[NBLUG/talk] Are all SEO and social networking builders scams?

[Omar Eljumaily]

Anet, Wow thanks for the wealth of information.  I noticed the slow page 
load phenom a couple of times when I switched a website from a rather 
slow ISP to hosting on a local server with a fast connection.  The 
search engine hits went way up.  Same thing the other way around where 
hits went down after switching to a slower website format.

It begs the question for content management systems like Wordpress that 
tend to be very slow and very often run on crowded shared hosting 
sites.  It's nothing scientific, but I tend to get better hits with very 
streamlined text oriented sites rather than gumming things up with Flash 
and lots of javascript.  I think you touched on that.  I have a 
suspicion that Wordpress in part is an invitation for people to spam you 
and for search engines to ignore you.

Thanks,

Omar



On 3/6/2015 8:10 AM, Anet Dunne wrote:
> Omar, your instincts are right, and I am saying this as an SEO 
> specialist.  There is legitimate magic, which is essentially making 
> your site readable to Google.  Remember the old days when people had 
> expensive Flash websites?  Search engines could not understand the 
> content of the site, so the expensive website did not get good page 
> rank.  People like me fixed problems like that.  Same for websites 
> that were just big pictures. Their owners thought these websites were 
> artistic and dramatic.  They were actually rocks on the Internet that 
> no one could find.  As recently as a few years ago, Google could not 
> determine the content of an image, so text had to be created on the 
> page or in the HTML markup, and links had to be easy for Googlebots to 
> follow.
>
> I found a business in San Rafael who was spending thousands each month 
> on Yellow Pages advertising and whose 70 page website couldn't be 
> found on the first seven pages of Google results on a search for what 
> he did.  I built a seven page "front-end" for his website so that 
> Google could understand what he did, and could find the 70 pages, and 
> his business jumped to the top of the organic results (free results) 
> in WEEKS!.  Now, most of his new business comes through Google 
> advertising and search and he has cut his Yellow Pages expense by 90%. 
> http://www.artisticcellars.com/
>
> Here's an example of one of his old pages. 
> http://www.artisticcellars.com/makeover.html These pages are still up 
> because the SIZE of the website, and HOW LONG it has been on the 
> Internet are factors Google includes in its algorithm for "Trust," a 
> factor in page rank. Back-links are still King for Google, but this 
> too can be shilled, (see FiverR, below).
>
> Regarding Twitter, and getting a lot of followers quickly, here's 
> where lazy SEO people go to get things like that done.  You can get 
> almost anything for Five Dollars, hence the website name.
>
> https://www.fiverr.com/
>
> So, yes, there are legitimate techniques and yes, there are scammers.  
> Right now, the best way to improve your Google page rank is to make 
> sure your website loads fast and to optimize it for mobile.  Google 
> checks every website for speed and responsiveness, and the results are 
> part of your page rank score.
>
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 8:14 PM, Glenn Kerbein 
> <glenn at spontaneousdancing.net <mailto:glenn at spontaneousdancing.net>> 
> wrote:
>
>     SEO is some other calibre of voodoo.
>     I tried it before, and it's not so great. There are some Google tools
>     that will work for you - their AdSense program is great.
>
>     Shill followers will bump your relevance on the Twitter. After that,
>     you'll get an equivalent set of legitimate users, and by then the
>     shill
>     users are irrelevant or unfollow you.
>
>     Best of luck,
>     Glenn
>
>     On 03/05/2015 02:30 PM, Omar Eljumaily wrote:
>     > I guess this is marginally related to Linux since it's all
>     running on
>     > LInux essentially.  I got a spam email today that said it would
>     > guarantee 2,000 Twitter followers or your money back.  Are there
>     > legitimate techniques for building such followings or do they use
>     > non-legitimate means like shill followers?  I suppose shill
>     followers
>     > would boost your ego as well as make it appear that you're more
>     > interesting than you are.
>     >
>     > Same for SEO in general.  The main issue for SEO as far as I can
>     tell
>     > are back-links.  Are there shill back-link sites? I suppose search
>     > engines would be wise to them.  Any legitimate SEO techniques?
>     >
>     > Thanks,
>     >
>     > Omar
>     >
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>     --
>     Delta
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