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I've got a long history here, stretching all the way back to 2007. At that time 80% of my traffic was organic, and most importantly, was spread equally between
by rackforms 10y ago
I've got a long history here, stretching all the way back to 2007. At that time 80% of my traffic was organic, and most importantly, was spread equally between MSN, Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc.
I paid for ad's through HotScripts, and this was a solid source of leads. This mixture, along with a fast, secure, easy to use site and great word of mouth lead to an annual growth rate of around 30%, ending up in 2011 with a monthly income of just over $5000. Not bad for what started out as a side-project. I took none of this for granted, and worked by butt off every day.
It's key to note from 2007 to 2011 a great consolidation was taking place, with Google eating, for me at least, 90% of all search traffic.
Then the spammers hit. My site was targeted with millions of low quality links, which lead to a Google penalty in 2012. I lost 90% of my traffic and along with it, 90% of my revenue.
4 years on and I've never actually recovered from my penalty, with traffic being manually limited to under 30 clicks on any particular day.
I've done my best to advertise, with Google capturing the lions share. Unfortunately I too have very little luck with this channel, with only 1 $4 conversion after hundreds spent.
The real kicker here, and my reason for posting, is the difference between what was my organic traffic then, and my ad traffic now, is nowhere near the same in terms of quality and obviously, conversions.
I guess my point is the current situation, basically 2 companies controlling so much traffic, seems, well, bad for small business in this country. I value what they bring to the table and fully understand why they're so popular. But is things keep on this way where does that lead the guys like me? Is this just the way it has to be? Is the dream of the open Internet already dead?
- emmanuel_1234 10y ago"I guess my point is the current situation, basically 2 companies controlling so much traffic, seems, well, bad for small business in this country" Why "in this country"? Isn't it a problem for the entrepreneurs in the rest of the world too?
- SloppyStone 10y agoMore importantly, which country?
- rackforms 10y agoYes, and I should have said as much.
- iopq 10y agoChinese businesses don't care, Russian businesses don't care, etc.
- coldtea 10y agoSays who?
- iopq 10y agoNobody in China uses Google other than English speakers. Google is notoriously bad at breaking Chinese characters up into words. Few people in Russia use Google for Russian language searches, this is because Google is not as good at declining Russian nouns and conjugating Russian verbs. Yandex gives more results of a higher quality for certain searches.
- coldtea 10y ago>Nobody in China uses Google other than English speakers. Google is notoriously bad at breaking Chinese characters up into words. That has no bearing on whether Chinese businesses care. Obviously there are tons of Chinese businesses that sell outside China, including retail businesses, and their customers DO use Google. Same for the Russian case.
- kofejnik 10y ago>> Few people in Russia use Google for Russian language searches This is not true, Google has >20% share in Russia iirc
- iopq 10y agoI didn't say nobody, I said few. 1/5 is not that many compared to the usage in English-speaking countries.
- maxdo 10y agoThat's bulshit, Google auditory is bigger even in Russia, not saying about other russian speaking countries. prof: https://www.searchengines.ru/google_oboshel.html https://www.searchengines.ru/google_oboshel.html
- somid3 10y agoWow, this is EXACTLY why I found this topic so annoying. Thank you for sharing!
- beedogs 10y agoIf it makes you feel any better, I've been blocking ads the whole time.
- cconcepts 10y agoThe spammy links thing fascinates me. I don't know much about search algos or SEO but on our small, industrial business site we couldn't understand why, after many hours and thousands of dollars spent on the procedures that Google recommends, our organic ranking in SERPs for a very niche product (of which we are one of only three providers in our region) was appalling - often page three. It wasn't till we realised we had 10,000+ spammy links pointed at our site that we wondered whether we had been the victim of some malicious attack. We couldn't recover the penalty to the site no matter how hard we worked and have had to rebuild at a new domain as a result. For small businesses like us, is it really possible for a competitor to just destroy our online credibility like that or am I just paranoid?
- Taek 10y agoNah, if there's money on the line there's a lot of reason to target you for a penalty. Scammy sites can't get attention if there's a legitimate site in the search results. SEO is a big industry and taking down competitors is a part of being the top N results.
- cconcepts 10y agoSo how do I combat against this? We're a small, honest company providing great products and services for the companies that need them but we're getting killed online because no one can find us. I've forked out a lot (for us) on adwords and the return has been negligible to say the least. Does this mean that the democratizing power of the internet has been swallowed up for small, lean companies like us who cant afford a mega adwords budget?
- maksimum 10y agoTry finding influencers with high pagerank (page 1-2 for your business type) and paying them to review/feature your products and link to your site.
- reefoctopus 10y agoYou have to disavow the bad links. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
- WhitneyLand 10y ago>My site was targeted with millions of low quality links Are you saying competitors maliciously sabotaged your ranking? Or that you bought SEO services from an unscrupulous company?
