You have a site to rank, what are you to do in the post-Penguin world? Sure you could try removing links (which is, IMHO, Google’s conspiracy plan for you to out yourself and everybody else somehow related to what you’ve been doing as not a single person has confirmed so far they have recovered after being affected by Penguin just due to removing links – but that is a topic for another post), but what if it’s a new site and you have nothing to remove? Well, you have to build some links. But how do you build links that won’t get you screwed? Obviously, you build something that hasn’t attracted the wrath of Google explicitly yet. Or have somebody who knows better build these for you.

So what’s a poor site owner / marketing agency looking to outsource to assume seeing Facebook ads like this?

Supposedly the business advertising their services knows what Penguin safe links are, right? Does everybody actually follow all Matt Cutts rants against infographics and guest posts being abused to death and being the new kind of spam? How does one ensure the quality of the service provided if they don’t know the first thing about what’s safe and what isn’t? How many people out there actually know, post-Penguin? Ads like that one (the actual site withheld to protect the innocent) surely boost people’s confidence and trust in you knowing what you do, especially when they head over to your site and read things like “Our SEO articles have been published by SEOmoz, SitePoint, and Search Engine Journal“.

Seriously, shut the #$&*@ up!

Nevermind that when they get from the aforementioned Facebook ad to your site, it’s not some landing page talking specifically about infographics or guest posting but just a general page about white label SEO services (what a targeted approach, unless the end goal is just to collect a nice email list to spam later with all kinds of other poorly targeted offers, which is quite often seems to be the model for too many similar agencies).

How’s a poor soul looking to outsource their linkbuilding to know how poorly guest posting scales? How are they to know that what they are about to get is either a slew of low quality posts on low quality untargeted sites or a few decent but way overpriced pieces on a few select sites that are surely nice to have in a site’s link profile but in the long run don’t have that much impact and won’t get the site ranking overnight? Only somebody who practiced it directly, and in the exact given niche, knows for sure.

And no, guest posting in the SEO niche doesn’t come even close and cannot be compared – it’s a totally different animal, with much different priorities and more tolerance to self-pitching on average than any other industry – at least we all know and understand perfectly well why we’re all doing this. Outside of that niche, largely, doing the thing properly is one hell of a job. Especially if you keep in mind that guest posting is not about getting links at all – it’s about building relationships… Building relationships in a short time for a bunch of different industries? Requires some serious whoring skills!

And infographics, OMG, all the tasteless meaningless unreadable shit people refer to calling it infographics… Don’t even get me started. So take two most resource intensive (if done right) linkbuilding techniques – guest posting and infographics… Scale it all if you can! While preserving the bloody quality! You stand better chances catching a leprechaun on a moonless night in downtown New Delhi.

It ends where it began

Oh, but there’s an upside to this story. You get a service like that to build you some links, once they are finished and you get to the next round of Google’s mass mailing campaign and you get a love letter from them telling you that maybe possibly you have some links that can possibly be disliked by Google but Google won’t tell you which ones, you now have something to do! Why, remove those feckers of course! The online linkbuilding economy has come the full circle, the cycle is now complete!

I’m only surprised we don’t see any Facebook ads advertising link removal services – maybe it’s just my luck? I surely have seen a few link removal tools being pitched here and there, why not the services? Or are we getting there yet?

