As you may or may not know I have been providing SEO services for quite some time now. Although my main focus these days is in the sports betting industry but I have also performed this service for many other industries as well. Hell, I cut my SEO teeth so to speak in the adult entertainment industry. I make no apologize for this work or any other work I did in the past as one website is pretty much the same as another to me. I will add this one point – I never knowingly worked on or would consider working on anything that falls outside of the law, well the laws for the country in which I live anyway.
The reason I brought all of that up is to demonstrate that as far as SEO goes I do not simply take on the safe, easy projects. The gambling and adult industries are among the toughest to gain SERP for in any organic search result. Don’t believe me, go ahead and try.
Given the amount of experience I have with the various search engines I have seen a lot of changes over the years. One of the changes I have been witnessing as of late and not liking are the changes that Google has been making. Over the past 18 months or so, Google has been making some rather bizarre choices in their attempt to fight off spam. Now I applaud the efforts but not the results as the results seem to be focused on fighting the spammers and not on improving the results. Granted, getting rid of the spammers should make the results more relevant but when sites that don’t use spam get caught up in spam net, how is that good?
Another area that Google seems to have lost focus on in their attempt to fight spammers is the alleged age delay sandbox. If you don’t know what that sandbox is I’ll briefly describe it. The alleged age delay sandbox is where a new domain is assessed a penalty that prevents the site from ranking in organic searches for all but the most obscure keywords and phrases. How this is supposed to fight spammers I am not sure seeing as the sandbox is only allegedly supposed to exist. The one thing I do know about this effect is that if you are a new site and you need to have it rank right away, the alleged age delay sandbox isn’t affected when applying for Google’s Adwords. Go figure. Is this another example of how Google is alienating the medium it was developed to serve?
If these things are in fact happening at Google, how long will it take the other search engines to act in an effort to counter these failings? In my opinion not too long. From what I have seen it would appear that MSN search is doing just that.
Recently I had the occasion to create a couple of niche sites that fall in the sports betting market. The sites I made both had newly acquired domain names that were both optimized for highly competitive gambling phrases. I had the sites spidered within days of uploading them to their host and within a matter of days they were ranking very high in MSN for their targeted phrases. Not only did these sites rank well but for the most part, the pages maintain their SERP to date.
Another thing that I did notice was that MSN search was indexing the pages more frequently then they were in the past. No sandbox and increased frequency in indexing tells me something, it tells me that MSN search is looking to fill in a hole that Google has created. I for one think that is a good thing as it may force Google to quit taking the easy roads in their fight against spammers.
