SEO dead?
-
What does everyone think about this article?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2 … l-content/
I tend to think its off base, Link building still works and there are tons of things that have to do with SEO that have nothing to do with link building...
I think its actually quite ridiculous and written by people that actually no nothing about SEO...kind of a lame attempt by Forbes, and if anything at all, this is just forbes practicing "SEO" with a link attraction post like this. Becase SEO, is NOT dead
-
The death of SEO has been greatly exaggerated at least as far back as 1997: https://plus.google.com/117235644077949816393/posts/ccq57PqfYXm
h/t: Wil Reynolds
I think EGOL's comment ends the debate.
-
Totally agreed - we did go back and optimize once our website went live.
-
Yes you are correct it is anathema. However it was the best use of our time with the resources we had when we were getting started.
We have gone back and optimized our site. But we knew we could more/quicker results with the path we took. Also, early on we started with a series of landing pages rather than a website - tested the concept (incl. PPC) and validated our hypothesis before we built a website.
But that definitely has me thinking that I should also go back and give PPC another try now that there is a website backing it up.
And finally another reason was that all of our clients were teachers. They were looking for freebies but we found that many would not complete reg - no matter what method we used. They weren't sure of who we were - brand new to the education vertical - so even if we did rank on Google I don't think it would have mattered much at that time (now it does).
So partnering with a 20+ year education industry veterans gave us the street cred. with the teachers. Also, teachers hearing from influencers in education were more likely to sign up rather than going through a Google search or PPC.
The first 6 - 9 months were really about the word or mouth credibility that came from partners and influencers that got us the biggest return.
-
Nice work on making this successful without search engines.
It's not too late to optimize those pages. You might make a lot more money.
-
EGOL,
As to forbes and you doing the SEO: I have sent them a letter telling them they would!
-
Ryan, as usual you and EGOL do a masterful job here. I do want to add one thing though: While Ken and Adam may have never heard of you, I have. This was an attempt at getting links by a couple of pikers. Sorry, that's how I see it. Frankly, I think:
THE UNINFORMED POSTING STUPID BLOGS TO OLD MEDIA SITES FOR LINKS IS DEAD!!!
Was tempted to link to something here.....
-
I was going to ignore all until I read this, so I will respond to the thread separately.
But, in your response to Igor, you state you essentially ignored on page optimization, failed at PPC, and used no PR agency. (and no bought links).
Then you state you did other marketing outside of web based: relationships, events, conferences and that worked.
So, here is my question: If you were going to go to this tremendous effort (and include social, content, etc. What was the purpose/reason for not doing on page optimization utilizing key words significant to the page?)
Do you get business from your site? Is it driven by a query on a search engine?To go to the trouble of creating dynamic content and then ignore basic SEO is anathema to me.
I did like all the rest though.
-
Don't worry Igor - SEO isn't dead but the way we do SEO is always evolving. I have "tested" lots of ways to do SEO - some good and some not so good.
But I have arrived at what I know works and the Fortune article is correct IMO on a couple of items.
I launched a new brand about 1-1/2 years ago. We were able to put over 100,000 users on the product, get over 220 earned press mentions (without a PR agency) and win 3 industry awards within 11 months.
What did I NOT do?
- I didn't even optimize the web pages for search terms.
- I tried PPC and it failed miserably - the vertical I was going after apparently hates PPC - go figure.
- No PR agency - they are overpriced and get so-so results. Sorry just my experience working with 4 of them.
- I didn't buy even one link.
What did we do? Exactly what the Fortune article points out and a few extras....
- Our biggest winner by far was building relationships with other companies (20 years in the industry) in the vertical we were new to. It now provides anywhere from 30 - 50% of all of our new users.
- A solid Content Marketing strategy. We created solid value and content and packed the site full of extremely valuable Free Resources. We hired an expert in the vertical and they did webinars and events for the new partners at no cost - we re-purposed this content and dropped it onto social sites as well as our site. We had a blog that was updated regularly with industry relevant info etc etc etc
- As far as outreach we had a strong social media plan and a dedicated and an experienced social manager. We were able to connect and build online relationships that translated into many articles, back links and natural SEO which was always our goal. No link building was done at all beyond the natural links we received.
- We attended industry events and conferences and had speakers at all of the events. We had booths at the events and had pre, during and post event strategies ready to go weeks before the events. We even had a guide of the top 15 infuencers that we wanted to meet and everyone from our company had a picture, bio and knew the "likes and dislikes" of each influencer. We connected with 12 of them at one event - this resulted in tweets, FB engagement, blog posts etc. = links (natural SEO).
