BU got caught up in the sweep and there's not much we can do about it. BU wasn't even the primary target. The blog networks that allowed 1 article to be posted to 100 sites and that kind of spammy crap by others is Compared to most blog networks BU was at the top of the heap for good posts and good blogs. However it's still a blog network and google doesn't like that.
As much as y'all might like to think google is a great place, goodle is a dictatorship. Most search engines are. When you get into SEO you play by the SE rules. Like them or not, fair or not, adding value or not. SE's are dictatorships.
I've been through a fair amount of these SE massacres and the one thing I know, this to shall pass. The problem we need to be concentrating on is what do we do now rather than spending time speculating on how google found all the blog networks.
Now we all have to go get links the old fashioned way, the hard way. Finding a place to post or comment that will pass link juice. That's hard to do and a lot more work than most people want to do.
Lol, one scheme that might work is a network of blogs that people post comments to rather than making posts. Google loves busy blogs with lots of comments. IMO it would have to be a very private blog network, invitation only, and no forums or lists of blogs accessible to any search engine. No affiliate programs and no discussion on open forums.
Another possiblity is a forum where people post about their problems with a page or site and others try to help them out. Everyone would have a sig and everyone would be allowed one link in their forum posts. A long time ago in internet time I had one of those and it worked well but it was a pita to keep spammers out. While the advertising on the forum made good money the hassle finally got to me and I let it go.
No matter what anyone decides to do there is no way to support tons of blogs and get the links you need and that google likes. While I have around 30 blogs, small potatoes compared to the idiots with thousands in blog networks, I already knew that having that many was bad. I don't do a lot of automated stuff and 30 is way to many to do manually without a blog network to post in.
I'm going to concentrate on having 3 large blogs that will become authority blogs. I mostly write my own articles or radically rewrite the PLR articles before I post them. Unique helps. I'll choose 3 different niches and work those to the max. Links will come from blog comments, forum comments, articles I write and submit to the article places, etc. Just like before blog networks happened.
There also happens to be another problem. For those of you who went and looked at the mind power search and checked out the sites you may have noticed that there were very, very few of them with ads for anything above the fold.
Planet Ocean, a respected SEO newsletter that is quite accurate and has a large staff managing their own websites for SEO. They do a lot of testing and give great advice.
* Google's Freshness & Panda updates have struck again with
an entire wave of sites just now being effected.
* Google is now laying BIG penalties on sites with tons of ads
featured 'above the fold'! and that includes Adsense.
The above are two things they believe, through their testing, have happened or are in the process of happening.
I'm moving most of my ads to below the fold, on the sites I plan on keeping. Makes good sense from a surfer standpoint as that's tells google the site os for surfers rather for selling affiliate stuff or getting adsense clicks. Never tested it as such but it's not impossible you could make more money as surfers will like the site better so you will get more traffic.
However it kinda puts the generic adsense sites out the window. Google has never liked sites that were made strictly for adsense even tho tons of people made big bucks that way.
In the future you need to be much more focused on providing great information and a great surfer experience than most of us have been. You'll need to learn whatever niches you are in, inside and out. It's simple as it;s just research.
I'll be getting rid of most of my bogs that are generic and have no real focus. Almsot any blog that allows posts on any and every topic aren't focused. If some of my keywords aren't in the url those blogs will be gone as they are now huge time wasters.
Oh, another thing I read from a trusted source is that google is going a different way with links. It's now not quantity but quality of the sites you are linking from that counts. The vast majority of our sites in BU are not considered quality by google standards.
The biggest problem with getting quality links is they are fairly hard to come by. I suspect that started happening in a small way a couple of months ago. The mind power site told me something was happening and when I started making two posts a day to it instead of the usual one it ws still going backwards. I even tried rewriting some of the pages and tweaking them for better seo and that didn't stop the slide either.
Like I said, I've survived through a few of these massacres and I'll survive this one too. Just need to stop, take a few breaths and go on with a new way of doing things.
Lol, at least my sites that are good at MSN aren't going backwards there, yet.
Just wish I could figure out why they are good at MSN as I have tons of pages that aren't. I haven't done anything specific to make them good at MSN, just the same things I've done to rise in google.BTW, I doubt that deleting posts will help you much. Obviously if google doesn't like the posts you need to get rid of them but don't expect it to do much for you. Your sites aren't going backwards because you were delisted, they are going backwards because you are losing lnks to your sites.
With Wordpress blogs you can get rid of the posts by deleting the user. When you do that it will ask if you want to delete all that users posts or if you want to put them under someone else. Simple to get rid of all posts google doesn't like by doing that. It won't keep you from going backwards but you will look a little better to google. It's kind like shutting the barn door after all the cows escaped.
While I doubt there is much that Mike can do to resolve the situation here at BU I'll still be here and wait for him to come up with something else as I know he will sooner or later.
So will most of the other big boys that got hit. Just need to wait awhile for them to figure out some new schemes they think will work.
