There’s one thing more powerful than Google and that’s word of mouth advertising.

“Life is good” T-shirts are now a $100 million dollar business. Over a 100 years ago they created
the slogan, “There’s a toy prize in every package.” Every kid wins!

A strong brand transcends Google doublespeak, has more staying power,
is more flexible, and affords the business more control over its destiny.

Brandable domains are not at the mercy of Google’s organic search.
Brandable domain names are not as hard as you think to come up with.

When people mention you on Linkedin, are they going to talk about cheap-mp3-online-buy-cheapest.com? Would they feel comfortable recommending it to their friends and networks of contacts?

Does it make them look good? Will they remember your domain name five minutes later? Would it be something they’ll pass on? Even those webmasters who do link out tend to be cagey about where they link.

I’ve never posted on this blog before, yet I’ve often seen the name Pot Pie Girl.
I’ve never been obsessed with the link thing and stuffing keywords in domains.

As a matter a fact, I’m labeled as a troll in the SiteSell forums where they talk about domain names. It’s very sad to see these new work at home parents get on board and be steered the wrong way. Networking and catchy names are where it’s headed.

I put together a page below that includes 20 examples of catchy creative website names,
including Pot Pie Girl.

The purpose of a business is to get and keep customers.

“Customers don’t buy products, they buy certainty. They buy trust
and likeability, they buy perceptions and reputations.” ~Brian Tracy

The essence of competition…is differentiation: providing something different, more attractive, and better than your competitor. Preference is an idea that differentiates. Your business name is your greatest asset.

Driven by their gold mine persistence to outwit Google, many wizened webmasters will start out creatively broke, digging deeper to discover what is the true value in words,
and lay claim to richer resources—like Comstock kings:

http://www.incometrue.com/catchy-business-names.html

Hey CB,

If this ‘makes the cut’ this time…

Remind me to give you the short version of the reply I made here that she didn’t approve. Long story short – big G is a big joke and your absolutely right. Your post reflects on the attitude they have of being the Internet police, judge and jury by deciding who is worthy to have links loved and not loved.

Anyways, shoot me a PM and I’ll tell you the story that didn’t make it here.

GOY

Google said that others from the outside couldn’t hurt your site for years, but we were living proof that was false! So I’m glad that things have progressed this way and sites that do have this crap happen to them by competitors have an avenue to appeal and save themselves years of lost rankings!

but the really concerning issue to me here is the fact everyone is now freaked out to who links to them AND who they link out to in an overly concerned way.

i think it is pure reverse psychology they are using on the population. google wants it to be harder for you to get backlinks. they want to control how and where you get links. they want you to be afraid to place your links.

this serves google VERY well in what they are doing.

also lets be real here – how many blogger splogs, wordpress splogs and youtube trash do you see all the time which is completely malicious, with spammy backlinks, and linking to downright malicious content? all the time.

but google takes it upon themselves to NOT penalize their own products and other major corporate websites which are obvious targets and which get linked out to by highly malicious websites in the tune to MILLIONS OF SITES

bottom line is this – we all got sold out, they do not care about you or your site, they only care about their shareholders and people spending big money on adwords

but this nonsense of people actually removing good solid links is ridiculous. use common sense judgement. dont put your link on junky malicious websites. truth is sometimes taking a link from a certain place even if it gets you a small penalty is WORTH MORE than not taking it! theres alot of good strategies with linking and google does not want you to be really thinking about and analyzing it too hard.

if “X” site is penalized heavily but you still know that getting a link on a certain page their will bring you 1000 hits a day – then why wouldnt you? because GOOGLE says its bad!? HA HA weigh the pros and cons out. you can always make up for penalties or overcome them in other ways.

always continuously be building decent links to websites which actually write their own content. and above all – STOP worrying about GOOGLE INC. glad to see you gave them the boot potpiegirl

P.S. potpiegirl why do you close your comments on articles so early? you should leave them open on each article for at least 6 months IMO. your missing out on so much more readers and free content, stories they will post for you!

How to future proof your website

I’m not sure if you allow links in comments, so feel free to delete it if you don’t find it to be useful. It’s a 3,000+ words article and I’ve spent a lot of time doing my research, though, so you might like it.

Those who have been in the game for a while have at least some idea how to “fix” a website, but not so us newbies. In their effort to police the web, Google seems to be doing more damage to newbies (and legitimate webmasters) than to the scammers and schemers they claim to be trying to eliminate. At this rate, we’re going to see internet start-ups go the direction of the family farm.