These were just a few of the tactics and strategies we used. Did it support SEO for us? Sure, in the new sense of the word. I think SEO is evolving and getting truly engaged in your niche, vertical and industry are key. Find the thing that you really want to drive to be the best in and go for it. I think this is the new SEO - you will get links that you could have never bought, you will get exposure that a PR firm could have never secured and by gosh you may even succeed
-
"SEO is dead" is the internet version of the boy who cried wolf.
What it takes to create a well optimized website is constantly changing and expanding, but that's not necessarily a bad thing IMO.
-
It was a shoot-from-the-hip article done with zero research so that yada yada yada writing could get him content in under an hour.
Same type of content as discussed here...
http://www.seomoz.org/q/i-want-to-know-if-this-is-bogus-or-not
-
I agree with EGOL on everything and will elaborate a bit more and cross some lines.
Forbes is a very high profile publication, but if you think about it when was the last time you performed a search and found a Forbes article as the top result? As a company, Forbes does not perform as well as it could or should in search. They have no expertise in SEO and as EGOL suggested, they could benefit from some SEO advice.
So who wrote the article? Ken Krogue. Who is he? According to his own bio, "I'm a serial entrepreneur with a short attention span, so I need things to work really fast. " Is that the kind of person you want to take SEO advice from?
So is there ANY basis whatsoever for making such a claim? The only logical reason is the guy wanted a headline, and it worked. He claims the basis of the article is a conversation with Adam Torkildson, "one of the top SEO consultants in Utah". OK.
Well I never heard of Adam which is fine. He probably has never heard of me either. I was curious to find out about him and where better then the About page on his own site: http://adamtorkildson.com/about-2/. Umm...there is nothing really helpful there. His site is very basic, but who am I to judge since my site is still under construction.
According to his LinkedIn page, he is a PR Coordinator, although he previously worked for SEO.com. I am still trying to understand how the Forbes author felt a person who presently is employed as a PR Coordinator would be a great source for the statement "SEO will be dead in 2 years". Oh wait....I just found something. He is a PLUS author on EZine.
I do not ever wish to share anything negative about any person or company, especially in our industry, but when you make such a statement as "SEO will be dead in two years" you are truly opening yourself up to ridicule.
Here is what Matt Cutts has to share on the topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQArUFRb4Is
So the question to you is...who do you find more credible? Matt Cutts or the others?
-
As long as there are search engines, a person who understands how they work will have an enormous advantage over the ignorant person who just tosses up a website.
I bet Forbes.com would get a lot more traffic if I was doing their SEO.
-
Hoping its not true, as I am investing a ton of time and money to learn SEO...
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is that trailing slashes necessity for an SEO doing blogs
Hi, I have a website, https://australiatimenow.com.au/ I would like to remove the trailing slash and move to .HTML formal. I have never done SEO on my articles. Is that, any issue causes if I move to .HTML format?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | joshnajenny0 -
A doorway-page vendor has made my SEO life a nightmare! Advice anyone!?
Hey Everyone, So I am the SEO at a mid-sized nationwide retailer and have been working there for almost a year and half. This retailer is an SEO nightmare. Imagine the worst possible SEO nightmare, and that is my unfortunate yet challenging everyday reality. In light of the new algorithm update that seems to be on the horizon from Google to further crack down on the usage of doorway pages, I am coming to the Moz community for some desperately needed help. Before I was employed here, the eCommerce director and SEM Manager connected with a vendor that told them basically that they can do a PPC version of SEO for long-tail keywords. This vendor sold them on the idea that they will never compete with our own organic content and can bring in incremental traffic and revenue due to all of this wonderful technology they have that is essentially just a scraper. So for the past three years, this vendor has been creating thousands of doorway pages that are hosted on their own server but our masked as our own pages. They do have a massive index / directory in HTML attached to our website and even upload their own XML site maps to our Google Web Master Tools. So even though they “own” the pages, they masquerade as our own organic pages. So what we have today is thousands upon thousands of product and category pages that are essentially built dynamically and regurgitated through their scraper / platform, whatever. ALL of these pages are incredibly thin in content and it’s beyond me how Panda has not exterminated them. ALL of these pages are built entirely for search engines, to the point that you would feel like the year was 1998. All of these pages are incredibly over- optimized with spam that really is equivalent to just stuffing in a ton of meta keywords. (like I said – 1998) Almost ALL of these scraped doorway pages cause an incredible amount of duplicate content issues even though the “account rep” swears up and down to the SEM Manager (who oversees all paid programs) that they do not. Many of