Just how accurate is anyone's appraisal on this forum?

[WhitbyHolidayCottages]

When people are discussing what affects their search engine rankings on this particular forum,  which has got to be one of the most read on the Internet just how much guesswork is really going on?

It seems like God almighty Google works from its own criteria and the rest of us all scrap to guess! I myself in the last week of posted various topics on here and are conflicting reports by so-called experts not that I am being critical for the sake of it.

If you to one website and said to all the people on this forum just exactly why is it ranking to a degree for this particular key phrase or not as the case may be would there be any truly accurate knowledgeable answers that will come through and explained the difference?

If you have a top 10 of most important things that would influence your rankings that are not guesswork would that be possible to say based on knowledge and expertise? And if so spill the beans what are ? What are the movers and shakers in their particular keyword phrases doing ongoing that's getting them the great results we all want ?

Or is the entire subject of how well you rank ultimately not totally understood and only the realms of guesswork based on observation.

When I was young I trained as electrician which dealt in facts, it seems like this is not possible with the world of business and search engine rankings?

[EGOL]

Where I compete, the short tail is becoming enormously competitive.  Almost all of my revenue comes in from extensive long tail content. Extensive.  More than all of my retail competitors and manufacturers combined.

Most of my traffic comes in from long tail queries that are informational rather than transactional.  So, although it looks like my conversion rate is bad, the number of conversions is higher because a few of the informational content visitor will purchase.

[m2webs]

I could agree that it happens that sometimes google penalizes innocent sites but we can count it as collateral damage. Google is not perfect. But in most cases when innocent people get penalized they are not so innocent.

You mentioned "keyword rich anchor text" as an example. If google didn't penalize for that and people start making 100% of the links with same keyword rich anchor text then it is not innocent. If my brand is "m2webs" and my site is about "how to bake potatoes" does it look like innocent if all my anchors are "how to make bake potatoes" ? It is just not logical that out of 300 links I have all the 300 are with that anchor text. People will in many cases link just brand name or url as it is more natural, like brand.com, or www.brand.com or even "click here"...

So yes, some techniques work right now and are not penalized but could be sooner or later. And I must say that in most cases by using simple logic and common sense you can realize by yourself if something could be penalized and avoid that.

If you see advertising "50.000 visits in 30 days just for $5" does it look logical. Does anyone think that for $5 you can get 50.000 real visitors and potential customers ? You don't need to be internet marketing expert to realize that.

[WhitbyHolidayCottages]

Yes as always that great advice on board I think I just need to pay for good advice regarding Penguin and Panda and and a website redesign which I have talked about for a long time,  it's time to get on with it !

Strangely enough I was comparing my Google analytics this morning and I put the post on because in the first six months of 2012 in comparison to the first six months of 2014 my overall traffic Increased three times, but my favourite short tail money keywords has gone down.

I'm working on that one at the moment,  but that's the keyword working

[EGOL]

Overall, you are doing great.  Fantastic.   How many people can say....

....my two websites produce the majority of my income....

You are doing better than most professional SEOs would do on your site.

So, I don't think that you need or want someone to "take it over".   You want a brief amount of SEO consulting.  That is what I get.  I have paid people for their opinion on what should be done with my site and I have paid people for technical work such as responsive design, moving sites into wordpress and coding a custom content manager.   These are generally one-time costs.

If I owned your site, I would probably pay for an opinion of its Panda and Penguin vulnerability.  And I would pay to have someone recode the site and incorporate responsive design.  That might be all that I would do.  This might cost a few to several thousand dollars.   I have paid for both of these services several times over the past few years.  It does not cost as much as you think.

Then, after that work is done and I gave it some time, I might get advice on how to kick-up its competitiveness safely.  Here, I am paying for ideas, not someone to do the work.

There are plenty of people who provide "SEO consulting" services.

[WhitbyHolidayCottages]

You're perfectly correct, I was asking too much from people who are giving their time free. When I think about it more clearly in my case I am  the only person who really knows my website, I haven't paid for any help. Not the best situation overall if you want the best from the website because I'm certainly as I think you know dabbler regarding SEO.  I tend to have too many plates spinning and don’t  spend enough time on the subject.

In actual fact, when I've considered the organic traffic I've had over the years in competition with some larger companies and surprised I've achieved the results I have. I've put the work in but not the most knowledgeably based.

The reality is that my two websites produce the majority of my income, so it goes without saying that it's worth investing in expertise. The problem I seem to see initially when looking for expertise is that the majority of trusted, well-known companies all demand a large fee for their work, which is fine if you're a large company with a large turnover. Example I looked at the recommended list on MOZ. If you are a one-man band small company website you just can't afford the amounts. But then on the side when you look at the small or even possibly one-man band SEO companies they don't have the results or clientele to give you trust. I looked at one company and as an example they were representing a roofing firm and on local search on Google roofing firm's website was ranked extremely poorly for the obvious keywords..

I am serious about improving my website and its rankings and I will try to hit the balance of getting the right person for the job, but we satisfied with the amount paid for the work. It's always a difficult step I think handing over the keys to your website to somebody when you've been in total control with no delegating of the work.

Overall when I've looked at the comments from the majority people on here they're giving good sensible information to the best of the knowledge and I realise some people give excellent advice considering they're doing for free.

Is there any way to determine if your site has being penalised by Panda or  Penguin ? As you point out if that's the case maybe that will be the first thing to try to fix this as much as possible before hiring a website redesign and SEO  a professional.

