About to give up with SEO

[bill4091]

I have been getting extremely frustrated with SEO lately as I simply cannot build any more links. What I mean by this is, I have several websites which are ranking quite well but none of them ranking past 3rd position.

I have been learning SEO for around 3 months now and have done a lot of work everyday since then. I have been building web 2.0 links, article links, wiki links, web 2.0 profile links, blog comment links and private blog network links

The website I am focusing on at the moment is a very easy competition keyword with only 1k searches but I am still having trouble ranking it. It was first of all ranking well with an extremely rubbish low quality link wheel with the same anchor text on every spoke.

I realised that this is probably going to harm my site after a while so I started building high quality web 2.0 links varying my anchor text as much as possible, adding media to each one to make it appear as natural as possible. I have also been building high quality links from the link authority blog network.

My website is now ranked 8th and it seems like I cannot get it back to where it was, no matter how many high quality links i build. It seems like google prefered the super low quality links over the high pr contextual links from authority sites....

Each day I am sitting at my computer thinking of ways I can get backlinks. I have manually got backlinks from hundreds of different locations and it seems like I am wasting my time now...

I have a number of backlinks from different web 2.0 sites, social bookmark sites, article sites, web 2.0 profile sites, blog comments and so on. I have been building links as white hat as possible with no effect.... it seems like I am wasting my time creating any more web 2.0 or social bookmark sites as they have no effect anyway.

I cant even use scrapebox to harvest high quality blog lists because nobody seems to know how to do it these days. My website is aksimet banned so i cannot harvest wordpress blogs. I have been harvesting blog engine blogs but everytime I harvest blog engine blogs It returns the same results everytime which are not even related to my keywords lol.

When I use the obl checker to filter out the high obl blogs I am left with rubbish that has 0 comments due to never being moderated. I made a thread about this and was wondering if anybody could help me but after bumping the thread numerous times with no help I've decided that people probably do not use scrapebox to find blogs anymore... I am really confused and am moments away from giving up and finding myself a regular 9-5 job like everybody else

 

[Justin Tyme]

Sorry to hear of your troubles. I agree, for the most part, SEO is dead. No one will convince me otherwise. You only have to look at the sites that are ranking to realize that. Im struggling on page one with one site, the number one site in G has one post, every other word is mispelled, very few backlinks, they have the name of the product wrong, the author is wrong, the price is wrong. There is no keywords in H1 etc., The anchor text is repetitive, there is no contact, or privacy page etc etc. and this site has been ranking #1 for at least three months.
Ive done everything with my version, quality hand written posts, H1, H2, etc. etc., good internal and external linking, cant past #9. All the other sites above me are shit.
So, you are not alone, I suggest put seo on a back burner and concentrate on other means of traffic. Google holds all the SEO money, but they are one horrible shitty search engine.

 

[Bienshen]

Hey op, how about you put those sites on the back burner. take your new learnt skills, make a new site, maybe your keyword research was the best? dont give up on me.

 

[theseodude]

Dude, I feel like this post was written by me. I share all your frustrations and I am also ready to get a real job. or go back to school.

 

[skripel]

IM is not for everybody, you either give up or you dont, simple as that. Iv been doing it for 2.5-3 years and before that It was pure learning its close to impossible to master seo in 3 month as you say specially with all the panda and penguin and all the new tools coming up. If you feel that you are made for IM than suck it up and work hard and I mean it, 8-10 hours a day till your eyes hurt. If in a year you are not making 4k a month than you should reconsider.

Its like university, if you wanna have a good job you study for 4+ years and invest money into it. IM is similar but you have to be willing to achieve that goal more than anything.

 

[bill4091]

IM is not for everybody, you either give up or you dont, simple as that. Iv been doing it for 2.5-3 years and before that It was pure learning its close to impossible to master seo in 3 month as you say specially with all the panda and penguin and all the new tools coming up. If you feel that you are made for IM than suck it up and work hard and I mean it, 8-10 hours a day till your eyes hurt. If in a year you are not making 4k a month than you should reconsider.

Its like university, if you wanna have a good job you study for 4+ years and invest money into it. IM is similar but you have to be willing to achieve that goal more than anything.

I would love to work on SEO for 8-10 hours per day but it seems like a huge waste of time sitting here getting links from the same social bookmarking sites all over again, or the same web 2.0 sites all over again. My site currently has over 50 high quality web 2.0 links which seem to have done nothing at all, it seems like a huge waste of time sitting here making new ones...

If I just knew how people got high quality backlinks from fresh places all the time I would hapilly sit here for 8-10 hours and get those back links.

I cant even use scrapebox to harvest high quality blogs because nobody can give me an answer on how to find decent blogs when your website is aksimet banned.

 

[bill4091]

I have been sitting here for over 5 hours today and got 1 link.... seems like a huge waste of time.

 

[Falian]

You gotta just keep hustling at it brotha! Best of luck to you .

 

[skripel]

Can help you there guys. I personally think that engineering is a waste of time, no matter how hard i tried i could not work with physics and its formulas. The answers would just not come to me.

You are young and ready to explore things, if you start crying that things are not working they will never work. You gotta get up when you fall down. Make another website, try different techniques. My first 6-8 websites were a complete failure and i wasted more than a year and a half on them. Only after doing all those things i started to understand what things i should have done differently.

If you right now think its a waste of time just quit!