the pages use other shady tactics such as meta refresh style bait and switching. For example: The page title in the SERP shows as: Personalized Watch Boxes When you click the SERP and land on the doorway page the title changes to: Personalized Wrist Watches. Not one actual watch box is listed. They are ALL simply the most god awful pages in terms of UX that you will ever come across BUT because of the sheer volume of this pages spammed deep within the site, they create revenue just playing the odds game. Executives LOVE revenue. Also, one of this vendor’s tactics when our budget spend is reduced for this program is to randomly pull a certain amount of their pages and return numerous 404 server errors until spend bumps back up. This causes a massive nightmare for me. I can go on and on but I think you get where I am going. I have spent a year and half campaigning to get rid of this black-hat vendor and I am finally right on the brink of making it happen. The only problem is, it will be almost impossible to not drop in revenue for quite some time when these pages are pulled. Even though I have helped create several organic pages and product categories that will pick-up the slack when these are pulled, it will still be awhile before the dust settles and stabilizes. I am going to stop here because I can write a novel and the millions of issues I have with this vendor and what they have done. I know this was a very long and open-ended essay of this problem I have presented to you guys in the Moz community and I apologize and would love to clarify anything I can. My actual questions would be: Has anyone gone through a similar situation as this or have experience dealing with a vendor that employs this type of black-hat tactic? Is there any advice at all that you can offer me or experiences that you can share that can help be as armed as I can when I eventually convince the higher-ups they need to pull the plug? How can I limit the bleeding and can I even remotely rely on Google LSI to serve my organic pages for the related terms of the pages that are now gone? Thank you guys so much in advance, -Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VBlue1 -
Asynchronous loading of product prices bad for SEO?
We are currently looking into improving our TTFB on our ecommerce site. A huge improvement would be to asynchronously load the product prices on the product list pages. The product detail page – on which the product is ordered- will be left untouched. The idea is that all content like product data, images and other static content is sent to the browser first(first byte). The product prices depend on a set of user variables like delivery location, vat inclusive/exclusive,… etc. So they would requested via an ajax call to reduce the TTFB. My question is whether google considers this as black hat SEO or not?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jef22200 -
SEO Hosting and many dummy blog, is it still works ?
Hi, I want to keep update with the latest trend of SEO,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | theconversion
in one side, we know that google now more focus on-page rather than off-page,
the Question is, when we handle a big size of company, that we can't change easily,
the content inside the web, this will become a problem. do you have any suggestion about
this matters ? Second question, I still keep my SEO team to do this, 5 people, 1 people hold 7 .com website,
that hosted all in SEO hosting with different IP Class C, and 7 social network site. Everytime they
are posting a unique article and put link that targetting the money site. My Question is, is it still
work to do all of this ? so at the end of month, we have almost 70links that going to money site,
with composition of link, 50% exact match text, 30 partial match text, and 20% direct www. link today, it is still working, all the site that we optimize, going up to page 1. But I want to know about
the future, or at least in your country that more competitive rather than in my country (Indonesia),
what do you do for backlink that created from your farm. I also heard that, SEO Hosting is not use, the things that works is, when u posting an article, make
sure u post from unique IP address, not from same computer. Please give me enlightment, I truly open for discussion, thanks a lot0 -
Does the Traffic boost SEO/SERP ranks?
Hello, I know a guy that sells Organic traffic, bought 10k from him, will this help me to bost google seo ranks? Attached a screenshoot thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 7liberty0 -
UK SEO Agency Recommendations
Hi, I am currently looking for a new SEO agency to manage strategies on 3 websites, budget of about £15k pm in total. Any recommendations would be really appreciated as trying to navigate through all the usual sales waffle and hollow promises of most SEO agencies is becoming rather difficult. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cewe0 -
Huge diifference linking root domains in SEO MOZ and opensite explorer
Hi there, I have fairly large site that has never really been optimised. I think an old forum i hosted has either been spammed or my webmaster at the time used some black hat techniques to get me more root linking domains. I am a newbie and would really appreciate if someone could just quickly look at my donain and confirm that this is a problem and something i should fix before i start my SEO campaign. I am also worried this will negatively effect my domain authority. I dont really want to broadcast my domain so if anyoone would be so kind to confirm the problem so i cant start to research the answer. Thanks v much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nimble0