Is it the moment to take a Machete to Your SEO Strategy?

Disclaimer: This column contains ideas that advocate essential changes to the SEO strategy for a lot of web publishers. This may or may not be the finest thing for you to think for your website. You need to assess that risk for yourself, and neither the author, nor Search Engine Watch, can be answerable for how you take this advice or the impact on your business.

Has your site been matter to a steady ongoing decline in natural search traffic? Or even hit by a penalty? Either of these are likely signals that something is wrong in how your site is being alleged by Google. Your site likely is sending Google signals that it is infected with poor quality SEO or commercialization practices.

Do you want to overturn the damage and get back to strong traffic growth over time? Then you should pay close consideration to what Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said about disavowing links:

"One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks."

While Cutts' comment was focused on links, this idea really applies to the entire web strategy of many different publishers for whom SEO or commercialization has become an extreme focus.

Using a machete sounds like it hurts! And, it will.

Seriously, for most businesses, trying to save as many links or doubtful on site SEO practices as possible will doom you to a long slow process of trying to get clean in Google's eyes.

You can spend 6 to 12 months trying to get well if you get too cute about it. You may need to sacrifice short-term revenue to get back to a place where you can grow your business going forward.

Google's Algo Update Process

It will always likely for people to name reasonable exceptions, except, for one fact – Google is not building spam fighting algorithms to assess each individual site on the web. They are building spam fighting algos that get better the overall quality of search results.

The new search algorithm launch process looks something like this:

They assemble a series of test cases for areas that they want to address. This comes in the form of a set of motivating searches, where the results are not as high in excellence as they would like.

They come up with an algorithm to address most of the test cases.

They run a series of in-house tests to see if it works. To do this they show a number of "raters" two results side by side, the current search result, and the search result that makes use of the new algorithm.

If the raters pass the new algo, they then test it with a little part of the Web population, in what Google calls a "sandbox".

They determine whether or not the net interaction with the search results is improved.

The output of these experiments is then discussed with a launch decision team. If it is approved by that team, they roll out the change to the general population.

The decision is data-driven, based on the overall development of search results. The algorithm update is designed to get better overall search quality, and it is truly not about your site individually.

The Key Takeaway

Don't think of the Google algo as performing an analysis on a site by site basis. Think of it as looking for signatures or profiles of sites that are excellent for users vs. those that are not good for users.

It is not about you. To Google it is about recognizing patterns in web publishing behavior that allow them to show more of the top excellence sites in the first few search results, and less poor quality sites there.

What does that mean for you? It is about how your motivations convey themselves as a web publisher. You should be OK if your day to day focus is something like:

"We want to offer the best damn ______________ resource on the web and we will recognize nothing less"

There are other variants of this, such as a determination to present the fastest way to learn about some topic, or the lowest prices anywhere on the web, or goals of these types.

Here are a few motivations that won't work:

• We will build more money per visitor than anyone else.
• We are going to compete for every long tail search query we can think of.
• We are going to direct our publishing strategy based on rankings reports
• Let's boost organic traffic by getting lots of web sites to link to us (without a concern about the relevance an quality of those sites).

Summary

While this article is a "philosophy piece", the reality is that without the right philosophy no amount of efficient execution is likely to help you win in the long run. The reality is that Google, and to a lesser degree Bing, make the rules.

Get your priorities in line with the right motivations and you will be in line with what Google and Bing want you to do. This will get you out of the business of trying to figure out what they will let you get away at present, and set you up for much less risk of getting slammed by their algo changes of tomorrow.