I had a totally different blog post planned for today but a number of things came together at the same time and it would be foolish not to highlight them. They are very important and all connected.
The first was a post in the WordPress Goldmine Forum by one of our long term members Paul Nichols who pointed out a fiver gig that offered to sent 67,000 poor quality links to your competitors. (probably the same gig that offered to send you 67,000 quality links before the last algo update!)
I know what you are saying…. Google says that competitors can’t harm our rankings.
Do they ? Really?
Read this from the same thread
Just so that’s clear: A competitor CAN build crappy backlinks to your website, and hurt your rankings. And Google now admits this.
Look how google have adapted there guidleines:
“Can competitors harm ranking?
There’s nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”
Then, in November, it got “slightly” modified… just a TINY fraction too:
“Can competitors harm ranking?
There’s ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.”
Wow, what a difference one word can make! So hang on, saying “almost nothing” means “can”, no matter which way you spin it.
Then on March 14th, they caved.
“Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don’t control the content of these pages.” –http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
In case you missed it, the key difference is in that first line:
From “nothing” to “almost nothing” to “perfect political answer”
Now do you think that a competitor can’t harm your rankings?
With gigs like that available on google you really had better not be relying on Google for your traffic. Google is no longer a search engine they are an advertising agency with shareholders, 2 things matter profit and the war to stay bigger than Facebook. That means like every war there will be collateral damage and thats us and our sites.
So whats the alternative?
Well one alternative is BRANDING…
Jonathan Leger pointed out in a post over the weekend that many people go directly to Amazon when they look for a product rather than Google.
Well, my friend, Google is only sending your site “walk-in” business. It’s your job to convert those walk-ins into long-term, repeat customers. Do that enough times and it won’t matter if the search engines got shut down by the government. You’d still be in business, because you have a brand. People would still be typing your domain name into their browsers’ URL bars, and you would be fine. Your revenue might take a hit (as would Amazon’s), but your business wouldn’t shut down. Source
Until last year I thought my biggest screwup in IM was not building a list sooner, I was wrong about that as well , my biggest mistake was not branding myself sooner. (not literally!)
I actually mentioned this in a forum chat and branding expert Martin Jelsema replied
“Mark: You’ve been branding all along, you just weren’t in control of it, and it may have not been consistent, unique or compelling. Now you’ll make branding work for you!”
That my friends is the key! Everything you do online can add to your brand but you need to be focussed, You need to be consistent, unique and compelling.
How many of you found this post via Google? Not many!
In January this year I set out to consolidate my Branding and start to drive traffic to this blog, below you’ll see 2 screenshots of the unique traffic from December and from the first 22 days in April. Apart from the obvious increase in traffic you’ll see the percentage of people coming from google has dropped significantly. I really do want to get that figure to be below 10% while the number of visitors rise on a monthly basis.
December Traffic
Traffic April 1st -22nd
It doesn’t matter if you have a micro blog about acne, or an authority site about Finance whatever niche you are in you need to start branding yourself and remove yourself from the threat of googles frequent changes.
Start today! I’ll come back to this topic a bit more in the coming weeks but the first thing you can do is make sure you use the same avatar on every site you have, every social media account and every forum you visit. Also decide if you want to be the guy with the woody woodpecker avatar or do you want people to see the real you?
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