1. Google is an SEO’s god.  It’s true and many SEO don’t know it.  Google says add this text, or remove that tag and an SEO will race to see how fast he can please Google.Just a whisper of a new algo change will have SEO’s running to their computer to see if they can discover what Google has changed.  Webmaster around the world pay these SEO’s because of their great knowledge of the Google god.
2. This exchange of money with anyone other than Google angers the Google god.  But again many SEO’s think Google loves them.
3. Google has labeled all SEO’s as spammers.  Google has said time and again anyone that manipulates a site for the purpose of ranking higher in Google is a spammer.
4. The reason Google shows organic results isn’t because they love the small business owner.  They need that content.  They can buy it, write it, or steal it.  They’ve chosen to steal it.  But as long as the content writers are making money no one cares.  Many SEO’s don’t understand why Google is using that content; again they think it’s out of love.
5. Google is getting more aggressive with their ad placements and have begun using the organic results as nothing more than feeler text.
6. Today it’s much harder to get ranked on Google and you are less likely to get the results from those rankings that were achieved 3 years ago.
7. Google’s war with the World has caused the good content writers to go underground.  Some of the best content is now found behind steal walls designed to keep Google out.
8. Consumers are beginning to skip Google and head straight for the retailer.
9. There’s a new godin town that’s about to kick Google ass.  As an unlikely rival as they might seem it would appear that Amazon might be the next Google.
10. Commercial searches make up 20 percent of Google searches.  This is where Google’s money comes from.  More and more consumers are skipping Google altogether and going straight to Amazon.  Google’s going to feel that in their bottom line.

And to me, search is search.  It makes no difference if it’s making a product rank in the search engines or making a product rank on a social media site.  SEO’s are going to have to spread out a bit.  If not the social media marketers will move in and steal our thunder.

Me, I am a web designer.  If there’s a way to optimize the search results for a site and drive traffic to my site, I’d like to hear about it.

I’ve compiled some useful tips to help any budding spa-*cough* special ops email marketer put together an excellent email guaranteed to get maximum return on inboxment:

1. Don’t address the SEO personally – That is for suckas – instead, use something generic like “Hi”, “Hello”, “Greetings Sir and/or Madam” or sometimes leave in a variable so they really know you mean business, e.g. “Hi first-name$,”.
2. Forget about grammar – In fact, this is crucial in making you sound legit. Ensure that no effort is made whatsoever to spell-check. Mixing tenses is highly recommended. Promise things that happened in the present & don’t look back! Run-on sentences are good too. All of these things help promote your quality assurance skills.
3. Make an impact- Choose from the following introductions:
   • “I will like to make small introduction about our company which will help you in selecting us as your trusted SEO Outsourcing Partner.”
   • “It’s fact: more people find out about your business on Facebook or Twitter than on search engine.”
   • I am “<Enter your name>” – I am an <Enter your special powers>.(e.g. I am Boris – I am an Executive.)
4. Be direct – Tell us what we do – we don’t know. If it wasn’t for people like you we’d be sitting around at our desks firing rubber bands at random objects & possibly insulting insects as they randomly pass us by.
5. Turn up the volume – Write with CAPSLOCK ON. It’s not like you’re next door and can “skate”-on by… you are on the other side of the globe & yelling through your virtual megaphone is fine. Besides, how else could we really catch what you’re throwing?
6. Don’t be afraid to use colour – Imagine Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory without colour – oh noes! How dull. Ensure that your email stands out by colouring every second line. Bonus points for alternating colours at the letter level, e.g. Google. This helps with integrity too.
7. Point out the bleeding obvious – Most SEOs don’t really understand what they do or how to do it so it’s important to explain in layman’s terms how to do SEO. Bonus points awarded for guaranteeing to rank #1 for numerous keywords!
8. Keep us on our toes- Randomly throw in a full stop mid-sentence to check that we’re paying attention to your thoughtful prose that has been carefully constructed for our reading pleasure. It also leaves us hanging for more. A fine example: “I was surfing through your website and realized that despite having a good design.” What? What did you realise?? C’mon man… I got to know!!
9. Don’t include a website link – We don’t want to see any credentials – we take your word, seriously. Also, not having/including a website demonstrates a confidence in your own ability so great that it literally sends shivers down our spines.
10. Chase hard – If at first you don’t succeed, leave it 5 minutes and try again. SEOs love this and will most likely want your babies if you follow up in rapid succession.

You now have the perfect recipe to construct an indestructible email guaranteed to add value to everyone’s day and most importantly… inbox. You have also increased your chances of being considered as a candidate.

Halt!

I hope you didn’t think any of this was serious… Just consider an alternative approach altogether to get people’s attention to hire you such as what these guys (Grinter + Spencer) did when they hijacked some domains:

…or Emiland, who used Slideshare to land a job:

…otherwise you’re going straight to the trash can!

