The best time to start a blog is now its now its now. Don’t believe me, I’ll give you the proof. Starting from February 2012 Google has been at least in theory penalizing sites with shady content, sites which bought links from other sites for traffic, sold links and pretty much did every dark stuff known to man in bringing more traffic via search engines. All the sites which have been link bombing, keyword stuffing and writing content exclusively for search engine robots and not for humans lost their ranks, traffic and weightage in search results. Some sites lost as much as 50% of their traffic all thanks to major and minor updates from Google. New SEO rules were written and content was exclusively dedicated to you and me, factors such as readability and Social media signals came into play and that pretty much sums up the whole story.
Who suffered penalty and why?
The people who suffered the greatest slight were guys and girls with sites so ancient, established so long before they could even imagine that they will see the reign of the panda.
They had done nothing wrong, they had spent huge money following the SEO kingpins and bought back links from everywhere to improve their visibility on Google, innocent people who had no clue why was Google intent on destroying their livelihood built so painstakingly. I recently read an article where the site owner asked a blog to remove all the back links which he had gained by commenting on his blog. Google was penalizing him for having so many back links with the exact matching anchor text
Many of those sites ripped apart their homepages to decrease page load time, desperately cleaned up the back links which they had taken from irrelevant sites(1k to 10k), removed pages with low quality content all in the effort of being accepted back by big daddy. However the kicks and bruises continued unabated with each minor update.
Time for you to build a new site
You may like to believe that the competition is mind nerving, yes it is and when you are starting out you will be easily despaired. One tip from me is not to check your stats. Seekdefo started on 16th of August 2012 and I just like to imagine that a lot of readers are hanging on my every word but I know the truth.
Back to the point, you should be thinking about blogging because you are not going to make the same SEO mistakes which your forefathers did.. ahem.. others before you did. Now no one can face the ire of Google and even think of buying back links and so even you need not be concerned about buying links. You will not rank lower because of not buying links. You just have to do the legitimate things for ranking higher and escaping penalties from Google.
Things which a newbie blogger would do write good content, update your blog regularly, building back links on relevant blogs by commenting and guest posting. For me ‘not knowing something’ and ‘ knowing something and not being able to use it’ are both the same things.
There are a lot of black hat stuff which people know but they can’t use it anymore and you don’t know how to use them. There are some additional things that you could do which will help you improve your rank but I’ll deal with them later. According to Matt Cutts the man behind all this fiasco, “ Even if you don’t do whitehat SEO write good content…”