[WhitbyHolidayCottages]

I don't know how you guys managed to get the time to give such comprehensive and good answers on this forum you really must love the subject! One of my problems is I tend to be too busy to study the subject enough and that really is counter-productive.

I think that was one of my most posts ever because Google has been extremely good to me and I'm sure a lot of other people businesswise so I shouldn't complain at all. I do realise that the ultimate aim is to give the best results with the most accurate information and to stop ongoing to the largest to be possible cheating of search engine rankings.

The only thing that I'm not particularly fond of is when you get the change in the search engine filter system and it penalises people maybe for innocent mistakes in the past like key rich anchor text which was at one point acceptable to encourage the same key phrases and then it becomes a natural and is penalised it doesn't seem fair when in the past you were working with the information that was available at that time. If people use black hat techniques that were obviously bad like link farms then you can see there is no excuse.

I appreciate your comprehensive answer and I will study more

[EGOL]

When people are discussing what affects their search engine rankings on this particular forum,  which has got to be one of the most read on the Internet just how much guesswork is really going on?

I believe that most people are giving you their honest best answer.

As the person who might use the information provided you have to consider these things...

1)  The exact question that you asked and what information that you provided about your site that would enable the person answering to give you a well-considered response.   Some of your recent questions have "unknowable" answers.  Why?  Because any person who would try to give an answer would need to spend many hours in study to give a good answer.  They would need to consider your site, your competitors site and everything that they know about google which google only partly reveals.

2. Who is answering your question.   Some people are answering your questions without looking at your site, some are answering after looking at multiple pages on your site, looking at your competitors site and looking at data from all of these sites using tools.  So you are getting shoot from the hip answers given by noobs and carefully-considered answers given by experienced people.  Sometimes the noobs are right and sometimes the experienced people are wrong but you are asking where people of many different abilities and perspectives are doing this for free and are not inclined to spend a lot of time.  In short, it is best to listen to people who you think are successful and who in their answer reveal that they have carefully considered a lot of information about your website, competitors and google's foggy revelations.

**3) Are you REALLY reading the answer carefully with a mind that is willing to do the work? ** Very often, the answer that is the most difficult to implement is the best answer.  In recent weeks you have asked the same question here multiple times in different ways.  Go back and read all of the answers again.  The first time or two you ask people might give you reasonable time, but after they see the same question again and again (which has been asked here months or years ago) their willingness to respond starts dropping.  Either you don't like the answers that you received, don't believe them, or you are allowing "shoot from the hip" answers that are easy to implement seduce you away from carefully considered answers that are hard to implement.

** 4) Your site might have a Panda or a Penguin or another type of problem** and that is important to determine and get under control before you make a big investment in other things - because when you have a penalty you only get back a fraction of any further investment.

You seem to be considering a major investment in your website.  When I do that I spend a lot of time studying the situation myself.  Then I get paid advice from people who are smarter than me and who have looked at similar problems on LOTS of websites.  What I don't do is try to weight the advice of a hundred different people given in a forum where people give your question ten seconds of consideration and type the first thing that comes to their head.  _That is the high cost of free advice. _

When I was young I trained as electrician which dealt in facts, it seems like this is not possible with the world of business and search engine rankings?

You are right.  There is a big difference.  Diagnosing the problems of a website on a forum is similar to diagnosing mental illness.  The only information that you get are what the person shares about the website and then what you can divine from looking at it, its competitors and the data from a few tools.

If you  suffer from mental illness who do you want advising you?   I would want my advice from experienced people, who have treated many others and who have spent good time trying to understand my situation completely.  So when you are trying to decide who to listen to in a forum keep these things in mind.  And keep in mind that there are different approaches to building winning websites.  Some require an intelligent investment in the website and some use offsite methods that might have different values to Google over time.

[m2webs]

It is not a guesswork for sure. Actually it is very simple. By changing possible ranking factors on your website and analyzing how it influences SERP changes you can come to conclusion which of that factors are more or less important. So by time you get more and more info how that Google works.

Next step is to get more quality info and that info includes more extensive research on a big number of sites and sharing experience with other people, using tools which automatically do some analysis for you and so on...

As an electrician you know facts and deal according to them. The problem with google is that factors are changing. People are always trying to find a way to rank better with no efforts and google is fighting against that.

Once upon a time there were meta keywords and google used them to find out what about is that page. People realized that and spammed it to death. So google removed it as a ranking factor. Then people started stealing content from other sites to make huge website without efforts. Then google said "we will penalize that"... And so on...

Many people know how google works but noone knows it 100%. Just when you think you know almost everything it is already changed. So, one part of that is thinking in advance also. So when you get "opposite" answers to your question one of the reason may be that you get "old data" or just wrong answers.

So if you would ask me what the most important factors are I would say:

1. Quality content (unique, complete, media rich)
2. Users experience and engagement (on website and social media)
3. Authority gained by backlinks (perfectly if gained by points 1 and 2)

So if you are electrician and your website has just phone number and address on it for sure you will be ranked low. If you add more info about yourself you will rank better. Add some images of your work and someone may share it. Add some how to, or diy articles and you will get some audience. And all of that may produce some natural backlinks. Be active on social media...

After all it comes to some mathematical things so you can use moz crawl test and page grader to see what is wrong or what you miss, fix it and that's it - simple