I no longer tout for business as an SEO consultant, and here is one of the reasons: The profession is an embarrassment. At least, it is when working on a freelance basis. If it isn’t an embarrassment, it is at least embarrassing. The biggest problem is that there is no professional body. Anybody can mess around online for a bit, pick up a bit of terminology, a few of the latest buzzwords, and then start to tout for business from poor unsuspecting clients.

It would, admittedly, be difficult to regulate, the game changes all the time and Google throws things up which keep people guessing for months. Is it really too much to ask to have a body which at least screens potential members with a 50 question offline sit-down exam which covers the basic principles? Forty correct answers and you get your membership, less than forty then you don’t, is this really too much to ask? … Continue Reading

This year has been one of the craziest ever seen in the world of IM, the whole industry has seen the game turned on it’s head, search engine optimization is no longer a skill – it is increasingly becoming a science. It almost feels as if anybody who owns a website or anybody offering SEO services has had to extend their brain capacity by 20% this year in order to cope with the fast growing list of new things that need to be remembered.

Many people without a website, or indeed anybody who was lucky enough to be  a ‘net’ gainer from Panda, were quick to praise Google for their ‘war against content farms’, or for winning a ‘battle against spammy content’, anybody with their ear constantly on the ground knew that a lot of good content was punished (and still is being punished) and in many cases outranked by scraped or even spun content. One webmaster that I know set to work deleting 5000 pages of content that he considered to be lower quality or no longer relevant, equivalent to half of his site, only to be punished in the process – probably as a result of a loss of some of his oldest and most mature backlinks.  … Continue Reading

In the aftermath of Google Panda there were plenty of online marketers, freelance writers, and probably unscrupulous spammers, looking for somewhere new to publish online. With major multi-user sites losing tonnes of authority and incomes being obliterated, there seemed to be a mad flurry of activity from many who rushed out to buy their own domains, whilst others sat around twiddling their thumbs waiting for things to get better. A popular destination in the wake of Panda seemed to be a new wave of smaller, typically WordPress based, indie sites.

Many of these sites were brand new and set up as a reaction to market change, primarily by people hoping to benefit from the shoals of disillusioned contributors looking for somewhere new to write their sales pages or let of steam. The concept of small one-man WordPress based revenue sharing sites wasn’t in any way new however, in fact one of my very close contacts was busy building and launching one almost a year before Panda struck. That contact is Oliver Whitham, an Internet Marketing consultant, who added the invitation only article directory ThisIsFreelance.com to his stable of web properties at some stage in 2010. … Continue Reading

It has been over six months since Google shattered the hopes and dreams of webmasters everywhere when they pushed out their biggest algorithm change for years. The Panda update saw thousands of victims going public with desperate pleas for help and advice, some sites reporting a complete loss of Google traffic, had opportunist search engine optimizers touting for trade on message boards web wide, and had reputable search engine optimizers admitting that they had no idea how to help their clients recover.

Three months after Panda 2.0, which was released on February 23rd, I searched high and low for examples of websites which had made a full recovery from the set back. Things looked gloomy at the time, my search was fruitless. There were a few medium to large sized businesses reporting a partial recovery, but these provided little by way of conclusive evidence and those partial gains could well have been attributed to on-page factors which were holding those websites back even pre-panda. … Continue Reading