I've taken some big hits from sites that were based upon pure whitehat techniques and from sites that employed only Blackhat tactics. Consequently, from here on out I'm permanently banning ALL whitehat SEO; there will be NONE of that!!!
The whitehat sites were humming along for years, generating around $1400 p/m. Now they are gasping for air at $500 to $600 p/m. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to what is taking place... with one exception.
g00gal seems to be intent in flexing it's muscles with the goal of letting those in SEO know who is in control. They seem to be taking actions with the sole purpose of leaving webmasters and those in SEO flat out guessing at how they rank sites.
I don't know how you measure/test/confirm and track what's happening SEO wise but here's one method that I use. I have a list of about 220 sites from various markets and niches; none of which are mine. I monitor these sites to help me grasp and comprehend any g00gal algo changes.
What am I looking at and looking for? Site design, on page SEO, off page SEO, rankings, PR, age, social media, indexing rate, caliber of content, ratio of advertisements to content, canonical structure and a few other variables.
By monitoring such a broad based spectrum of sites, I can hopefully pinpoint the type of message g00gal is sending. I say hopefully because as I've previously stated, there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind some of the severely adverse actions g00gal is taking.
Over the past week, I've looked at and checked out no less than one hundred and seventy-five sites. About 17% were completely and totally
DE-INDEXED. For example, take a look at:
Code:
Videoforward [COLOR=Lime]dot [/COLOR]com
This is one of the sites I've been tracking since May of 2009 and at one point I recall it having a PR of at least 4. If I'm not mistaken, I believe it achieved a PR5 but don't quote me on that. Keep in mind, this is only one site in one niche.
However, by the time I've added up all of the sites that were de-indexed along with the ones that lost rankings and measured them against the sites that improved or remained as they were, nothing is adding up or panning out. In other words, there are no clear cut patterns. Some sites that were de-indexed and lost rankings looked like masterpieces - as in they had their act together from top to bottom SEO wise. Yet, they still lost out in these last set of g00gal changes. I've ran many of these sites through IBP, MS and SEOSpyglass, etc., and again nothing is adding up and nothing is sticking out like a sore thumb.
At this point, if you are paying attention g00gal and the SERPs and whats happening, it appears the best thing to do is to set up a solid and continuous DF system for both on page and off page and weather this storm. JMHO.