Analysis - 'Will responsible SEO inevitably become more about risk management?'

Down in the ideas lab a few projects have been slowly cooking away, but the EUclix.com domain was spun out fast and mainly in response to an actual need to streamline users' access to advertising within a few of our own domains plus the desire to develop it as a simple classifieds platform for a select group of trusted traders to use. The site needed to offer a home to at least three distinct banner exchanges and allow direct communication and trades between members, if sufficient user activity developed.

We rushed out a basic site with a wider focus on European Internet Traffic, Banner Impressions, Click Throughs, PPC and, daring to speak of something from the dark side, Paid Text Links aswell. By paid text links we mean what it says on the tin, often non-contextual links in a quality position on a quality site where the inducement for placing it is purely a financial one. It was an issue that needed facing at the outset. Allowing them to be traded was realistic and allowed new sites to directly negotiate relatively cheap advertising on sites where they felt it may be effective. Not contextual bid upon links, not aggregated schemes, just plain link purchases. Text Links as an important part was added to Traffic, the thing any website craves and Banner Impressions. Click through traffic was essential as we offer PPC campaign management services and skills in a number of European business areas. We'd got our main keywords simply by looking at what the site would need to be and filled in the standard descriptive ones in the meta tags to get a meaningful and effective general meta tag start for each page.

'Get Results within a week' or ' From registration to search result frontpage in a week' - they're phrases that sound like the title of many an ebook doing the auction rounds bundled with 40,000 others, the ones that are yours with resale rights for just 99cents/pence/insert local currency, but this site's first week figures should act as an exposee of why the information is commonplace and has little to do with translating that into a real skills based business, why all SERP figures should be seen in relation to how far they can translate into increased profits in a viable long term business and why that's precisely the 'secret' all those ebooks can't tell you. One thing the 'secret' certainly isn't is that next scraper script, email harvester, chain letter or MLM that are passed off as ebusiness models. Just how can such inital results be easily claimed and achieved though?

• The domain was not sandboxed or blackhatted.
• A relatively large lump of new content was deposited online. More pages and, probably with a little more thought to seo than a normal sitebuilder's site.
• The tested engine's (G's) SERPs have had a tendency to give a high initial reward, based on credit to and trust in your tags. Four weeks down the line, no more development, and positions for the terms above would fall substantially
• The search terms chosen for listing above are extremely niche keyphrases and they are far from the most common searches in the niche. 'No show' keyphrase results are omitted, naturally. Washed results if you will.
• Possibly perceived black hat tactic - subdomains with substantially duplicated content. This was intentional by design with an initial framework for individual genuine development of each as a unique area, but each looks very similar at the outset. This is a risk, viewed by experience, as one that is acceptable, if the site is to be structured in a way of benefit to visitors it will receive directly from our own sites that it is intended to serve..
• Grey hat - sloppy seo. The site was created with standard sector phrases and little individual page optimisation / changes. Domain interlinking issue. The reason it and the seo newbie gets away with it between numerous domains is because it is still small fry and not of the same consequence as the 30,000 page 2 hour to create scraper site..
• Site is free from scraped or plagiarised content and has bot readable content with easily followed links. Relatively simple, table based layout should not make content overly difficult for a bot to read, As any newbie will tell you tables can be a godsend in a fast, few skills required creation process. This does not, of course, make it a good way to lay out pages. The decision to not seek validating code in at least 4.01 transitional was purely an aesthetic one. Page content should display without background image. Known issues with Netscape 4, but there should be reasonable modern cross browser viability.

So; what do we expect to happen next with this domain's performance in the SERPs? Do we care? It doesn't claim to revolutionise links or advertising and an organic network growth is sufficient to justify its existence. It isn't a throwaway name; it's got a predetermined use for our users, so we will be adding content to the main domain at a reasonable rate. Nothing script generated, just modest amounts of genuine, researched and relevant contextually enhancing blurb (or interesting information to some). Subdomains will evolve their own necessity led structures and content with differing local results. This will obviously have an effect on regional variations in prominence. Years of experience tells us though that even all this would, on its own, never be enough to arrest an ineviatble slide down the results. Steadily increasing, natural Inbound text links with good anchor text from authoritative and relevant sites are what any site needs as its lifelblood in the SERPs.

This needs to be achieved in a number of ways.

• a) increase the traffic and awareness of the site and hope for organic backlink growth
• b) develop a small number of mutually arranged links from and into relevant 'good neighbourhood' sites
• c) develop a larger number of inbound service related links

An increase in them doesn't necessarily equal a rise in the SERPs though. Increased position is only achieved by outperforming the continuing efforts of your established and upcoming keyword competitors. And this is where white hat, grey hat and black hat all run in the wash. In the big search engines' ever changing algorithmic world what constitute the boundaries of good / acceptable / bad linking now may have shifted for the worse tomorrow. If recips are going to be downgraded, if paids will be penalised, how do you plan your link strategy in such an unpredictable environment?

With 'Risk Management' of course. It's just the modern day SEO way of attempting to play ball and not to do evil, link into good places and not link into bad, spam not our own pages or the pages of others etc etc in the quest to increase search results for relevant, targeted and profitable keyphrases. Paid Links, Link Condoms, Backlinks or No Links? They're all hot potatoes at the moment, meaning that 2006 is going to be an interesting ride for anyone who makes their living by the SEO sword. Potential effects on current client's well crafted link strategies, forced changes in methods and even damage repair all seemed to be in the air in blog and forum lines across the web in late 2005 / early 2006, partly in digressing responses to Matt Cutts' blog comments about paid links. Over haunts as diverse as Threadwatch, syndk8 and other black hat forums there has been discussion on sustainable business models, the future of the search engines and open dialogue on the use of 'search engine spam' Adsense sites between white and black hat SEOs. Now is definitely an enlightening time to be involved in, study and learn from the minutae of this emerging industry.

Author : Mike Goodyear - Feb 2006