Content doesn't matter anymore for SEO
 

At least.. that is my conclusion...

last few updates I noticed that google devalued my handwritten unique and relevant blogs. My EMD blog is now ranking lower than less relevant sites for that keyword... When I look at my competition for my keywords, I feel confident saying that my sites are more relevant, have better content and suit what the surfer is looking for perfectly...Basically I am outranked by 5 of the same WhiteLabels...

Google sure loves thin affiliate sites :thumbsup

At the same time I notice that also my WhiteLabel keeps ranking in the top... a WL that is similar to 1000's or maybe 10.000's of other Wl's... Again.. Google sure loves thin affiliate sites :thumbsup

Conclusion... content doesn't matter anymore... You can spend hours and hours a day writing unique and relevant content like me.. because you thought (like me) that google will appreciate your hard work. The opposite it true... in the end you only need a few articles or just a WL and 10000 backlinks... Writing unique quality articles doesn't help you one bit if you do not have enough backlinks...

actually I think the only thing that matters now is backlinks

google... :321GFY

You've gone nuts.

Btw.. I will keep writing unique articles... because I am hoping google will come to it's senses one day and reward sites like mine in stead of for example WL's

thanks, :2 cents: indeed search engines can have that effect on me sometimes

:1orglaugh

:1orglaugh

I need to ask how anyone who promotes Chaturbate WL's can accept that all Chaturbate WL's will show the below for the Meta description in Google or other :

freesexcams69.com/
A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt ? learn more

Chaturbate say :

"Based on our SEO guys recommendation we're not going to change the robots.txt. We don't intend for people to use these whitelabels for SEO purposes. "

I never understood that ?

I feel your pain. Getting hit hard on my handwritten blog network also..

:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup

WL's usually have 1000's of indexed pages and provide what surfers want if they are searching for cam/live sex terms, so not sure what you are talking about.

a WL is the perfect example of a thin affiliate site... google said they are punishing thin affiliates sites, so why do they get the top positions? That is what I am talking about

yes, that policy sucks IMO, I also wasn't referring to my Chaturbate WL when I wrote about top rankings

probably because they provide what surfers want... doubt people searching for "live sex" etc. are looking for any hand-written blogs...

Won't happen. I told about it a number of times while Google was moving to it, and now it's there. They want you to make sites for real people but not for search engines, so "uniqueness" of your blog posts doesn't matter anymore. The most important things are: the time the surfers spend on your time, the depth of surfing, % of returned surfers and low bounce rate.

Let's imagine you have two blogs about mobile phones: a hand written one and an autoblog which syndicates mobile-related video reviews from various sources (e.g. YouTube channels). Try to guess on which site the surfer will stay longer? Who wants to read a boring keyword-rich "unique" text winch was written for search engines if there is a cool site full of relevant videos, even if these videos are not "unique"?

This is why your hand-written blog can't beat a properly made autoblog anymore.

Time to dump google, no?

And this is your non-biased opinion?

Agreed. Now would be the absolute worst time to send volume of unproductive traffic to a new site and give it a ridiculous bounce rate. You would fuck that site's chances of ranking good and proper.

Sounds logic.

Absolutely. I have both hand-written and automatically generated blogs. The SE traffic on handwritten ones has dropped dramatically, and I don't even update them anymore. Why? Because my autoblogs have incomparably more of quality content and they are being constantly updated a few times a day.

Look at Google SERPs for adult keywords. They all filled up with absolutely non-unique tube videos which usually don't have even a short description. Where all those hand-written blogs with "unique" content now? They've gone because surfers actually don't like them.

Exactly :2 cents:

well that does makes sense I guess, but I still believe in quality handwritten reviews (for example), I already tried not to write for search engines, I always try to write reviews that surfers can actually use...reviews with useful info that will guide them when searching for sex. But I guess I should adapt too and make my sites more "cool" and fun to surf.. so surfers will stay and watch those relevant "videos" for example.

A balanced combination of what I do and what you suggest sounds best to me

Sure, in this case you could rank well for terms like "cam site reviews" etc., but not for generic cam terms as that's not exactly what your site provides.

By unique and hand-written do you mean:

"Wow, she's a hot slut. Look how she sucks that big cock."

SEE MORE AT BRAZZERS

:question

I hope everyone follows your advice and stops producing original text content.
Letting me have all that SEO traffic would be much appreciated. ;)

other area's of the site can rank for other terms

never said I will stop producing, I just said google doesn't seem to appreciate my original texts. At least not like before...