Bonus:
I’ve taken the liberty of drafting an email that I encourage you to use when replying to an email that lands in your inbox, of this nature. Simply reply with the below & help our little friends become better at prospecting:

Dear Executive!

Best,
firstname$

Either way, I call BULLSHIT.

Why? That’s fairly simple. Allow me to make it real easy for ya, ok?

1. It is a rolling update and we’ve just had V1.1 last Friday (May 25th). That means unless you wrote about it since then, yer full of shit.
2. If you wrote about HOW to recover, same goddamned problem as outlined above. How in the hell would you know?

This is just like the folks that write about search patents/papers as if they were gospel instead of using not-so-impressive words like ‘may be’ ‘could be’. Any type of recovery advice should be prefaced with ‘possible’ or ‘ideas how to’ and that’s about it ya dang nerf-herders.

And I really don’t know which one’s are worse. The ignorant bird-brains that don’t even get how Penguin rolls, or the ones that are just looking to cash in and get eyeballs to their posts. Don’t believe me? (and there were high profile fuck ups too, just being nice today).

Oh and while I am at it, can we just STFU with all the theories about Penguin/Panda? Seriously. Just before the last Panda update and the first Penguin roll out, there was an unnamed link spam type algo. It hit some folks hard too. We should be talking about ‘Google algo changes affecting SEO’ instead of trying to focus on fuzzy fucking animals. Why? Because it makes us look like a bunch of turds as we have no idea which affects can be completely attributed to which algo changes.

When talking about this with my SEO Dojo cohorts, Lee Beirne said something I thought worth adding, “I find too many SEO’s chase algo’s. Just get on with what you do and take not of changes instead of trying to be Einstien.” – WORD!!!

Laterz….

As stated in the post;

“No semantic boost for on page benightedness. [launch codename “Orca”, project codename “Hide and seek”] We have modified a spam classifier we use to exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality due to semantic obtuseness. This is a bridge from our work on semantic terminology framework utilization from last months search quality updates”

In speaking to a Googler ‘off the record’ we have learned that it has to do with search engine optimization that relies heavily on concepts related to LSI, (Latent semantic indexing) LDA, (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and other semantic analysis approaches. Early on we’ve seen a lot of posts (and tools even) getting de-indexed that deal with giving advice on using these types of semantic analysis to boost rankings.

Dubbed by many in the SEO industry as the ‘STFU’ penalty, top professionals we spoke with had advised search optimizers and bloggers to stop writing about and performing such tactics at once. In light of the recent iAcquire / D&B fiasco, it is quite possible Google may even start to de-index companies that talk about using such processes.

Oh and just in case you still hadn’t caught on? We’re just fucking with yer head ya muppet. Seriously, a ‘STFU penalty’? On the SEOBS blog no less? My happy band of cohorts at the SEO Training Dojo just love to fuck with me by dropping shit about LSI/LDA in our chat room to get me going… so we just couldn’t resist writing this contrived lunacy. Stop using fancy fucking terms and just call it what it is; semantic analysis.

’nuff said….

Related reading;

• Let the LDA Google Games Begin
• SEO myths & crap; LSI and Google
• Google Rankings and LDA
• Latent Semantic Indexing and Google; One more time
• On SEOs Latest Deceiving Artifact (LDA)

Pages not worth reading;

• LSI Keywords Simple Yet Very Powerful
• What do LDA, LSI and a few other geeky acronyms have to do with Search Rank Predictability?
• LSI Keywords
• Understanding Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for Improved SEO Copywriting

Big thanks to;

• Doc Sheldon (technical research)
• Thomas Fjordside (imagery consultant)
• Adam J. Humphreys (quality assurance)

“Domination to the point of demoralization,” is my answer.

That’s when the bug-eyed, blank stare hits me.

The concept of my strategy is so under-estimated, so feared, so rare, that no one hardly ever gets it that THAT is what I’m doing.    Go fucking psycho on them.  But that’s my strategy.

