Why not setup a totally different domain on a different provider and setup a blackhat operation there if you were concerned for being banned?

WG

... nah mate, suffering from the AMP syndrome ... can't afford the flight tickets.

:1orglaugh

Kevlar....OMG....THEY HAD SUCH TUDES!

1 of them was rude to Brandy aka Muffin!

Do you mind if I have a go? ;)

Most all of my sites are mainsteam.

I built it...used it for a week...starting getting emails asking why my URL was in people's logs when there was clearly no links from my domain to theirs.

I run an honest business. It just didn't feel right.

I got a Nice jump from google...and then I quit using it.

What is the Amp syndrome? Thanks WG for getting that straightened out.....As a matter of fact I still owe you your birthday drink!!!!

P.S. - I'm not selling it/giving it away.

Well, i'm not refer spamming.. YET!

Few months back you started spamming my site, and I asked you to stop. And if you check the high schools stats pages there are a lot of porn sites there. Your site is there too, but at least it isn't porn right ?

I noticed a couple of SEGuru's sites in that list :)
WG

50

Point is, I use the service myself. I only use it with non-adult B2B sites for myself. That's my choice.

I cannot control how other people choose to use and/or abuse methods.

But Brujah, you and I both know...if done right...is less intrusive than the average spider and seems to work for people. Even CCFool said he saw the jump in google.

In all things moderation, and control.

Hense the first time at an SES we've heard the term "over-optimize!"

Agreed. There are always some anti-spam nazi bloggers who go apeshit and start talking about ban lists and stuff. It does work though. But, I don't kid myself and pretend it isn't spam or think that Google doesn't mind me doing it if I do. I know they'll kill a perfectly good site and domain name if they wanted to. If I wanted to do it, I'd go with a disposable domain at least.

Google knows what's up. They are not stupid.

It's just a matter of time before they start slapping penalties on sites with excessive stats/blog links.

Thank you for your honest comment there. Very kewl.

It is a personal call. For us, at this crazy hectic time...I personally am hand tweaking stuff and bauilding links like a mofo.

Don;t get me wrong I am most definitely advocating building solid, relevant, long term links.

But I am also advocating a shotgun approach until things settle down.

Only makes sense if you really thrive off of this traffic. If you have paid campaigns elsewhere and you're managing those appropriately...and seeing an ROI...you can likely weather the storm until it passes and the changes come and things settle for awhile.

I feel compelled to put my less than :2 cents:

As i see it google have not changed their emphasis or their criteria for what is a good site.A mixture of Quality and and not so good quality backlinks is still important,good clean navigation and structure of a site is still important ,outbound links to on topic sites is important.
What has changed is that google has stopped making it easy to game them anymore . Sure you can still spam google short term but people buying expired domains without proper use of them are getting shitloads of pr but no positions in the serps.
Also people buying a bunch of domains at the same time will not last a major update from google.If you buy a group of domains at the same time dont use them in the same nest.Be careful of link farms and dont link to spam domains which is a hard thing not to do in our industry.
Don't hoard your PR.Link out to good quality sites.And google likes outbound links on your page.dont target just 1 keyword but use its many variations.
Also get good pr links and low pr links.Its a bit suss when all your links are pr4 ,5 and 6. And dont go buy domains that have your target keywords in the domain.this is a flag for google to suspect gaming them.
And lastly ignore all this shit i just wrote.:1orglaugh

awesome thread guys. it's one of the very few gfy threads where i actually learn something useful.

Hey Swami....

Great fricken input man. You are so right.

I couldn't have said it better, except for the listening to him part.

This is the feel good part about giving back. This is a simple formula, but as webmasters...we should have this or one you call your own...in front of your face.

Stick to your plan, and stay SE friendly during the turmoil.

BUT ALSO...QUIT THINKING ONLY GOOGLE FOLKS.

all i know about the florida update is that it put most of my low rate PR pages into the top10/top5 for main keywords for those pages. and i never attempted to optimize. i just hope i stay there :)

rabbit

Look under my name... if I go around to other bots she won't show me the Google loving!

WG

Nobody does Anal like Deepbot.

:1orglaugh

Freshbot and Deepbot in a threesome is great :)

I think I'll give referer spamming a try. Can't hurt with a throw-away domain or a free subdomain.

As for buying high pr domains it works well for me. Honestly the PR isn't much of an issue, I just use them to get the spiders to follow my internal links. Most of the pages I get good serps on are either PR0 or PR1. I didn't really see any big change after the florida update, but I don't use very competitive terms(none that would be filtered).

Okay, where the hell did you all hide GFY? Too many thinkers present here in this thread. This is not GFY, the aliens must have swapped it with another while we were not looking :P

Still here :D

Don't flatter yourself... I believe they were refering to the jesusmeister. :Graucho

:(

haha :P

Hey Cluck...shout at me on ICQ: 28495329
I'll show you the new system and how the old works. See if anything we have may suit your needs. Some reference of course. Hhehehehe.

CarbonDream: Did this flipflop happen on the big Florida Update? If so, are those same sites that flipped...how is their PR or backlinks? Are you still up there?

Curious...

Ive noticed that a lot of sites have been dropped down into the abyss in the serps seemingly because they ONLY paid attention to linking strategies. Folks, links help a great deal with google, but they do have to be complimented with reasonable content seo too now.

I also strongly believe relevant links is becoming a part of the formula now. Having thousands of inbound links in the past used to boost the PR significantly, but now it seems like this won't help in the SERPS. It may get you a high PR but it doesn't seem to be as effective anymore.

WG