SEO-Process-Overview

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process is an ongoing continuing process that we perform every day for our clients. It is possible to become very successful with top natural/organic SEO rankings, as most (68% to 90%) searchers skip the paid ads. This large range is highly keyword dependent, e.g. if someone is searching for "buy refrigerator" vs. "what is George Washington's birthday". People searching to buy a new refrigerator have a higher probability of clicking on a paid Google Ad, then someone searching for George Washington's birthday.
The other major benefit of natural or organic #1 rankings is you do not have to pay per click.  Google Adwords can run as high as $182+ per click for highly competitive keyword phrases.
It is very important to stay with SEO methodologies long term in order to achieve the desired results.  If you stop this process your web traffic and rankings will drop, and it may be difficult to recover previous top rankings.
Google is very complex and secret so no one can claim to be 100% accurate as to why Google makes the decisions it does.  However we do know that Google has many different types of penalties some of which are manual and some of which are automated via advanced software algorithms.
The quality of your backlinks and the longer your backlinks are aged, make up major factors in the Google software ranking algorithms.  Please remember if you lose important authoritative backlinks, then you must start the aging process over from the starting line.  Besides losing PageRank, this also brings suspicion from Google, and you do not want that to happen.  Google detects all these changes looking for unnatural suspicious activities.

I have been doing some new testing on Google.  The changes made to a web page are indexed and applied to Google search results days in advance of what Google shows when you use the "show Google cache command".  So the freshest indexed data is first applied to Google search results, then days later Google updates what they show as cached.  This makes sense as it is more important to Google to use the freshly indexed data then to report and update the data Google has stored about a web page.  For example the newest article I have written in this blog is showing up in the Google search results five days ago.  However when I look at the Google cache for this blog, it still does not show that Google even knows about the newest article.

80% of Web Site Owners are Wrong about SEO and Link Building

We receive thousands of phone calls and emails every year, about SEO and Link Building. Eighty percent or more of the people contacting us have terribly wrong ideas about what works and what is important for outstanding results in the major search engines. Below are details, samples, and history of people contacting us with their requirements. Hopefully, you will find useful SEO information that will help your company grow and increase your profits.

Many people phone our company saying, " I need low cost SEO, low quality backlinks, and tons of cheap links. "

I respond, "Why?".... They say, "I want to out rank my competitors."
They think it is a pure numbers game. All links are equal and you get more and you win.

They want fast outstanding results, they want to be #1 for competitive keyword phrases in 1-5 months.

I reply,  "You do not understand how search engine optimization works, you need to look at this as a long term investment that you will be making as long as you are in business.  Good ranking results take at least 6-12 months to achieve.  Highly competitive keywords may take several years of SEO work and high quality merit based link building.  Then you have to maintain all this work forever or you will lose the top rankings you worked so hard to achieve.  Please remember your competitors are also working hard on their SEO and want to outrank you."

More on Link Building
Someone with fewer backlinks , e.g. Site A has 300 high quality natural embedded text links from topic related authority sites can out rank Site B with 20,000 low quality text links. Google now gives thousands of web site owners penalties for these low quality backlinks.
Unfortunately Google also has penalized many websites unfairly. 
Your competitors can have your web site sabotaged via black hat SEO experts.

This includes all the webmasters that do article submission SPAM (duplicate content SPAM), excessive and only low quality link exchanges, these do not work because Google considers that all junk and SPAM. E.g. A PR0 site exchanging links with other PR0 sites, to Google this is just junk to junk SPAMMY stupid SEO methods.
Please watch this video by Matt Cutts of Google:

Funny link selling story - Matt Cutts tweeted Vince at WebDesign.org

This article on SearchEngineLand made me laugh.

http://searchengineland.com/selling-links-big-brand-heres-dont-tweet-187179

Now let's see what Google does about this clear violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines and how long it takes Google to do something.

Currently this site WebDesign.org is ranked #2 for "web design" on Google (very impressive).

Also this site is a PR6 with many PR5 internal pages and no gray bar pages from what I can see.  I would say this is currently considered a super powerful and highly ranked website by Google.

In the SearchEngineLand article it really made me laugh when I saw what Matt Cutts tweeted to this guy Vince.