WHAT IS PSYCHO?
Well, it starts with sleepless nights.  Or day-night sleep reversal, whatever you call it.  Personally, I can’t work while those wretched birds chirp so that means when the birds start chirping, it’s time for bed.  Although, I live in Vegas, and perhaps that’s par for the course.  However, the indisputable fact remains:  ”I worked well beyond what you’re capable of working. I win.”  And, that’s my strategy, people.  Work harder than anyone else to the point where other competitors look at your campaign and say to themselves, “that site dominates everything, why bother?”

Perfect.  The exact response I was looking for.

DOMINATION TO THE POINT OF DEMORALIZATION
That’s my motto.  I want to make you cry.  I want to make you feel hopeless.  I want it so you don’t even try to compete with me.  Why?  Because you CAN’T COMPETE WITH PSYCHO.   Nothing instills a win faster than someone contemplating to compete with you then giving up because you never became complacent with your campaign and this fact is evident when competitors try to belly-up and play ball with a pro.

“Don’t even try.”  That’s the message I’m trying to convey.

FINISH YOUR SHIT.  DOESN’T MATTER IF IT FAILS.
Don’t be a douchebag.  The MOST COMMON defense mechanism your big-fat oversized brain will try to impose on you is “If you don’t finish the site, and it fails, then it’s okay but you never gave it 100%.”

That’s TOTAL SEO BULLSHIT.

Recognize that your brain is trying to save you from pain.  If you were to deploy, what you considered to be a 100% awesome site, and it failed, you would then conclude that YOU are a failure and your brain will do everything in its power to prevent pain.     DEPLOY THAT SHIT.  FACE THE PAIN.

If your idea/site is a failure, then so be it.  But don’t NOT do something because you want it to be perfect and, therefore, if it’s not perfect it’s not deployable.  That’s a bullshit defense mechanism.  Recognize it.   Thwart it.

GOD HELP YOU IF YOU REACH THE TOP 10
If I could behead you, video it, and put you on THEYNC, I would.  All you do when you start making progress is piss me off.  Nothing aspires progress like hate.  It’s this writer’s opinion, and that of others, that HATE is the STRONGEST of all motivational emotions.  It allows you to accomplish anything.  It’s like an adrenaline-inspired emotion.  When you try to compete with me, you invoke an adrenaline-overdosed demon.  You create hate.   Just when you thought that I was done with my campaign, I will GLADLY double/triple/quadruple my budget for new content generation and campaign advancement to make sure that you don’t succeed.  At this point, my goal is to make sure you fail.

DOUBLE JEOPARDY, ALEX
Not only do you have to conjure up the motivation to succeed, and do it with such tenacity as to compete with me, but now you have me trying to make you fail with the SAME tenacity.  Matter of fact, my approach to make you fail is more mature than your attempt at getting psycho.  I’m a pro.  You’re just learning.

You won’t have a boss looking over you and that’s your disadvantage.  You see, it would be one thing if you were at a place of business, say APPLE, and that boss, say STEVE JOBS, went psycho on you and forced you to over-achieve.  This is the standard.  But what if you worked at home?  What if I knew you didn’t have a Steve Jobs to motivate you?  What if *I* was my own Steve Jobs.  What if I watched videos of Steve and modeled my own motivation after his?  Have fun competing with that.  You will fail.  It’s your only option.

CHECK OUT THE BIG BRAIN ON BRAD
So, Mr. Smarty Pants, you’re trying to pounce my shit?  You’ve just conjured up “the psycho in me.”  A normally kind, generous, helpful gent that will help grandmas succeed just turned into the most scary, relentless terminator that you can imagine.  Allow me to quote from scripture, paraphrased slightly (The Terminator)

“He doesn’t eat.  He doesn’t sleep.  And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are gone.”

I liken myself to how birds fight with each other and how ants dismember their prey when I judge how to punish you.  Peck your eyes out.  Dismember you.  Whatever.  As long as you suffer, I win.  I want it so you associate pain with your campaign.  This works.  Everytime.

Not only do I meet the minimum, not only do I go over the minimum, not only do I go to MAXIMUM, I go to Level 11, where you cry to your mommy, “Please God make him stop.”

