Jennifer

You may have a few sites that you really care about that you wouldn’t do this for, but maybe with bs niches that you simply want an affiliate sale or Adsense click it would be better time and money served to just post whatever. And keep getting links. That seems to be all that ultimately matters.

I dunno. Just a thought. It’s what I do now. I’ve stopped getting bent about writing original 400-500 word posts on shit I know nothing about. I use OrwellPro and Frank Link Luv builder to create quick posts to keep things fresh. I have the same success with 100 word posts as I do with 500. They both get indexed.

Where I notice the traffic dropoff is for new content I’m posting. So if I post a new article at a site that’s been deranked, and I used to be able to get that new article on the first or second page of Google for my keywords, now those articles are getting stranded much farther back in Google – third, fourth pages, that type of thing. So that will definitely affect traffic for me since the “power” of my site has been decreased.

Existing articles that were already posted seem to be holding steady in their spots on first and second pages of Google. But new stuff isn’t getting as much love from Google. Which sucks.

If your site isn’t as powerful any more in competing with other sites for your keywords, this of course encourages people to shell out money for Adwords to replace the profit they’re losing.

It’s all part of Google’s evil plan to drive everyone into using Adwords.

When I said content only sites are favored by Google, I forgot to add that obviously you also see monster sites like ebay and Amazon and Youtube also favored. Especially with Google making plans to buy most of those sites (they already bought YouTube I believe.) You start to see a real uneven playing field unfortunately. Not good for those of us busting our butts doing things the old-fashioned way, building sites out organically over time. What’s the lead time now to get a page rank of 4? It used to be six months for me if I updated sites regularly and gently built backlinks. Now we’re looking at a much longer window. Will that be two months? Another six months? At one point do we have to have these insane build out schedules where you build sites today, update them for a year, and maybe in the twelfth month Google finally coughs up some traffic.

I HOPE it doesn’t go that way, but I know that our time window in getting a site some Google love definitely became longer with this latest update. We’ll see what other fallout happens.

I could totally stomach this if I was building spammy sites or doing stuff Google doesn’t like. But when you try to play by their rules and still get slapped, it does make you want to take out an Uzi some days!

Jennifer

It’s one reason why I think WP is so powerful, right now. There is no onsite monetization possible. Which following your thesis (interesting) about Google penalizing sites with online sales makes sense. So maybe utilize sites like Blogger, WP, Hubpages and Squidoo that collect a ton of traffic and then send the traffic away to your money sites that Google hates.

I have a PR2 site that used to be a PR4 maybe a couple of years ago. It gets more traffic and makes more money as a 2 than a 4. Then again you could say that if I promoted the shit out of it to get it to a 5 I would double the money. WTF knows.

I have two excellent quality, regularly updated sites that had been at PR4 and now they’re PR3.

My Badger blog had been holding nicely at PR3 and I naively expected to hit PR4 based on the way things USED to go with Google. GRRRRGH. Instead after lots of updates and backlinking it’s been deranked to PR2.

You know traffic dips when your sites get deranked like that. That’s just life. But it really sucks. Google is so blatant about favoring content only sites and forcing ANYBODY engaged in any form of online sales to use their Adwords program – costs of which doubled the moment their company did their IPO.

YUCK.

Jennifer

The thing about “blogs need to be blogged” for Google I think depends a lot on the content. As I’ve mentioned before I’ve got a very rarely updated programming blog that gets steady Google traffic. I’ve got some other niche blogs that don’t get regular updates and still hold their own. However, I’ve got others that will die off when not regularly updated. Maybe it has something to do with how Google grades the content as it being timeless info or just temporary.

Hey Brian. My theory on Google is they like blogs only to the extent that they are actually blogged. If they aren’t updated in a manner that is “blog-like” I don’ think they care much for it. Plus I have a few XSP sites, static sites, that do fine without ever being updated. Ever. But the same can’t be said of my blogs. When I stop updating they stop being ranked.

I’m shooting for a PR8 on the next update…Hehe, just joking.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. Basically it sucks, and doesn’t get much traffic at all, but it might be good for some link juice.

I may start another one soon and try to create better content. Or I may just work on this one and see if I can make it better.

If you had some really good content on one of these things, and as a result, ended up getting a bunch of natural links coming in to it, you’d probably have a real powerhouse for link juice, not to mention a lot of good search traffic.