Google gets smarter and less easy to trick,… or does it only seem to? We’ve seen so many discussions that black-hat SEO is dying and paid links (as well as reciprocal links) are no option at all any more (because Google is impossible to cheat) that many people start believing in that even without real-life evidence.
So is fair play the only option we have now? Or is “pushed” SEO still effective or even “more” effective? Let’s have a look at a couple of examples shared in public and also discuss our own experience.
Case Study 1
An interesting experiment shared on WebmasterWorld Forums (discussed on SER and Sphinn) is really thought-provoking. It discusses what actually works better: the good old SEO tactics (like directories and reciprocal links) or high-quality naturally-linked content.
Note: I am not talking about the purity of this experiment. Too many factors might have come into play that affected the two sites performance (like the niche, the way tactics were applied and pure luck).
What I am calling to is to share your personal (honest) experience.
2 sites on same niche and similar topic were launched simultaneously:
| Site 1 | Site 2 | |
| Domain | new, short, containing core term | 3-year-old but keyword based |
| Content | keyword-optimized, not stuffed | high-quality, keywords only naturally occurring |
| Tactics | quality paid web directories; quality paid links; (almost) relevant reciprocal link exchanges, article directories | daily unique content added, blog, press releases, video channel, Twitter account |
| Anchor text | controlled | natural |
| Results | high rankings and good Google traffic after only 3 months | struggled to rank anywhere, even for it’s own name, stagnant Google traffic |
Case Study 2
Vladimir Prelovac is sharing his experiment of reaching “what can be considered decent search engine traffic” in a month.
Tactics used:
- Established domain (Page Rank of 1 and 5 or so visitors daily);
- A new “SEO optimized” blog;
- Daily added content (it was not clearly stated in the article but I assume the content used was nothing brainstorming. Just short unique articles for search engines to crawl);
- Relevant links from niche forums.
Your take?
So do you still use “pushed” SEO or is creating quality is the only tactic you are using? Do you believe Google will ever be able to conquer “pushed” SEO or has this been already done?
