Basics For A Strong Business Foundation

In the construction world, developers know that if they do not build a strong business foundation from the start, that there will be issues down the road. Brick and block masons know that without a strong foundation, the building that rests on it will also be in trouble. The same can be said for building your own websites online. If you choose a poor foundation, then your sites will not last. We have seen this come to pass in the most recent round of Google algorithms or Panda for short. Panda is actually a series of updates that seem to hit weekly. The first major update in February of this year was just the first major shot fired in the war against what Google termed as farmer sites or just plain scraping sites.

There has been a lot of anguish over this internet search change, many have reported that their sites lost 80-95% of their traffic seemingly overnight. We have seen many of the larger internet giants get hit badly, and lose much of their search traffic. When in previous years, they had enjoyed the fire hose of traffic levels.

Internet marketers had once depended on article marketing, this also changed overnight. Much of Ezine Articles traffic was gone, and with it went the traffic for the articles that were published on the sites belonging to thousands of website owners. Many people had spent literally years building this profile of targeted articles to bring fresh visitors to their sites and gain link popularity. This all changed overnight. The strong business foundation that they thought they were building was wiped away in a tsunami of search result changes by now infamous Panda updates.

Incorrect Search Results?

In more recent search attempts, I have tried to find the most common items that I have used in past years on my websites, plugins and other tools of the trade. When I typed in the same keywords that I have used for years, I found to my shock and dismay that all of those were nowhere to be found. I even went 10 pages back, and the pages I found to be displayed were not anything close to what I was looking for. Did these changes really make search that much more targeted? I think not.

Many webmasters have come to the conclusion that the only way to keep the Panda from destroying their livelihoods was to make their sites stronger. I agree to a point, but in doing so they changed the way they were indexed, and not always in a good way. The items we searched for and found so easily in the past is now gone. Website owners have been drawn to believe that only posts of great magnitude would be given a higher score with the search engines, namely Google. Now the internet searcher has to weed through absolutely huge posts just to find what is relevant to their search. and this in itself is causing a large amount of frustration to them.

Of course, building a strong business foundation is the best long term goal. Having a good template if you use wordpress for example. Using good plugin sets, writing good useful posts that help the reader. These are all things that many of us have already been doing for years. Why has so much changed and not always to the greater good? I see in many places total frustration from webmasters who have taken years to build their blogs, only to have them dumped in the internet sewer after Panda update. This has caused a lot of folks to wonder, “What’s the Point?”. And these folks thought they had built a strong business foundation for their online websites.

Social Proof?

Adding social proof seems to be one of the marking points from the recent changes. I think it’s a little late myself for Google Plus and other challenges to the social giant that is Facebook. It may just be another way for Google to score how well a website is doing, but they of course never reveal the true meaning behind their scoring procedures. Lot’s of people have jumped on the Google Plus bandwagon, I even gave it a try myself. I have posted on their site just a few times, and internet marketers can work their wonders on this new platform. I’ve even seen some of Google’s top name spokesman on there hawking wares of various types like cell phone devices and whatnot. What we were not expecting right? I do hope that in the general, they allow all who use the new platform to build a social following and be able to promote products and not get looked down upon. After all, they do it themselves, no need to be a hypocrite right?

The strong business foundation many had thought they had achieved, all came crashing down in a few short months.