(former) SEO guys and gals, how are you doing now?
 

This year has been a true disaster for me. Everything i built crashed down. But also freelance projects I did disappeared due to bad business decisions of other people involved. Or collaborations where people stopped paying me. Somehow this all happened at the same time.

Whatever could go wrong business wise went wrong. I have started up new SEO projects for myself but everytime an update arrives my shit is dropped. As for porn, I am going to actively trade traffic with other sites now. Can't rely on SE's anymore, especially with google gradually turning porn results into mainstream results. I have some other unrelated projects still that do allright luckily.

If you are or were in SEO, what did you do when the penguin etc. shit started this year? Is your SEO stuff still going strong? Or are you doing other stuff instead, and if so what?

went totally shit for me past year aswell.
now i am forgetting about seo and just trying to build good sites that should get hits organically, i think this is the best method without me trying any sort of techniques. I admit that I am not smart enough to be an SEO expert.

got huge hits on 2012 Apr and 2012 Oct (both penguins)

Income fell by 40%, still surviving though

not sure how much of this applies top adult (there was a discussion in the mainstream forum about whether there was even a difference) but you might want to have a look at this thread form the twist (formerly moreniche) forum about seo post panda/pengiun; http://www.twistforum.com/topic/4057...-and-penguins/

but its really tough to know what really works these days. there is some complete and utter shit ranking on page1 for keywords relating to some of the brands I work with...

Some exact match keyword domains have lost their positions. Evertything else works mostly like it's been working before.

Fuck everything i used to get steady joins from some and now nothing and other sites have increased

Most sites have stayed the same. A few had a slightly i ncrease in traffic from google. No site has lost traffic, other than the usual ups and downs as always.

Seo methods/ techniques, didn't change my methodology at all. Kept doing the same shit been doing forever. Nothing changed at all.

I didn't bother to try to fix anything,was hoped how will google come to their senses but dont see that yet.Their decision to count backlinks as negative i find totally retarded since it's so easy to abuse that,it would have much more sense to simply auto discard such backlinks.Not the mention i haven't see anything clear yet either from google nor seo sites what exactly is negative/bad link,they only mention how it shouldn't be unnatural plus the thing with anchors where in case if you too much target same keywords you would lose rankings.
Also,did anyone got their rankings after changing anchors ?So far nobody reported that,which make me wonder is that just another bullshit placed by seo sites and "penguin fixers".

Even the top SEO guys are scrambling. My sites also took a big hit since the google BS updates

Most black hat nerfs are also white hat buffs...
Building quality sites still works well.

Imagine! Some people that thought they were smarter than google are not smarter than google.

Those people are still smarter then google,since google is now more stupid :1orglaugh

I did good SEO wise on mainstream projects. I'm totally out of adult so I cannot say.

By far my best year in business so far, by a long stretch.

I dropped some spots but all in all not tooo bad. Slow to get them back up but I never did things like others anyway.

Can you give me some hints please :upsidedow :helpme:)

I got out of doing blackhat stuff quite a while ago, so I'm doing fine.. though I stepped away from adult for almost a year(not entirely, just mostly) to focus on a mainstream client.

I'm back building up a couple of projects now, though.

haha... as you already know...

If people don't enjoy your site when they reach it, Google will send less of them in the future. That means actually granting visitors a user experience worth returning to in the future, so they will like your site and spend their time on your site, etc etc etc... Humans don't like duplicative uninspired disinteresting text. They aren't interested in blurry mass produced images that look just like everything else on every other site and all of the basic white hat SEO factors are still important... page titles, tags, links, content, etc... but humans are able to judge content quality better than any bot, so Google is using their judgements as a major factor in its own rankings.

The fundamental point is that making real sites takes time, effort and expense and many webmasters spend all their time trying to avoid investing their effort and expense in their sites. In most cases the time spent trying to circumvent working on your sites with a trick or gimmick would have been better spent actually improving your sites. Google will never penalize you for building something people actually want to see and enjoy legally online. Building quality sites costs more time, effort and expense but it also offers you the peace of mind that you aren't going to be sunk by some nerf in an update to their algo... :2 cents:

AWESOME post :)

What, pump and dump SEO'd to fuck sites are dropping while organic best user experience sites are prospering? ASTONISHING!

I've been saying this for years, but all "SEO gods" didn't believe me. Long term === user experience. :thumbsup

I barely notice a bump these days, there are the normal fluctuations from day to day but overall traffic keeps on going up. I barely notice updates, normally I find out about them from reading about it on forums.

I think the user experience apologists are the ones who can't adapt to the blackhat of 2012. There's still plenty of life in the blackhat horse yet, without resorting to the tedium and slow growth of building real sites. :2 cents:

You just need to balance your approach more these days. It isn't the old days of building a site and then piling links on it till it reaches #1...i.e: social media, free hosted blogs - you need a greater mix of god links, plus you have to build better "stickey" suites that people will stay on and return to. Landing pages are dead.

I've always refused to accept the notion that 'SEO' and 'building a great user experience' are somehow mutually exclusive.
Anyone pursuing long term success continues to focus on both. :2 cents:

Possibly the most ridiculous thing you've posted...

Landing pages are essential for the sales funnel. People coming from social, or PPC, or organic brand vs organic non brand etc all need a different message about why they should sign up.

Landing pages are probably more important now than ever.

I imagine you already know this, but for those that don't...

Make sites for surfers, not for google.

Post relevant content that is updated regularly.

Create good articles and content and submit them to 'good' sites regularly to get good back links.

Make sure the technical side of the site is right. (Title, H1 and ALT tags, image file names, etc)

That's it.

interesting. Never did much blackhat stuff. One of the succesful things i did was building 'thin' sites on emd's, that worked very well. (by thin i mean not much real content on it, just affiliate links). They ranked pretty fast. Until the emd update obviously.
Now i pretty much try to focus on less sites but build them for the surfer, so true white hat.

I have no issues here and Google sends me a Christmas card every year

Great year. Took one of my clients for zero to 1st page for one of the most competitive queries. They spent $81k and we made them $1.6 million in revenue and about $200k profit. Presented 2013 SEO budget yesterday and will be looking to invest $400k. Content is king!

i lose a lot of traffic also but only on domanis that i abbused a little with the linkbuilding