PerformanceCorporate Weblog

The fallout from the recent Google Bourbon update seems very severe. It appears that spam filtering has been done much to agressively, and clean sites have been caught in a trap set for the so-called “scraper sites”.

The main problem when dealing with information from webmasters, is sorting through their bias. Of course they think of their sites as “clean, authority sites” that are leaders in their field, other reviews might not be so kind. However, it does appear that certain SEO practices have been clearly targeted, including Brett Tabke’s infamous “26 Steps to 15K in 12 Months” or whatever it’s titled. Even “white hat seos” are jumping out of buildings en masse, so this has been another rough one. I guess these 3 words apply: diversify, diversify, and diversify.

Oddly I’ve had a large traffic increase from Google. The sites were lost since 2004 in December and haven’t re-appeared until just now.

This is the reason everyone preaches patience when dealing with Google. Sometimes time heals all wounds in the SERPS.

It appears lately that the shuffling of results from Google is constant. Rankings are less stable than in the past.

The mantra these days is to get links from “diverse ip sources”. A few years back, the idea was to get links from sites that have high PageRank. The theories keep changing as the results keep changing and Google has realized that it’s much tougher to hit a moving target.

Now more than ever, the best thing most webmasters can do is make sure that their site is a high-quality resource, and do not get too focused on one search engine, and what they “want” from your site. Always build your websites for the users (while being search-engine friendly of course).