Google is relying on back links now more than ever. That's primarily all it's about is your back links (which is silly but I'll save that discussion). If you have good back links which are not spammy you will come up first. If you have great unique content but no quality back links you'll lose. People forget too that affiliate content isn't technically original unique content. Google can even read flash now. To Google it's the same crap 1000 other sites have. The irony? You know those illegal tube sites? That content is seen as more unique and original than your affiliate content. Not everyone has it because it's supposed to only be available behind the pay wall in the member area. So to Google the illegal tubes have all sorts of unique, original content.

I agree, and that's basically what I said in the beginning:

"actually I think the only thing that matters now is backlinks"

All that matters is backlinks, yet everyone is scrambling to get old backlinks removed. Sweet.

Yes, its all about backlinks!! get to work yo

My blogs all have hand written unique content on them, What i seem to find is whenever I do an Update my traffic falls whether its because of the keywords used in the last update post I dont know, But I have def seen a drop in traffic on my older blogs with hand written content

You'll steal it from tubes. Good luck on that :winkwink:

Not after Penguin.

Actually even more after Penguin.

Not just any backlinks but quality backlinks. Quality means backlinks which Google does not detect as fishy for whatever reason. It merely added a way for people who know what they are doing to further game the system. As long as you are within the expected profile you can add backlinks to get ahead. The people who try to do it naturally will be below you or in some cases even penalized because THEY are seen as low quality. To Google a site with not many good backlinks is now one of the main ways to get classified as "low quality". Google is now 90% a popularity engine, 10% search engine proper.

That depends on origin (relevance) and format (% of keywords in anchors) of those links.

Correct.

SEO :1orglaugh

I've been doing some pretty large scale testing on quality factors such as time on page, bounce rates and various flows throughout a site (with Analytics powered sites), and to say the least, the information Google collects from analytics plays a large factor in rankings. Backlinks and pagerank seem to have diminished dramatically compared to quality factors.
WG

:thumbsup

if it is true that they evaluate the bounce rate by GA this would be a breach of data records

I've done some really specific benchmarking where I purposely took control sites with minimal backlinks which had really high bounce rates of 90% or so and then replicated a similiar user experience (I won't go into much detail on what I did here) where I prolonged the retention times and reduced the bounce rates from all traffic sources, Search/TypeIn/Referral traffic, and got my analytics in the 40% bounce rate and 45-60 sec hold times. The results took almost a month to realize but with all other factors being equal, it was quite apparent that the analytics information was affecting rankings.

All page content stayed the same, no increase in links. The only variable difference was the new traffic I had introduced to alter the analytic information.
WG

I follow you. the next test would be to install an alternative analytics software and no WT.

Already running... have a similiar setup without analytics, but does webmaster tools. I found that time to spider and include into G index went up quite a bit. The domain is only 4 weeks old but starting to appear in slowly. I should know in another 4 weeks or so if this is better or worse.

The domain I'm testing that has nothing at all, no analytics and no webmaster tools has been crawling for even longer it seems. Almost 6 weeks and not even 25% of all the pages yet.

Its easy to assess inclusion times from the above, but what really matters is the SERP's. Thus far, I've been able to manipulate the analytics information, the other 2 cases I haven't had enough listings to try to manipulate yet however. But it does seem clear the more information Google has, the faster she's willing to index and while its early to say so, I'm willing to bet the more it will affect rankings.

WG

Long ass blog posts are just se spam when it comes to porn. Nobody looking for porn is looking to read much of anything. This thread sort of confirms that.

Right, because although G may be reacting to longer on-site time and less bounce, it may not be measuring it via analytics. It could be toolbar data, or return-to-search results data, etc.

I'd think they would have learnt their lesson by now about data privacy, but you never know. It's hard for data geeks to resist using every scrap of data they can lay their hands on.

And I do suspect the use of GA data because I recently put GA on a single page of a large site as I wanted data about that page only of a type hard to get another way, and a week later there was a huge drop for the entire site. In retrospect I think I falsely fed them info suggesting that the bounce rate for the site was 100%, because with GA only on a single page there would never be a second page load on that site even if the user did indeed click through to somewhere else on the site.

back to roots?

"GFY" ranks fourth for the search term "GFY" - at least up here. Google and relevance parted company years ao.

booyakasha!

For those of you saying it is the bounce rate, can you post if you have a Webmaster Tools account and/or a Google Analytics account. Would love to see if others are seeing the same trend.
WG

I have seen a slight drop myself and I do everything by hand as well.

I think the key to this is to just get the surfer sticking around longer. Focus on adding content that makes them want to stay or click instead of jumping to an affiliate tour. Just my two cents.