The only real way to solve the puzzle is to start a new site and monitor it, allowing lots of time between any changes you do to affect the site’s ranking.

Only then will you know what good or bad things affect the site.

Is it really about quality content?
I still see a lot of sites with low quality content ranking, and I don’t think for one minute that Google bot can tell the difference between good and bad quality content. There must be something it’s looking for something on or off site that triggers the result.

Is it really about Back links?
Are all back links bad, or is it just one kind of link that kills your site?
Could it be automated software footprints that do the damage? The list is endless.

Be patient collect the data over months and document it, that is your future solid foundation to build the success of your online business.

Trying to resurrect a site from the far reaches of cyberspace may work, (I’m not so sure). However, if it can be done, most will not do it slowly and document what they did over time… Just removing back links on mass, undoing on page SEO may help, but may also undo and remove the good things that helped the site’s rankings.

One of my sites got a Google kicking,(Slap is just too mild). The first to go, was the main site rankings, over time the individual page rankings. That tells me there is more to this then just off page or on page, SEO.

Google never goes back on what they say, unless they got it wrong. Anything they find that points to your website that Google considers led to artificial inflated rankings will most likely remain where Google put it. I’m thinking there may also be a trust issue with those sites now.

SEO gets more and more seedy every day, yes? Feels like the local thug down the street roughing up the local merchants for money. “You need protection for, Vito? Ok?”

Rand Fishkin has famously invited the black hatters to attack him and his companies. However, we all know that is a losing fight because of his name in the field. He has defended his site well because of the work he put in before the black hatters started to spam him.

Whatever the case, it is probably best to establish a base and pattern to link building as a defense against black hat attacks. At least the history of the natural link building could show normal activities and the blasts of others could show abnormal attacks from other people.

Either way, keep your heads down and get to work. Its all you have right now. Perhaps micro site strategies are in order for particular keywords to diversify the traffic portfolio.

No matter what Google do comment spam, like this one above, will still be big business. However Google should just be ignoring this, and I hope that in most cases they do… However they have been quite honest in saying that they now want bad links to hurt you … How they police this and draw a line I don’t know … Because even if they are using multiple factors, so just running xrumer does nothing to your competitor, it would not be hard to run an entire campaign consisting of many links from many sources over a long period to zap the competiton.

I am thankful I took on what PPG and WA said years ago and diversified everything, not reliant on one source of traffic or a single product.

Been subscribed to your list for a long time, but it wasn’t until this post that I had to respond. I’m the admin of SEOSunite, and recently wrote an intro to beginners at: http://seosunite.com/f2/negative-search-engine-optimization-beginners-71/ (Don’t ‘link slap’ me bro…)

The reason I’m responding is pretty direct. Negative SEO is -EASY- to pull off, and Google continues to pretend it some magnificent feat that someone could do this – but only when they are asked about it. Otherwise, an average xrumer user can tank rough 10-15 sites a week with a single installation. I thought your readers who might not fully understand the implications of Negative SEO might want to really think about what it might be like for a single person to go around tanking 50-100 sites a week with a handful of servers running.

Now, take a forum full of xrumer users and have them focus on a specific topic, or set of 100+ keywords. Consider the implications that could have on the internet as a whole over the course of time.

Maybe I’m not being specific enough…

What if ‘we’ (meaning link spammers) were to target super PAC’s in this upcoming presidential race? We could take out the online presence of an entire side (republican or democrat) of this race, and all thanks to Google.

I’ve seen a few comments now that don’t seem to take Negative SEO seriously… and my response to them is YOU SHOULD! The Presidential Race is merely an example of how damaging Google is allowing this to potentially be.

http://www.dotcult.com/negative-seo-what-is-it

Keep up the great work. Keep linking out to relevant posts. Don’t fuss so much over getting backlinks (but don’t give up on it either).

If you’re trying to make your backlinking “look natural” then you’re probably going to end up shooting yourself in the foot. Don’t make it look natural, make it natural. Use the web the way it is intended… to share information, network with people and have some fun!

I strongly believe that this is a passing phase even though it is killing many people.

See the irony, Google started all these to stop people from gaming its search engine and it has created more chances to be gamed. I am sure, the “MEGAMINDS”s at Google will come up with some other anomaly to overcome this anomaly, create new gamers there upon, kill some honest folks, come up with some new anomaly to counter the existing ones etc and etc till the system becomes so complex that it breaks under its own weight.

There will always be some people who will game Google.