 

[zebrahat]

The above horror story is the reason why black hat exists. Google says there are rules for quality sites that it ranks, but breaks them for its own self serving purposes. Right now it's saying its rules are drifting away from favoring SE "optimization" and more towards SE "naturalization,' as in sites that look natural---that is, Google will likely penalize you for putting a ton of SEO bells and whistles on your site, if the bottom line content is not 'natural' looking in its eyes. Think less of 'quality' in terms of excellence, and more in terms of it being authoritatively 'natural' looking to Google. At least this is what they SAY they want, the truth is G seems to have multiple formulas for different levels of sites, with big boy authority sites getting one treatment, and everybody else another.

Otherwise, forget the rules, forget the gurus, and slap back. Google is trying create a scenario where ONLY established authority counts, not optimization, not well written content, not even raw traffic, in ranking the sites, and where only it can know the magic formula (all others must use PPC to assure page one visibility). Add targeted traffic in 6-7 ways outside of relying on ranking the site on a search engine. Yahoo answers, you tube viral videos, tweets, FB likes, press releases, and the like. Find related forums and groups to post to with your link in the signature. Let your unique visitors come from heavy trafficked, related sources. Earn your traffic, instead of thinking G will always play fair in 'naturally' delivering it to you. Because they won't.

 

[t0.sh]

So then give up (and find a different method). If that method isn't working for you then you need to find another method. Not all techniques will work all of the time, it's a fact of life. You can't cling on to the same job forever especially with the rapid growth of technological advances. If you feel you have done enough then maybe it's time to learn something new. If you feel it's because you don't have enough knowledge then learn some more. It's important to remember with everything you do, things change and you must change with them. Think of SEO as being a very tiny part of your Internet Marketing toolkit, take the knowledge you've learned already, built on it and create something new. You must not give up completely if one method stops working. After all, imagine getting a job as a carpenter, if your hammer breaks are you going to give up carpentry forever?

 

[Duffers5000]

On page SEO is the best investment you will make in your site and long term you will reap the benefits...Off page SEO is giving your site a helping hand to get moving....I think you would get a better return on your investment by spending 5 hours writing 3 articles instead of looking for 3 backlinks.....It seems a pain in the arse but fresh content from living sites is what google really want....I also see crap sites outranking me but I dont believe they will be there for ever.. I also dont think you should get too attached to sites (ok we all have one or two) but once you are happy with a site and you have done what you can do then start building the next site and just come back and refresh your old sites when you have time.

Everybody has wanted to give up at some stage and sometimes a break is needed. But if you are putting up good sites I do believe in time they will rise to where they should be .

 

[bill4091]

Thanks for all the help guys, much appreciated!

The reason why I am getting so frustrated with this is because I told myself that I would manually get 30 fresh high quality links each day, for each of my sites. It went ok for the first few weeks as I was making around 5 new web 2.0, 10 new high pr social bookmarks, 2 high quality articles and a bunch of blog comments.

It has gotten to the point where I am out of ways to get links as I am always getting the same blog engine results in scrapebox and have realised that I have even commented on some blogs twice.

I made a thread about my scrapebox problems but I didn't get a response, this made me even more frustrated because it made me think that maybe scrapebox is dead and people only use it for auto blog commenting to tier 2.

I feel better after reading these posts and am going to focus more on on site optimization.

 

[verilix]

Just keep trying, but try to slip some blackhat linkbuilding in there. A mixture of both is important for a long term website.

 

[bill4091]

Just keep trying, but try to slip some blackhat linkbuilding in there. A mixture of both is important for a long term website.

Yea I've been using a mixture of black hat and white hat. I have a range of nulled software as I have no budget at all, I managed to get my mum to buy my domains and scrapebox and told her that I would pay her back lol.

I first started to blast my money site directly with senuke x but realised that it leaves a lot of footprint if I dont load articles sequentiality from my computer. After I realised that I was leaving a lot of footprint from the low quality web 2.0 I started to use it to blast my tier 1 high quality web 2.0.

Now the only time I use senuke to my money site is for social bookmarking, article directory, press release and web 2.0 profiles.

So I believe my site has a mixture of both white hat and black hat seo links in.

The best links I have found are those from link authority. I get 2 free quota per day from here as I write articles for a friend of mine who is overseas.

 

[gohardman]

The key to being successful at IM is sticking with it. DON'T EVER GIVE UP! I've been doing it for 6 years now and it has become my life. I would have never been as successful as I am now at it if I gave up. Of course it is going to be hard at times, but you have be up to the challenge.

Like the dude said above, 3 months is nothing for SEO. Especially since you came in it at a very bad time. Keyword research is a huge deal and you have to make sure that you do it correctly before you start building links. If you are doing everything in your power and it is still not moving up then you need to focus on other keywords that have less competition or do more research/testing to figure out why it is not moving.

 

[shoaibahmad9999]

Well, I got this feeling when my sites got hit.

I started to diversify into email marketing and stuff but I am a SEO guy so I always return back to it although my next project is to spend for traffic.

Ideally, you need to do this, Earn from SEO Spend on PPC.

 

[Checkered hat]

 

[Execute]

Try this site

http://dropmylink.com/ it might help you build higher quality links a lot easier if you are going down the manual route, don't give up!

 

[cantle]

You should give up on SEO... at least for a little while. Focus on other aspects of internet marketing. Study Youtube, facebook, pintrest, yelp, website design, affiliate programs (not using SEO for traffic), website flipping, the list goes on and on. After you get bored with that, go back to SEO.