Greg Vandagriff

So after observing a nosedive in traffic for one of my newer websites I was understandably concerned. I had grown rather accustomed to the small trickle of traffic I was pulling in from the search engines on longtail terms. Initially I chalked up the sudden fall in traffic to the Google Sandbox, although this conclusion didn’t exactly sit well with me, as the Sandbox generally shouldn’t come into play with SERPS on longtail traffic.

I did take into account, however, the fact that my traffic started falling shortly after I changed the layout on my website. It turns out that this might have been, from the perspective of pure profits, a bad move. Not that changing the layout itself was a poor decision, I think everyone involved would find the new layout more usable than the old one, it was a combination of changing the layout without changing the sitemap that Google was accessing. After checking in with Google’s webmaster tools, I think I found the problem: Google was trying to crawl my page based on the old sitemap and as a result was finding hundreds of imaginary dead links. It generated over 1,000 crawl errors before I was able to submit a more up-to-date sitemap.

I think these crawl errors are the culprit for why my site suddenly is performing so poorly; Google must think that my site is one big puddle of linkrot! I can only hope that the damage to my site’s SERPs isn’t irreversible and that it will return to its former position in a few days. This assumes that the hit to my site’s traffic is, in fact, due to the sitemap crawl errors and that the two weren’t just coincidentally occurring at the same time.

Some time ago, Google took a hard stance against link sales; after all, such behavior was diluting the quality of their search results by favoring those who could afford the often high price of renting/buying links.

By penalizing sites which sold links while simultaneously pocketing cash from their own link sales via Adwords, Google attracted a lot of criticism from SEOs for their hypocritical behavior. That being said, in the eyes of some, Google’s move was a good one… as now the playing field no longer favored the wealthy, right?

Wrong.

Enter the “content creation specialist”, either a cheap freelancer or script-kiddie aided by content scrapers and automated article rewriters. Both specialize in creating large volumes of “original” content plastered with strategically-worded links. End result? Crappy, but unpenalized, content that links to… you guessed it, the rich guy’s website who can afford to hire these cheap hacks in large volume.

And people wonder why there are so many “spam” sites on the internet… by directly penalizing the direct sale of backlinks, Google did not solve “the problem”. They merely obfuscated the process of turning money into linkjuice by inserting a middleman: the content creation specialist. From an economic perspective, I honestly don’t think that the cost of link juice has changed all that much…

Yet more evidence of the fact that the denizens of an economy will innovate and substitute their way around the crude barriers imposed by governments or absurdly powerful entities (such as Google). As is often the case with such events, ultimately nothing has changed, we’ve just exchanged one set of “problems” for another.

So I am thoroughly convinced that longtail search terms, that is, incidental search terms that are related to your subject, though not necessarily the primary focus of your SEO efforts, are delicious! Not too long ago I started a site focused on a broad subject. While I am far from ranking on that subject as a search term (not even in the top 200 yet), I find it endlessly fascinating that I AM ranking for lots of incidental longtail terms.

Moral of the story? When first setting out to make your millions from the interwebs, pick a web property that has a big opportunity for longtail traffic, and optimize each page of your site with this factor in mind. If your main target has tremendous volume, chances are high that the random longtails within that subject also have decent traffic that is far easier to obtain.

If nothing else, the early trickle of longtail traffic will keep your fire burning as you continue to optimize your site for more competitive keywords.

So I’ve been sort of delving into the world of business-to-business marketing and behavior at work and it’s been an interesting ride so far. I haven’t been able to do any deep research on the subject yet, largely due to what seems like a lack of good, solid business to business resources online.

I did realize that many enterprises which cater primarily (if not only) to business clients apparently have poor functionality on their websites. While it is true that many b2b deals aren’t likely to be settled via mouseclick, it would seem lazy to use this as an excuse to neglect one’s web presence. Businesses should explore ways to involve their clients with  the company’s websites. After all, if you give your customer reasons to come back to your site, it will increase the likelihood of your company being the first to come to mind when they have a need that you can meet.