I continue to blog about Traffic-Power (alert, fight) because I believe that smaller b2b marketers like myself were more likely to fall victim to their sales pitch. Based on my recent experience at an internet seminar, b2b marketers still don’t understand the web. Now that TP-type search-engine-optimization (SEO) is banned by Google, hopefully some of these folks learn how to do it right.
My comments to TP victims:
One issue is Google’s indirect complicity, which the TP-victims that contacted me have highlighted. Yes, Google let this go on too long. I’ve watched a competitor of mine for years hog the top spots because they’ve got a spammy website, while being dropped by Google twice, for just a month each time.
At the same time, you can’t expect Google to tell you personally that your site is doing something illegal and will be banned soon. When people from Michigan go to Indiana to buy fireworks, who tells them what they are doing is wrong? The cashier? the Michigan government? the state troopers at the border? Most likely it will be the local cops, and only after you’ve pissed off the neighbors by making too much noise. And telling the cop that you ‘didn’t know’ the fireworks were illegal isn’t going to help, either. Same goes for this situation.
And as a current victim of a competitor ‘spamming the index’, I’m not totally sympathetic. I’ve known the rules and played by them, and will continue to do so. Granted, the salespeople at TP don’t understand the rules or that they are violating them–they think if it works, it must be legal. Anyway, I hope you are looking at the current down-turn in business as part of the cost for inflated sales you’ve had while your TP pages worked.
Yes, SEO is part black-magic. Either learn it, or hire someone who knows it, especially if your livelihood depends on it. Marketing on the web is vastly more complex than getting top rankings, too. Now is the time get ahead of everyone else. If you can spend $1-5,000 with traffic-power, what can you do with your site to increase conversions??
For a more contrarian view on SEO, here is a great post from Seth Godin:
If you want to grow your business, you need a reliable and scalable and dependable way to spend time and money and have it turn into traffic and revenue. In the real world, companies do that with real estate and with advertising. Online, it’s about adwords and site design.