One of the first lessons I learned in life and business is that if someone doesn’t own their mistakes then they don’t really know what they are doing. As someone who helps companies with their online marketing programs I get the pleasure of hearing what their previous SEO companies tell them about why they didn’t get them to ‘Page 1’ of the Google.
Yesterday I had a new client tell me that their current SEO told them:
“The site got hit by a Penguin because of duplicate content so thats why the rankings have dropped.”
For the non-nerds out there the ‘Penguin’ being reference here is the update to Google’s search rank algorithm from April 24th, 2012 that “aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines [3] by using black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, participating in link schemes, deliberate creation of duplicate content, and others.”
Basically Google is trying to deal with the crap that some people are doing to get their websites to rank higher for certain terms.
Rather than create compelling content on a website that makes it useful lazy people would rather stuff the site full of repeating keywords and buy links from some guy in India and give the user a crappy experience. Google doesn’t want this because it means that people will stop using Google since it only gives them crap websites with meaningless content.
The same client sent me the SEO companies initial email after signing up and the following sentence actually existed:
“Generally speaking, the content of the articles and blog posts is not as important as the fact that they are being back-linked to your website.”
That says it all right there. The focus is not on getting the end user a better experience, it is on tricking Google into thinking that your website is more useful than it really is.
If you have been in business for any amount of time you know that the first thing you have to do is give your customer want they want. So the question then is why do you think its any different for your website?