SEO is dead

I am relatively new to SEO, Google rankings, page indexing and everything else that comes part and parcel of having and maintaining a website. I have had to learn everything as I go, from the very beginning not knowing how to even get a website up and running and where to buy a domain name from(let alone making the domain names WHOIS info private which I didn't find out until many months in!), to now having to find backlinks and figuring out percentages to optimise keywords.

Working in The World Wide Web is a contradiction, its the fullest and busiest yet also loneliest place to work. In the SEO world especially, there is no support  it's dog eat dog and everyone is against everyone else... unless you pay them!
It doesn't matter that your website has nothing to do with theirs and there is no competition or threat, they will still not help you out.

As a beginner, I needed help!
Source: www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org

As a beginner, I turned mostly to forums and YouTube videos to help me out and as places to learn from, YouTube videos were generally rubbish and self promoting, but surely I could find some helpful, knowledgeable people on the forums, these were SEO forums after-all.  So off I naively went and asked all sorts of newbie questions, an at first it was fine, I got a few answers (some spam but a few good ones). My main response from people regarding how to climb up the rankings was 'get more backlinks', but how? 'forum posting and use your signature as a link, it's totally white hat'.  Ok, why not, I'll give it a go. Most forums you have to have made a certain number of posts before getting a signature, so I followed the rules, made legitimate posts and joined in legitimate conversations  even helping people out with my new found knowledge  Finally I got to the required number of posts, put in my signature with a little link, and BAM, my posts got deleted. Everytime I tried to post a newpost, a genuine one, it was deleted! This happened on a few forums. So it was time to try another way  of getting backlinks

I'd heard of blog commenting. Again, I didn't want to be spammy, just wanted to get my site out there, so I looked for blogs that related to my niche, they were blogs about apps, and smartphone games. Most of them I found really interesting and I made sure every blog comment something I would write even if I weren't trying to promote my site. Almost every blog comment I wrote was taken down.

I was losing hope with my backlinking strategy,  I turned to social bookmarking but even Reddit wasn't letting me add my link (just one sodding link! and i'd commented and contributed plenty to the sites other news!), and Wiki answers decided to ban my site after only putting it in the 'relevant links' section once, and the question was where can I get the Logos Quiz answers? Literally my site is the answer!
I even wrote a couple of high quality articles to submit as a guest blogger (and yes they were high quality!), but got rejected by all except 2.  I was losing my mind! What was I supposed to do?!? How was I supposed to do SEO?

I know what you're thinking, sounds like a spammer, serves her right, she deserved it. But I can assure you I am not in the least bit a spammer, I have seen spam and I do not promote my site that, I think it devalues the site immensely and after the hard work I have put in, why would I want to devalue it.
How are you supposed to do SEO or even just market and promote your site so that people know it's there if at every turn you get shot down? How do people get their sites to number 1 in Google?

Is Blackhat SEO the only way to go now?
Source: www.qafila.wordpress.com

I have finally, after many many months of looking figured it out, Adwords, and Blackhat. Simply put that is all that's left, SEO is dead now, its almost as impossible to implement as knowing what Google's next ridiculous algorithm update is going to be. For your site to be seen nowadays, you must pay either Google (Adwords) or if you're not savvy enough to do-it-yourself then you need to pay a hacker or other blackhat seo specialist to put you on their link wheel or add you to their blogging network. FYI, I have gone with the first option, I have turned to Adwords, which in my opinion stinks! I paid £12.90 for 23 clicks! But I feel it's better than going the blackhat way because surely, SURELY, this will soon get sorted out by Google? Right? Google? Please?

Now you may be wondering, as I have spoken so much about it what my site actually is and maybe you want to look at it to see what I'm talking about. Well I'm not putting a link in this post, I know, completely ridiculous, as a link would be very relevant  however that would be bad SEO. You see I've mentioned my site and put a link to it many times before in this blog and so putting another one in would look suspicious to Google and potentially bring my site down. Just another example of how very stupid these algorithms have become.

