No, you’re not the first person to buy since the post above was published. SiteBuilder Elite continues to sell regularly!

Gary

I have just purchased SiteBuilder Elite after someone sent me a Clickbank link and now wonder if I was the first buyer since this post? I think you are offering an amazing product and having just invested $199 in a brand new thing called Commission Shops, which claims to do the same as yours, but DOESN’T…!, I will now be HAPPY TO claim back my $199 from them.

Being new to this IM and Affiliate marketing thing, I will ALSO be promoting your product as much as possible and even try and build a site dedicated to promoting it.

Thank you, once again

Joe

Gary

Certainly, various strategies can be misused. But that misuse isn’t restricted to individual, small-time webmasters. Many companies (some very well known) have been caught “gaming the system” themselves. That’s hardly playing fair, is it? (check out this NY Times article on JC Penney’s Linking Scam) Plus, companies have huge advertising budgets that would otherwise allow them to dominate the search results. Is that really what you want to see when you do a search – a list of sites where you can buy stuff and no sites providing the actual information you’re looking for.

People seem to forget that Google make a huge amount of money from their search pages, Google needs websites in order to survive. And, yes, it makes sense to get rid of garbage sites from the search listings but that should be done a the basis of a site’s content, not the links pointing to it.

Here’s the problem with their current strategy: suppose a company finds a competitors site is outranking them in the listings. They then hire someone to build “bad” backlinks to their competitor in such a way that Google takes notice. Google then penalizes the competitor and drops them hugely in rank or de-indexes the site. The competitor then cries foul and appeals to Google. Google says “prove you didn’t do what we say you did”. Competitor can’t. Result: First company moves up in rank and has demolished competitor.

While Google’s company motto may be “First Do No Evil”, what they’ve been doing in the last few years has basically kicked that paradigm into the Trash Can. One of my friends in the IT industry now believes that Google will have crashed and burned in 5 years based on its behaviour and how it is treating people, especially webamasters (he’s looking at this from a ouside perspective, not an affiliate/internet marketing one).

Google have become unaccountable. They’ve retired to their ivory tower and don’t deign to engage with the little people. Ever had a site kicked out of Adsense for example? Time was you could email a real person, find out what the problem was, fix it, contact that person again, get them to review your changes and reactivate your site. Not these days. There’s no way to contact a real person in Google to get things sorted out. Result: your site stays permanently banned from Adsense. Hardly a “First Do No Evil” attitude, is it?

Gary

Never put all your eggs in one basket – whether that’s building sites with one technology (e.g. WordPress), putting all your sites on one webhost or using just one strategy for building backlinks.

Gary

The danger is just when you become over reliant on any one strategy. Google does not like to be manipulated, but all SEO is exactly this. There isn’t a method on the planet that we webmasters won’t try to use to our benefit!

Don’t panic – the one thing we know about Google is that it just loves a good shake up.

Claire

I’d prefer if you used just the opening couple of paragraphs with a link back to my post. The reasons I’m asking for this is first I’m interested in getting people’s reactions, hearing about their experiences and getting their comments and that would be diluted if their responses appeared on your blog. By all means encourage interaction on the issue on your own blog though. The other reason is down to me having unique content on this blog and I don’t dilute the effectiveness of unique content by posting it verbatim on a range of different sites. Following the algorithm changes at Google (in particular), having unique content on a site is more important than ever.

Regards,

Gary