Hi all at BHW

Hi all,
I've been making a good living online for many years now. I've always been whiter than white. In fact I've always done as little SEO as I could. I followed the Google philosophy of building useful sites that others would naturally link to. I put all my effort into the sites and very little into SEO, all whilst my competition was busy plagiarising my ideas and doing their SEO to the max.

This worked for me for many years and my sites are now looking and working better than ever before. This year I was hit hard by Panda, Penguin and the final nail in the coffin, EMD!

Most of my links were from forums, where there was a real buzz about my sites, with people posting links daily. I've read that Google doesn't value these forum links as much as it did, but for me they mean more to real people than mentions on social channels. If your URL is posted dozens of times on multiple high end forums without being deleted it means something.

Anyway, I'm disappointed in Google and the gloves are now off. I'm ready to move over to the darkside

hello

Haha! Welcome to the dark(er) side. There's a lot of shit google's been doing lately that make me wonder. Their new webmaster guidelines for one have basically outlawed any form of linkbuilding whatsoever (even legitimate links like product reviews, etc.) It's crazy.

Yep, they want it all to be natural linking. Yet when you rely on natural linking Google allows you to get blown out of the water by sites that are doing proper SEO.

They also want to see sites chock full of content that people are never going to read. Not every site is a news site. Some sites just perform a simple function and are very popular, sites like Bitly for instance.

Try a search on some price comparison terms these days, all G returns are news articles and merchant sites. It's not what people want. It doesn't help them quickly compare prices, but then again I am slightly biased

Welcome! However, with all the recent updates... I think you should stick with WH methods. Google becoming smarter every day. It's smarter to be on their side. Just provide high-quality content/information/service and follow their guidelines, and you should be OK.

Welcome to the black forum

Cheers and Welcome

Always welcome