When I started on my Internet journey about 4 years ago I was advised by a close friend who was in the know to learn SEO. Naturally (at the time) I joined an SEO forum where I could ask questions, read threads and learn from many professional SEOs. I have been fortunate to meet and work with some of the people that I have met and chatted with over the years on the SEO forums.
Some of the forums I joined covered all aspects of running an online business, such as Crea8asiteforums.com, where they have some excellent advice in their threads. They are certainly worth looking at today to find out what is what in running an online business.
But, in the last 6 months discussion on these SEO forums have declined. It has been talked about on the forums by the old timers. There just seems to be less interest in discussing SEO in forums. Why is this?
Some new SEO forums have sprung up, but they are full of fake questions be people working in SEO companies, often SEO companies that do not do SEO! By that I mean, they do bad SEO. Anyway. Why the downturn in SEO discussion?
Apart from the Black Hatters that do all sorts of crazy automated stuff to create content and links, SEO today is understood well by most people. Google even provides SEO advice to webmasters that take time to read the information available.
There are so many good guides to SEO now that really to perform well in the search engines you just need to learn the basics and put it into practice. It is for this that I think that SEO forums are dying.
In the past there would be a far greater ROI (return on investment) of time spent in an SEO forum learning new tricks and then implementing, and seeing quick results, than there is today. Today, many of the “tricks” no longer work. The cheap, free for all, spammy directories are worthless. Google bombing no longer works. The key to SEO is content and a few good links. Content is king.
Google (there are other search engines apparently, but nobody uses them anymore) has developed so much that it can spot a spammy link, a paid link or duplicated, automated content that it can easily dump these from the search index. Instead it looks for relevance, trust, authority. What does this all mean?
It means that Google no longer simply counts links to determine if a site is any good. So it is pointless getting 1000 links from PhpLD directories in the hope of leaping to no.1 in Google. Instead you need to create excellent content. You need to be a journalist and be first to write about new events and ideas. You still need some links, but quality is far, far more important that quantity. Rel=”Nofollow” means that simply spammiung forums and blogs with your URL no longer provides any worthwhile help. It is not a good investment of time to do that.
As the SEO’s know this, there is nothing left to say really. Apart from a few small changes that may result in you working in a slightly different way. But mostly, the key is to just get on with the task of writing great content.
This is a good thing in my opinion. The web / Internet used to be a place where people shared great content. Then the commercial aspect of it resulted in people exploiting this fact in every way possible and with some simple SEO work spammy advert laden sites started outranking the official retail sites. As the importance of links reduces and the importance of good quality content increases, and SEO’s task becomes much harder – to ensure that content on a website does everything possible to address the consumers needs.
For a long time Google advised that webmasters should “write for the reader, not the search engines”. This was ignored by SEO’s for many years as they knew that writing for search engines gave better returns. But these days are over, and if not over very close to ending. Google is cleverer now. Mostly thanks to people like Merissa Mayer (head of search) using her knowledge on artificial intelligence to help build a search engine that can recognise quality from a more human perspective than is possible from a system that just counts links.
Anyway. So, I think I digressed and rambled again. But yeah, SEO forums are dying because the only true advice is:
- Write good content
- Make your site the best that you can
- Get people talking about your site and build a community (social media)
- Get some quality links to help Google find your site