Negative SEO article on Forbes - SEO Sabotage

Today Forbes released a very interesting article regarding negative SEO and I am glad.
Hopefully this will help promote this issue and make people aware and put pressure on Google to change some of their lame policies that lead to innocent websites and people being penalized.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/03/18/negative-seo-have-mercenaries-been-hired-to-torpedo-your-search-rankings/

In this useful article Matt Cutts is quoted as saying:

"In my experience, there's a lot of people who talk about negative SEO, but very few people who actually try it, and fewer still who actually succeed." He goes on to say, "I know that there's been a lot of people stressed about this. Whenever we dig into what's actually going on, there's been a lot of discussion but very little in ways of actually people trying to do attacks."

Bullshit from Matt Cutts, Google cannot even find and detect obvious paid links correctly, how can they claim they can detect negative SEO?

I do not believe Google has any clue about how often this really happens.

No Google is NOT Doing Enough to stop this terrible problem of negative SEO.
Google needs to decide which backlinks to count and which ones to ignore, that is their job, not the job of business owners.  It is ridiculous for Google to create this problem, then tell website owners they must do a lot of work to protect themselves from the problem Google created in the first place.

list-of-directory-submission-sites-that-google-likes

List of Directory Submission Sites.
List of Directories that Google Likes and that Follow Google Guidelines.

Over the last few years Google has cracked down on Web Directories that violate Google guidelines.

So I decided I should give people a list of Internet Directories that Google thinks are valid and that if you obtained a listing from these Directories it would help you with direct traffic generation and also as a "good" backlink as far as Google is concerned.

1.     http://www.Clasione.com
2.     http://vlib.org
3.     http://www.AllBusinessNow.com
4.     http://www.ipl.org
5.     http://www.seekon.info
6.     http://dir.yahoo.com
7.     http://www.JoeAnt.com
8.     http://www.dmoz.org
9.     http://botw.org
10.   http://www.SearchPure.org
11.   http://MedicalHealthSites.com
12.   http://www.HealthFitnessNutrition.org
13.   http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus
14.   http://www.pickNbuy.com

Comments from Matt Cutts of Google on what to consider when submitting to a Directory.

When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls?
If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory?
Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee?
For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url.
Matt Cutts, Google

Why Website Owners Should be Very Angry at Google

Google has caused a huge problem by creating a new industry called Negative SEO.
Most web site owners do not even know what a good backlink is, or what a bad backlink is, they have no idea whatsoever.  This is made even worse by the fact that Google is not very good at deciding what a natural link is and what is an unnatural link.  Google will penalize a website and not even tell web site owners which backlinks they do not like, Google asks the web site owner to guess.  Hello Google ... your policy is ridiculous and is just making the situation worse.
Frankly, we see Google make many mistakes penalizing innocent web sites and letting terrible spam web sites go free and clear.  Today Matt Cutts put out a video about how obvious most paid links are, so why can't Google do a better job then?  I could email Google all day long with obvious paid links and Google misses many thousands of them, yet they need to go and penalize innocent sites.  Perhaps if Matt Cutts could clone himself Google would do better, or how about firing any Google employee that penalizes an innocent website?  This seems fair to me, Google's incompetent employee ruins an innocent website owner's business life and Google terminates that defective employee.  You know and eye for an eye.

Now many website owners are afraid to give out any links as they think Google will make a mistake and unfairly penalize them, or they are emailing other web site owners that gave them a merit based natural backlink that Google likes asking to have it removed.
This is very frustrating to the few people like me that really understand what is happening.  Most people are clueless and so confused by Google they do not know what to do.

I do not understand why website owners are not so angry at Google that they are not trying to start some protest activities against Google.

I have talked and emailed with many website owners who are victims of SEO Sabotage. Please understand that this can happen to anyone, all that has to occur is a competitor of yours hires a company like this:

http://www.negativeseo.biz

I have also seen cases where an ex SEO company did this to a website owner in order to punish the website owner for firing the SEO company, and I have seen cases where both a competitor and an ex SEO company committed SEO sabotage against a website.  And silly Google still tries to claim this is not even possible ... bullshit

Furthermore Google is not doing anything to stop the evil spammers they should be going after, please click and read these links:

http://www.phplinkdirectory.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47171

http://www.phplinkdirectory.com/Google_PageRank_Hacked_by_Directory_Network.php

Please read this interesting screen shot below:
 

This is an outstanding article written by a top SEO expert:
http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/08/google-rank-modifying-spammers-patent/


What to do if Google Penalizes your Website?

1. Did you receive a message like below from Google?