I will never stop.  I will never quit.  No matter what.  Not ever.

You can’t compete with psycho.

Search for “Video SEO” in Google and one of the first things you get is an article published two years ago on TechCrunch. Now, TechCrunch is surely not an SEO site so can pretty much be regarded as any other mainstream publication trying to write about SEO (we all know what comes out of it – either something we all laugh about or some site getting banned/penalized). But FFS, if you claim to be an expert on the topic and submit your article to a large publication like this, could you at least get your facts right and word it properly???

Quote:

“You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages” (via TechCrunch)

LOLWHUT??? A robots.txt FILE on every page? Do you even have a clue how it can be implemented practically, other than maybe <?php include “robots.txt”;?> Should I just email the guy and ask him if he managed to figure out what robots.txt is since that publication? Should I launch an online course called “ROBOTS.TXT FOR CLUELESS MARKETERS“?

How much do you think I should charge for it?

Moving on to other results, that’s not the only one interesting in this manner. AimClear has published a whitepaper a year ago. OK methinks, aimClear is a reputable agency, must be good information, in their blog post announcing the whitepaper we are promised to see “a blockbuster featuring a correlation study of query intent, tagging, and how the combination effects a video’s chances in Google and Bing SERPs” so should be some impressive in-depth study…

No such fucking luck! Pure whitepaper spam! Out of 12 pages of the PDF, 6 are screenshots of Google SERPs and how video results can be included in them, plus there is a list of a bunch of video sites they have discovered – only this list is an image so not much can be done with it, and it has duplicate entries in it too (makes one doubt how accurate the rest of the data in the paper is). The closing points of the whitepaper mention that “aimClear has a rank checking extraction agent. Contact us for further information.” – wait, what? That was just a bait-and-switch to try and pitch your scraper to me?

I can build my own scrapers alright, been doing so since 2005. Another possible revenue stream for me: sell my scraper optimization services to aimClear so that their scraper does not output duplicate results, dohh…

Of course video SEO is a relatively new topic so good information accumulates over time. But as long as people accept bullshit as “expert opinions” under the veil of authority mainstream publications and whitepapers, separating good information from worthless banter will not be an easy task. So many people believe if it ranks on Google it must be good information! The two examples above show how it is not necessarily so. Google is all about rel=author and AuthorRank – how about BullshitRank?

There’s adjustments, and there’s EVICTIONS.  Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Google’s latest algo adjustment dubbed ‘Titanic.”  Why “Titanic?”  Because you’ll be searching for survivors, that’s why.  Well, the official name has now been officially entitled “Penguin.”   Our original “Titanic” moniker was at least  related to something being cold and frigid.

THE FALSE ALARM
Last week, we saw some interesting, albeit odd, adjustments in the SERPS as Google wrangled with a buggy ‘parked-domain’ signal.  Many, like myself, thought it was some A/B/C split testing going on with Google SERPS and was likely a premonition to come.  This was not the case.    That false adjustment alarm was prelude to the real adjustment which was designed to further signal unnatural linking and ‘webspam.’  Both grey and white-hats were affected by this adjustment.

So, you say, “big deal,” King.  Well, here’s why I posted.

GOOGLEBOT IS AN ANGRY STEP-FATHER WHO DRINKS
As you might have read a few weeks ago, I went white-hat with my money site in January due to weak nerves and was sodomized by a robot named GoogleBot.  Sure, GoogleBot is cute and bleeps a lot but there’s a side to that machine that anally rapes you, uses sand as lubricant, and punches you in the face on the way out the door.   Yes, GoogleBot is passive-aggressive and has a temper.  Deal with it.

JUST MADE THE CUT-OFF
So, it seems, by 60 – 90 days, I went white hat just in time.  Because my money site, which was in the shitter a few weeks ago, just got promoted to #1 across the board for pretty much any keyword phrase even REMOTELY related to my niche.  All the other competitors that were running grey got their ass handed to them….many of them totally fucking nuked.

