I think changes are afoot. I've done SEO in a single highly competitive niche for 5 years. Over the past six months, the rankings have destabilized, and over the past 2-3 months, it's like Google has thrown everything out the window. SERPs that used to be dominated by authoritative domains, high-quality content, and genuine contextual links are now dominated by sites backed solely by obvious linkspam. One site that had zero traffic a year ago is now dominating, despite content that isn't distinguishable from competitors, DA of 18, and few organic links that can be discovered by link research tools. I assume there's a couple big PBNs underneath it.
Here's my humble opinion:
- Remember, Google works like a casino: the more people play, the more money they make.
- Google still dominates search engine market share, and that's unlikely to change much any time soon, not least because they pay Apple a shitload of money to be the default on iPhones.
- Because of their dominance, Google isn't really focused on quality results right now. They're focused on maximizing profit.
- "Maximizing profit" to Google means getting PPC rates up. 80% of Google's revenue is from AdWords, compared to 20% from AdSense. (Obviously we're leaving out side projects like Android - I mean Google revenue from the web.)
- Google has two ways of raising PPC rates. (1) Making organic rankings expensive to pursue. (2) Periodically destabilizing organic rankings, forcing advertisers who rely on web marketing to jump deeper into PPC.
- For a while, Google used #1, and the way they did it was through Panda and Penguin: to rank organically, an advertiser had to invest heavily in quality original content and outreach to authority websites, the most expensive parts of SEO because they can't easily be automated.
- But a problem developed. Google doesn't know how to identify quality sources of content, or at least not in a way that's consistent with their goal of raising PPC rates. Disabling Authorship was a tacit admission of that. They're able to identify obvious spinning and duplicate content, but they can't get the algorithm to sort out "okay" human-written content from "good" human-written content, much less "great" human-written content. So they're falling back to links.
- And then another problem developed. When it comes to links, Google can't get Penguin to work the way they want, i.e., to make it expensive and difficult to obtain the links you want. They love the concept, but don't even have a launch date. I suspect a big problem is that web marketers developed efficient markets for buying and selling links on authority websites -- there's plenty of these links available right here on BHW, at prices way cheaper than a PPC campaign. People who write for authoritative websites don't earn shit, and it doesn't cost much to get them to drop a link.
- So for the past few months Google has been going with #2: destabilizing organic rankings.
- Let's be quite honest: the majority of the stuff discussed here, from PBNs to redirected domains to parasites should not work at all. Google should be able to easily filter that stuff out, but they don't. They only filter it out if you do it cheaply, like being lazy and forwarding 20+ domains or hosting all your PBNs on the same server. There has to be a reason Google is allowing this.
- The reason is: it works for Google. At least in my niche, PPC rates are way up, over 50% in the past year. Across Google, AdWords revenue is up 20% from this time last year.
I think we're going to keep seeing more of this for a while: large, inexplicable changes in rankings. Vague, unhelpful signals from Google, like suggesting that external links to helpful sites don't help a site's ranking, something that makes no sense at all from a user/quality perspective and which case studies of the SERPs have shown isn't correct. A destabilized web is a scary web, the type of web that gets marketers to throw up their hands and just pay the AdWords toll for business.
I think Google is going to keep fiddling with stuff on the backend to keep everything destabilized. It's not hard for them to do. Here's an example: a lot of people here hide their PBNs from competitors by denying access to Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, etc. That's all fine and dandy, but could there possibly be a bigger flag to Google that the site's primary purpose is improve rankings? What genuine webmaster would do that? All Google has to do is flip a switch and, boom, the rankings are destabilized again, and everyone has to scramble, and many more go running to AdWords for safety.
The short story is: stay on your toes. Don't get comfortable. Have diversified portfolios and strategies. You're going to need them.
