Panda update ain't all its cracked up to be

I read a lot of white hat SEO blogs, some of them from the so called biggest names in the industry and I have finally realised that most of them are just re-gurgitating crap and blowing wind up Google's ass.

One of the (biggest) blogs states:"This time around, Google has - among other things - improved their ability to detect scraper sites and banish them from the SERPs"

The blogger goes on to say that scraper sites are finished and already they have been banished from the SERPS, particularly in the big sectors of finance and mobile phones.

Complete and utter bollocks.

I work in personal finance and I was having a look around last night at some keywords I wanted to target and I was mightily suprised.

There is one site that is number 1 on G for a keyword that gets over 60k searches a month and another site that is number 1 for a related keyword that gets over 80k searches a month and both are autoblogs. In fact both of them also have the blue links under their SERPS listings so I'm guessing that G considers them to be authority sites?

Neither one of their home pages makes any sense...paragraphs are wrong, spellings are wrong and best of all, they contain sentences like this:

"To avail a loan that will give monetary, buy a finance application with no woes for you to decide your finances"

WTF?

Now that may read ok to G's spiders but to everyone else that is just pure gibberish.

Neither site domain is aged, they have about 200 BL's each (highest PR of 3) and less than 40 pages of content each.

I've just realised that after 10 years of this, I don't actually know anything anymore...

The only thing that works for certain is networking, whether it's manual or automated or backlinks or followers, to build connections and put a beacon out to the search engines that this is a site to consider for the SERPs. The amount of connections is irrelevant. If they're shitty links you're going to need a lot more of them, and the same goes for followers. If you have shitty followers that don't engage an audience themselves, it doesn't matter if you have 10k or 20k of them, you're not going to get any velocity.

It may look like there are only a few hundred to a few thousand links, but the networks can span 100s of thousands of links pretty easily.

Everything after that is just good-to-have. Unique content? Sure. Fast load times? Great. Regular updates? Let's do it. Don't get too bogged down in the details. If spam sites dominate the top 5 in a niche, make a great site and network it. If people like the site, they're going to share it. Once that ball gets rolling, your link building is essentially done because everyone else will do it for you.