- ehnto 10y agoEither could be just as true, and you can't always tell which SEO company will be unscrupulous. They are masters of the spin, after all. I have resolved to never use the services of an SEO company. Having both been burnt and worked in the industry itself, I would rather not work on a project that relies on "SEO" for important revenue at all. As noted above, it is a fickle and ultimately brittle way to prop a business up.
- kyledrake 10y agoDoes Google actually punish sites for buying spam SEO, or is this speculation without evidence? They don't publish page rank scores anymore, so how can one know? How does one determine their site is "punished"? I have seen the consequences of paying for SEO. They spam your site URL on random web forums. If you pay for SEO, you are very likely paying people to use bots and sweatshops to spam your site url via low quality garbage links dumped on Twitter, on web site hosts, in comment sections and forums. A lot of this traffic originates from criminal botnets. Seriously, don't do it. As an example I just pulled out of our filter, here's what you're really paying for when you pay for SEO: https://twitter.com/karenhall191 https://twitter.com/karenhall191 Unfortunately, as a web hosting provider (neocities.org), I have to deal with some of the fallout from this. Google's business model creates this problem, but they provide little support and few tools to help us deal with it (reporting API please?), and we're largely forced to go it alone.
- sherlockgopher 10y agoGoogle tends to ignore these things, just see how poor Google Analytics dashboard is, I hear clicky has a better dashboard as compared to GA.
- 10y ago
- edwinyzh 10y agoIt never occurred to me that back links from other websites would hurt ranking, I thought it's OK as long as a website don't point to other spamming sites... So this is really scary, it means that other people can attach your ranking...
- brianwawok 10y agoHence the disvow link button
- A_Crazy_Idea 10y agoCan you explain to me what the "obvious appeal" of AdWords is? A market for words and terms sounds more like a Free-to-play model then an actual legitimate business, why would you pay? Is it so hard to send text and hyperlinks around the internet and have it display on someone's webpage that your willing to compete with random 3rd parties for Google's benefit? Honestly, I cannot fathom why anyone agrees to this. It's not like gentrification actually works on the internet. I mean, without the artificial scarcities you agree to inflict upon yourself for no benefit to anyone but those trying to charge you rent.
- danarmak 10y ago> Is the dream of the open Internet already dead? At most, the dream of ad-funded websites might be dead. (I wish!) This dream created a lot of value by providing free services to Web users. But it also created a lot of harm by enticing those users into closed gardens full of surveillance, which service providers created to gather data to drive ad revenue. I think on net the harm is much greater; we'd have a much more open Internet today if people had gotten used to paying a few dollars a year for ad-free webmail, IM, social networking, search engine access, etc.
- phpnode 10y ago> At most, the dream of ad-funded websites might be dead. (I wish!) What you are wishing for is a world in which access to things like Google Search which we take utterly for granted now are forced to become paid services. What are the implications of that, particularly for the world's poorest?
- danarmak 10y agoHow much does it cost Google Search to support an extra user on the margin? I don't really know, but I'd wager much less than $1/year - because it's very implausible that the extra ad revenue it gets today from an extra user is more than that. (The world's poorest people are a really bad target audience for ads - they have very little discretionary income!) Meanwhile, the cost of Internet access for the poorest people is at least an order of magnitude bigger, maybe two orders of magnitude (since the cost to Google probably is much less than $1). Also, poor people's main or only Internet access is often via smartphones, and mobile data costs much more per GB than landline ISPs. On the margin, some people who can afford Internet access today would not be able to also afford (as many) paid services. I'm willing to pay this price, in exchange for everyone who could afford access and services (including most of the poor people who can do so now) getting much better and more varied service and much less surveillance. Also, a paid model would enable people who publish blogs and other sites, and various services. Finally, if you treat Internet or Web access and services as very important and maybe a human right, then governments should provide it or subsidize access or regulate prices. Absent that, for-profit corporations paid by users would be much better than the same corporations paid by advertisers.
- simplegeek 10y agoPardon my ignorance but why do generally spammers hit a website?
- matchagaucho 10y agoGoogle at least has the organic option. "If your content is fresh and linked to from reputable sites, we'll promote you in the search results... for free." Facebook is purely pay-for-play. Paying for boosted posts is the only way to cut through the noise (unless your content goes organically viral, which only has a 24 hr shelf life).
- hamfisted 10y agoIf you have watched the SERPS (search engine results pages) over the years you have seen that a number 1 organic ranking has gone from # 1 to something like #20 after all of the ads and what not that are shown above the first organic rank these days. Some evolution images and stories: http://searchengineland.com/evolution-google-serps-three-key-takeaways-smx-west-2015-216555 http://searchengineland.com/evolution-google-serps-three-key... It is still "free" but takes a lot of work to get there, and it is worth less than it used to be. Lots of SEO's have gone the way of paid.