Pixelrage.net

Here are several conclusions I’ve come to about the state of SEO and why 2011 should be considered the climax of your SEO career.

1. Say goodbye to comfort. Some of those cemented rankings you’ve been enjoying for years are probably now gone. If so, you’re scrambling to figure out how to get them back and make up for the loss of hundreds of dollars per month. The reality of it is that you can’t use any of the SEO tactics you knew and loved anymore, and it will probably take a long period of time to get those rankings back.
2. Google screwed up. Google Panda certainly was not without flaw. Type in some search queries that your sites rank for (especially ones you no longer rank for), and you’ll see that pages 1 & 2 still are peppered with garbage websites that have two dashes in the domain name and are full of spun content. Like everyone else, you’ll probably think about why your site, which is so much more worthy, is now on page 7. So much for the algorithmic upgrade punishing the same old scumbags who have been annoying both users and fellow marketers for years.
3. The rich get richer. More than ever, big brands dominate page 1, 1-5 for generic 2 and 3-keyword terms. Why? It’s because the new algorithm favors social sharing, and these days, most big companies hire advertising agencies for thousands of dollars a month to manage and analyze social campaigns. These services also engage in heavy link building both online and offline. I know, because I project managed one at my last job. Your personal Twitter, Facebook Page and bookmarking efforts pale in comparison, and they always will. And, who will get more +1 button clicks on Google? A famous brand name site, or some newcomer with a freshly built website who’s trying to work it up?
4. SERPs differ depending on where you are. Strangely enough, your site might be ranking at the top of page 1 of Google for a certain term when you search for it at home, but not in your neighboring area. Or across the country. Call your friends, ask them to search for a term and then have them tell you where your site is ranking over there – you’ll see. This has made life very hard on those who need to know their SERP position status. The old notion of “awesome, I’m ranking on page 1 #2 for “best used cars” in my country!” is out the window.
5. The way your site ranks is correlated to how it performs. Several years ago, webmasters wondered if Google was beginning to rank sites based on the sort of thing we see in Google Analytics: bounce rate per keyword, average time spent, etc. We can now pretty much confirm that this is happening in the current day.
6. Be paranoid, be very paranoid. By tomorrow, you can lose that wonderful ranking you currently have, and it will come without warning and without reason. You’ll notice when you log into Analytics and see that dreaded red percentage, followed up by a trough in your dashboard chart. The worst part of all is that there’s no textbook quick fix like there used to be. You can shuffle around your page titles and keyword densities all day, but it will be in vain.
7. Oh yeah, there’s Yahoo and Bing, too. Remember those? They’ve changed algorithms as well – I’ve noticed some sharp decreases in rankings to the two other giants who never seem to grace the headlines of SEO news sites. “Well, at least I’m still ranking #1 on Yahoo” – NOT!

The What & Why of What Happened to SEO

What I personally see happening is a shift toward websites that are just truly awesome and have a LOT of constant work put into them. Kind of like the upper 5% of every niche getting its rightful place on page 1 for their intended term. However, in order to get there, you’re going to need a lot of help from tens of thousands of strangers sharing and +1′ing your stuff.

If you’ve spent all of these years running 20 sites that run themselves, you’re one foot in the grave.

We’ve moved away from bookmarking our own sites on Digg and Delicious to begging others to share our stuff on Facebook and Google+. Our level of personal control in link building is mortally wounded. Google knows where you are, what you’re doing and how you’re attempting to manipulate your own sites. So, unless you have 5 dozen friends around the country who will help you promote your site naturally on a fairly regular basis, you’re going to just have to make awesome sites that people will want to share.

It seems like a natural progression. The internet has so many websites. For too long, people like us have been gaming them (i.e. personal link building). Now, it’s really up to the general public and the way they naturally interact with your site. For that, I have to say, I’m pretty happy.

What’s alarming is that there is no immediate solution to fixing a ‘sandbox’ or lost ranking situation. It’s just devastating. This is why you can no longer mass produce websites. Yet, at the same time, you can no longer just rely on one niche. Hopefully you have a lot of time on your hands.

This really is the age of branding – it’s the age of “Hotels.com,” not of “BestCheapHotels.info.” Become well known, and people will associate your site with your niche, bypassing much of the heartache known as SEO.

This is also the age of paranoia in internet marketing. You should feel paranoid about that site you never update anymore, which is miraculously still ranking pretty highly. You should feel paranoid about your sites not having social campaigns, or no +1′s. You should feel paranoid about those old affiliate sites you’ve been running – because affiliate storefronts are harder than ever to rank…especially if they fall within topics where article writing and social sharing is nearly impossible.

It seems like the best way to survive is to choose the most successful sites out of your entire portfolio and put your heart and soul into them. Unless you truly have time or assistance, bid the rest farewell. Make it a daily obligation to socially market these one or two sites, write articles and encourage activity. It’s called survival…