish the difference between original blog posts and fake feeder blogs that just recompile market data from various sources. Some people may even make legitimate regular posts to combine with the automated streams to make them seem more legitimate or manually compiled.

With hundreds of channels on a given topic you know that search engines are going to be in for some fun. This is yet another reason it will be hard for search engines to move away from link based relevancy systems.

Not something Google has mentioned (at least that I know of), but Robert Clough took a screenshot of AdSense ads on Search Engine Guide, which looks like there is an eBay favicon next to the eBay listing.

Luckily I already created an annoyingly bright favicon file which is ready and waiting to be used :)

Graphic text ads. hmm. To me it seems like it would make sense for Google to make ads on other sites look different than ads on Google to keep people clicking away at the Google.com ads for as long as they possibly can.

The more graphical Google makes ads on other sites the longer it will be before people become blind to text ads.

Google Hijacked in Google:
Official Google AdSense site bit by a meta refresh. hmm. Low quality site? more at ThreadWatch

For those who spin all the ethics stuff, do you think Google knew of the problem and was lying when they said it was no big deal? If so, is it ethical for them to tell blatent lies? If not, how is it that SEOs know more about their search engine than they do and they generally disocunt the whole concept of SEO?

Yahoo! Q Challenge:
whats up with a $5,000 prize - that surely is not much payout for the value they could create with that contest. I might need to create a similar marketing program for myself. hehehe

Exalead:
Michael Nguyen posts about some of their search features.

Novice Spam Tool:
I have not tried it, but someone promoted this site http://searchpr.info/test.php, via forum spam of course.

Yahoo! Public Site Match:
Nothing more than a PR stunt? It sure smells the part. A while ago they promoted that program a good bit, but it sure is hard to find information about it nowadays.

Masochistic Behavior:
reading IHY forums. I don't know anywhere else where a single comment can return pages about what a horrible person you are. SEO is doomed. We are all evil. hehehe

Lots of good ones in that rant thread, but one of my all time favorite Doug quote:

Most journalists I know of at least fall on one side or the other.

Another scary thing with that thread is I find myself agreeing with Glengara!

Open Source Rank Checker:
I have not tried it, but a friend pointed me to this software. I am not sure how it plays with Google, since they have been blocking some automated software.

OPD Should Close Shop?
Danny Sullivan weighs in on the ODP's recent site submission status closure.

Black Market Porn:
UK bans selling porn DVDs over the web. UK prostitution market to soar ;)

Funny:
There is a website that qualifies you and prints out your ordained ministor certification in under a minute. A person today tried to justify me giving away my business model to them because they spent the minute to print one out.

Evolution of Yahoo! Search:
article about Yahoo! creating their search service. thnx to RC

The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about smaller upstarts and the web challenging the business models of of big time academic publishers. It will be interesting to see how far advertising can take search companies before publishers get squeezed to the point where they revolt or make demands that spread to a critical mass.

In other, somewhat related news, Bill Moyers addressed the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis about a week ago.

One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at "Now" didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

he continues...

These "rules of the game" permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading. ... Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

Later he comments on the Journal:

But I confess to some puzzlement that the Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow Jones, had revenues in just the first quarter of this year of $400 million.

In other related news, Friday Ask Jeeves announced they bought out Excite Europe.

Any way you slice it, there are going to be a few gatekeepers to this thing we call the web, and to most media outlets in general. The more there are the better it is for consumers, and for that reason I might start trying a bit harder to use Google and Yahoo! a bit less.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out, but anyone who knows about SEO should see it as a personal responsibility to make sure people find what issues you feel are important.

Earlier today a friend of mine told me of a site he was creating about an ongoing, rarely covered, & brutal civil war.