Google Is Getting Cleverer...

Yesterday I was talking with a customer about link building and general search engine optimisation.

We were looking at various sites, including my Compare Mortgage Rates site and working out why that had dropped. Looking through Google, it's 550+ links that I've checked are still in place are reported as only 8 links. This massive drop is now been blamed for the site's massive drop.

We then went on to look at my customer's other site and his competitors. He named the top site traffic wise (out of his research) and it was a big name I recognised, using affiliate links, ppc and a huge warehouse setup. But the surprise was the second placed site. This was a guy he knows who runs the business from a spare bedroom with stock in a friend's barn. He wasn't a rich man when he set up in business, just very clever at what he does. He's beating the next best sites we looked at by miles - and these are millionaires happy to throw their pounds into marketing their sites.

When we started to look at how he was getting his site to the top of the listings - the tricks he was using. It didn't take us long to see that he was using techniques that I'd heard about before, just maybe not invested enough time in trying them out.

But, on the whole, he wasn't wholesale link building. We looked at another site I maintain (for a customer) and of his 600+ links only 12 show on Google. Less than 4%. Seems that Google is getting good at detecting link building and just ignoring it.

So in a day or so I'll at what this guy was doing and what we can all learn from him. And I don't think the answer is spamming people for link building. Gone are the days of Ms Yeager & co sending me masses of emails telling me they've just visited my site and how good it looks....