Did you die in that last Google update?

I know we don't tend to talk too much about search engines in here. I'm not sure why, but we should.

Anyway, just wondering how others of you fair with the February Google update some are calling Hippodrite, others call it Allegra.

I had a very keyword drop like a stone from number seven to number 25 and it's hurting. My Google traffic was cut in half last month, and we're talking tens of thousands of visitors.

Just wondering if anyone has figured anything out about the last update. My SEO is pretty sane, safe, and non-spammy, so I'm a bit lost on this one.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

it turns up that eastwestguys showed up along with worldtwink :devil:

Our SE rankings didn't change hardly any on our sites. We are seeing about an extra 100 hits a day from Google since the update which is completly negligible.

This is the thing though... it is my belief you must look at Search Engines as Gravy. We used to play the google game and had number one rankings in Google for "fuck", "men", etc. But, we made a decision a couple of years ago to stop spending time and energy trying to keep up with SE changes. There were never any guarantees that a SE wouldn't reindex and cut us out or that the engine itself wouldn't just bite the dust. The decision we made was to be our own traffic source.

The best advice I'll ever be able to give on this board, is that you must become your own destination. You must make your own traffic!

After a lot of very hard work we are at a point now where we don't need Search Engine traffic. Like I said, it has become gravy and we are happy to have as much gravy as we can get, but if Google dropped us completly it wouldn't have a noticeable impact on our bottom line. They key to success is 1) type-ins and 2) word-of-mouth. Make your site viral. Offer something that no one else does. Create a buzz so that people tell other people about your site. There is no better reference that a personal testamonial / recommendation.

Each month we have just shy of 100 checks that come into us from all kinds of different vendors. We don't keep our eggs in one basket. You have to diversify. No single vendor, no single merchant account, no single third party biller. You should be getting checks from ccbill, epoch, verotel, and your merchant bank. You should be getting checks from AEBN, ACMP, and Maleflix. You should have deposits each month from Mancheck, Mansites, and ****. Even though we have our own paysites that do very well, we still send tons of traffic and have numerous sign-ups each day to Randy Blue, Corbin Fisher, Sean Cody, Badpuppy and a dozen others.

The first step though was becoming our own traffic source. It takes a lot of effort, but it can be done. When you become dependent upon yourself and not Google you will see a paradigm shift that will empower you and your business.

Good Luck!

JustBryce,

Excellent advice all around, it's tough getting diversified when you're a one man show, but I'm getting there.

The thing about my sites and search engines is they're extremely solidly built. I was never one to engage in the latest trick of the month to get a good ranking, i.e. including text that's the same colour as the page background. My search engine strategy has always been to write keyword-rich, meat-poundly hot content to go along with my galleries. And I know few webmasters on the planet who spends as much time on the written word as I do. Hence, my rankings have been pretty solid for a couple of years. And any time Google adjusted their algorithm my sites stood pretty firm. This is the first time I've experienced such a hiccup, but just for the one keyword phrase.

This recent slip is temporary, I'm sure, because I can see that the sites who nudged in ahead of me are pretty spammy. They should be falling out soon. But it's taught me once again, like iBill did, that diversity is the key to long-term survival, and you reiterated that, Bryce. It some of the best advice webmasters could take.

And in the name of diversification, I've made great strides with Yahoo Search recently, which has been a tough nut for me to crack. My Yahoo traffic has doubled, so I'm thrilled about that because I always hated relying so much on Google.

Now, if I could just clone myself three more times, I'd be all set. I've got the husband in gallery training, but it's a slow process.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

We actually did quite well in this update.

We gained some ranking back that we lost at the last update and actually managed to get a brand new site indexed within a couple of days thanks in part to the timing of its launch :)

Regards,

Lee