A FIERCE ADJUSTMENT
What shocks me the most about this algo adjustment is the fierceness of  it.  This isn’t some “move this site down 2 positions, or to page 2″ adjustment.  This is a total adjustment of a 3.1% of all search queries (the name “PI” for this adjustment was a close second.)  This is huge.  I would venture to say that this makes Panda looks like a cute, furry adjustment.  No, my friends, this adjustment is nothing less than MAJOR.

NOT A NEGATIVE SEO OPPORTUNITY
Some are saying that this is prelude to a new type of SEO campaign.  The “Negative SEO” campaign where you can actually hurt your competitors by placing shit-stained links in bad neighborhoods.  Me?  I am always on the prowl for my backlinks showing up in a bad place and am ripe-and-ready to file a notice to GoogleGods stating “that link is NOT mine, please don’t kill me, my income, and my life.” #kthxbye.

However, and this is what gives me pause, if Titanic was just a devaluation of poor links and/or content, then why are the affected sites NUKED rather than just demoted?  It sure looks like there is more than just de-valuation going on here.    This is a penalty, it seems and this paves the way for Negative SEO which is scary as hell.   Perhaps this was a one-time sweep although I highly doubt that.

TRENDS/PATTERNS
How did you do after this adjustment?  Did you find any pattern to the sites that were nuked?  I did.  The ones with paid links in shitty web spots all had the SERPS that were affected NUKED.  It seems that Amit found a way to really find many paid links and nuke the fucking shit out of the benefit of those links.  I personally don’t think that NEGATIVE SEO is possible.  I do think that there was benefit from even slightly shitty links and that benefit has now been mitigated.

FEEL CHEATED?  READY TO INFLICT MORE DEATH?
Google’s got a form for that.  If you feel that your site was wrongfully affected by the algo adjustment, you can submit your request for review using this form.  If you feel that the change wasn’t deep enough and there are still sites that missed The Death Penalty, use this Google Spam Report and mention the keyword “Penguin” in your report.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got legal, paid juice passing. This means that there is a white-hat way to flow juice while paying for it. So, yeah, it’s not a ‘paid link’ but it is ‘paid juice’ and since juice means domain authority, I think we’ve caught a break.

So, let’s take this to the extreme then. What if I had a huge-ass budget and I decided I wanted banner ads placed on hundreds, even thousands of sites. In theory you could jack up your site to a PR 7 or even a PR8. PR6 should come relatively easy with even a modest budget and now, it seems, you can get a PR6+ site by coughing up recurring monthly dough. But, holy fuck, talk about recurring monthly marketing budget nightmare. You’ll be in bed *forever* with hundreds of sites, paying them monthly, yearly, etc. You’ll need to ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”

So what ARE the advantages of having a PR6+ site? Well, first you’ll pass authority to each sub-page. Okay, so what does that do? What effect does domain authority have on SERPS?  According to Rand @ SEOMoz:  None whatsoever.   However, if you’re looking to monetize your site, you’ll only have 2 metrics in order to classify how much you can charge:  PageViews, or PageRank.  That’s it.  You either have 1, or the other, or both, but never neither.

FUCK IT, CREATE A BANNER AD MARKETPLACE
So, if it’s legal, let’s take it to the fucking extreme. Form a marketplace like TLA and sell only Banner Ad placements with followed images. TLA’s infographic marketplace won’t work since they only require an infographic be placed for 30 days. You need a way to place that shit long-term in the same spot. Any one out there know of a marketplace that sells banner ad placements? I say take that shit to the max. If it got the blessing from Cutts then I say that could be one of the last, paid ways to get more PR juice to your site. I don’t care what anyone says, I want my site to have the highest PageRank possible. And if there is now a paid way to accomplish that then I say go to Level 11 on that shit.

I’d like to pose this question to the visitors: “What are the advantages of having a high PageRanked domain?”   Since we can apparently pay to get one now, how would we leverage it?   Now is a great time to watch Fishkin’s video on PageRank.  I’m going to get crackin on finding some way to pass seemingly worthless link juice to my sites, legally.