Google is Broken!

Google is broken, and it's killing small businesses and giving it's customers the wrong results. You want an example? I could give you plenty, but here's just one; I searched for 'Top locations to buy a house 2013', now because you probably wouldn't believe me if I told you what results I found, here is a visual for you...

Yep, thats right, I got given a page, (infact 2 pages!) about best honeymoon and holiday destinations and travel tips, not a single relevant page (and no I was not signed in for personal results!).

Google used to be the word for integrity and the best searches you can do on-line I'm worried that now it has built it's brand to a big enough proportion it doesn't care anymore and has become just a money-hungry beast like all the other big corporations.
If your thinking I'm some Google basher, who is bitter because Google threw my site down the rankings and isn't letting me back up to that number 1 spot, well you are kindof right, but there is much more to it than that.
Over the last month I have been doing everything I possibly can and everything that Google tells you to do to get your site back on the first page, perfecting on page keyword %'s, getting more quality and relevant backlinks, creating more content and generally following all the whitehat Google guidelines and rules, I have got nowhere.  Meanwhile, I have been keeping an eye on my competition, one in particular. Now I'm not going to mention their name as I would rather not give them the free publicity but if you Google pretty much anything to do with 'Logo Quiz' they will come up first in the SERP (search engine results page). They are easy to spot, they are the site with almost no content.
I decided to dig a little deeper into this site, some of the big SEO advice out there is to check your competitors links, I did, and what I found was shocking, here are some facts:

• Website creation date: 19th September 2012
• Number of backlinks: (on 28th October 2012)  57000+ 
• Any relevant backlinks? No, backlinks were from sites about Salmon Fishing and Ballet to name just two.
• Keyword %'s: All over the place, but for the keywords 'logo quiz answers' around 11%.
• How did they do this: That's exactly what I wanted to know! So I found out....

They are hackers! I didn't have to dig deep to discover this on a Joomla forum:

This is the link if you want to see the whole forum discussion

What the hackers had done is embed a dofollow link to their site in the head of this poor guys website, thus giving them a free backlink. They must have an automatic software they did this 57000 times over, and with most site owners likely not even checking for any extra code, or if they did, like this guy they wouldn't know what to do with it, this gives the hackers a tidy amount of backlinks.
So well done hackers, you got your free backlinks, but hang-on, surely Google is clever enough to figure out that this is a hack, that something fishy is going on?
Well judging by the SERPs, apparently not, there's not even a prospect of the Google dance going on anymore as these hackers have been solidly sitting at number one for the past 6 weeks.
Surely Google has the intelligence to see this, so why are they not doing anything about it? Money. They want more money, which they make a lot of through selling advertising through Adwords.
Adwords is ridiculous  you pay more per click then you could ever justify, but for small businesses who have been shot down the rankings and over taken by hackers it is now the only option to be seen. So, actually clever Google, more money in you tax dodging pocket.
What about the rest of us? Trying our hardest to play by the rules and be good SEO's? Well time will tell, there needs to be another BIG Penguin update to sieve out all these bad guys, when that comes, if the bad guys are still at the top, well then there is only one explanation, Google have gone to the dark side, they can't beat em', so they're joining them and using the hackers to make themselves a pretty penny. Once again, googlebye small businesses, make way for the big corporations.
Sad world.

As an extra, you can do you're own little experiment to see just how broken Google is; we all do at least one Google search per day, so when that time in the day comes to do your search, instead of clicking on the first result and assuming it will be the best, go onto page two, an really have a look, I bet you'll find a better result for whatever it is you're searching for! I have personally been experimenting with this, and have found that approx 7 out of 10 times, the results on page 2 are more relevant, about 1 out of 10 times the first result is relevant and the rest is somewhere in the middle to lower end of page one.
I'm off to Bing!

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