Live By The Creed

This idea I have in my head about where my site should rank is what’s frustrating me. I know because of where my site has been. I know in my heart that there is NOT 100 websites on the internet BETTER than my GI Joe website. But here I am, in the depths with a lot of other webmasters. It’s a sad day when a website from the Philippines is ranking on the first page of Google for anything as American as GI Joe.

The truth is that I contributed to my own demise and didn’t even know I was doing so. Back links were supposed to be my saving grace, my golden parachute, my elevator straight to the top, not my own self inflicted dagger through the heart.

Honestly though, how can I be mad at Google when they’re doing what I would do. They are thinking about their bottom line, ad revenue and stock price. Conspiracy theorists can look at the recent changes in the algorithm and think that it’s just a sham or a lie, a trick to get more advertisers bidding on those high valued keywords. You know the keywords I’m talking about. The keyword phrase or phrases that your site lost it’s SERP on.

I like to believe the best in people but I can’t believe that all these changes were just to battle online SPAM and to improve the SERPs for everyone. Have you looked at Google’s results past page 5? Oh my God, it’s just pages and pages of the same sites. Yeah those are diversified results which are totally providing the best user experience!

Come on man, STOP feeding me the company line about your algorithmic changes being about a better user experience. You guys are providing sketchy results at best beyond let’s say page 4. Your research probably suggests that searchers don’t drill down beyond page 4 anyway, so no harm no foul.

I’m fine with it in the end. I have made some mistakes along the way by taking the easy path to links. Thank God the other search engines are not as discriminatory as Google is; otherwise we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. I would cash in my chips and save my money instead of spending it on domain names and hosting.

Until next time, be good to yourselves and each other.