So, last quarter, I wrote about how I declared Google the winner of the “you better go white hat or else” stalemate.  I did paid links, paid reviews, and never, ever did any shit like “cloaking”, “spam”, or “stuffing.”  Hence, the “grey” hat campaign type.  I had awesome content.  I had a crawlable site.  It was perfect in every way.  I used paid links and reviews to scream at GoogleBot, “Hey, notice me!  I’m right here! I have killer content and reputable sites link to it.”  The results were great.   The money.   Terrific.  I left the competition scratching their heads since my site was HTTPS, it was hard to reverse engineer as most link-finding tools couldn’t really find my backlinks.

However, the stress of running a grey-hat campaign eventually wears on you and you long for the peace of a white hat campaign.  So, I hatched a plan to wean my site from grey and pray that the results weren’t too bad.  I expected a 15-25% drop in SERPS and traffic which I could then recover by getting a big relevant, content piece linked up to the pages where I removed the TLA’s.

Fucking failure.   Total and monstrous failure.

Because I didn’t have the BALLS to gut out the imaginary stress of my campaign,  I think I have nearly ruined it all.   My total traffic drop?  -72.5%.   About 10 days after the first phase of removing TLA’s, I saw the first hit to my SERPS.    It was bad.  Way worse than I had imagined.  Then when phase II came around 30 days later, it was nothing less than a total disaster.

It’s hard for me to write right now.  Because writing this means that the realization is true.

SAME PAGES, SAME CONTENT, DIFFERENT SUBDOMAIN
The way that my money site is setup is “mysite.corporate.com” and other competitors in my space have “theirsite.corporate.com” and “grandma.corporate.com”.   It’s a sub-domain structure.   So, what’s happened now is that mysite.x.x has been replaced, with a roaming/constantly-changing yoursite.x.x, someothersite.x.x. Google is so confused now that it doesn’t know what competitor site to rank where my SERP was.  I’ll tell you one thing, it ain’t my site anymore.   Did an experiment where I tried to get one of them back and I can’t even get the page to index.  I am seeing the total number of indexed pages drop EACH day from 530 -> 460 -> 420 -> 411…pages just keep dropping out of the index.    Organic SERP traffic DOWN from 290 keywords a day to a paltry 60.

THE SWEET TLA CAMPAIGN FLIES UNDER THE RADAR
I was piping in sweet link juice from about 4 PR6 sites and a couple of PR7 sites (all with less than 20 outbound links per site so that juice was sweet.)  My TLA bill was $380 per month which I didn’t give a fuck about because I was making $11-$27K per month NET NET revenue.   Who fucking cares about $380?    My new numbers are more like $7 – $10K now.   Yeah, yeah I can hear all you haters out there, “You should be happy with that!”  My answer is a whole-hearted FUCK YOU.   No douchebag entrepreneur settles for a 50% loss on their revenue and takes it in the ass and says “THANKS!”

Fuck that.  This loss is the SAME EXACT thing (analogously) as getting robbed at gun-point and having to give up my wallet and jewelry.    Then punching me in the face as they leave.

CONTENT STRATEGY IN EFFECT
So, my only strategy here is to work the problem.  I’ve dumped almost $3800 in content these weeks…big, nice pieces, beautifully interlinked with the rest of the site however the traffic upswing is slower than expected.   Plus, certain SERPS that I was certain I could pounce with some nice content aren’t going anywhere and some grandma seems to be out-SERPING me with NO TEXT and some fucked up “BUY NOW” button that has been upscaled from 75X75 pixels to a 20/200 vision 250 X 35 pixels and looks like it was done by a 7 year old.  Yes, Google, that outranks my shit.  So much for user experience.

I could write for days on this and correct the fucked-up sentences in this post that don’t make much sense or are awkwardly worded.  However, I’m just going to hit Publish before I change my mind on posting this.  Cheers.

Sidenote: Please, colleagues. This is really rough on me. Go easy on the flaming. This one’s hard. (That’s what she said.)  I write these pieces so you all can learn from other’s mis-steps and hopefully prevent disaster on your end.

UPDATE:  SEE WHAT HAPPENED!  http://seobullshit.com/google-presents-titanic-coming-serps/