Don't Make Enemies Out Of Search Engines

History they say can be negative and at the same time be a great educative means to point to the positive things and the negatives which may have impact(s) on future developments. I know you must have flipped your tops because of the title of this post but with webmasters going crazy when numerous Google updates hit them, there is a correlation, believe me on this.

I am an affiliate marketer and have been having an ample lump of monthly income in the range of about $1500. Not much to some "Gurus" who make tens of thousands but to me this was a dream come true in a country where the average income is just $450.

I relied only on organic traffic with Google being my major source of free traffic. I was overzealous and very aggressive with my link building. It didn't matter from where I got them as long as they were links.

It was not an uncommon thing to see 4-5 of my pages or even sites taking up placements among the first 10 search results in Google for the same keyword.

Then I was struck with a thunderbolt in form of Google SEO crazes. My sites survived Panda but then Penguin got them. Although I still get traffic from Bing, Yahoo as well as from some other minor search engines, things are not the same as they used to be. My income came crashing down.

I knew I can't take Google on. I have always been guided with the advice of my late grandfather - "use your brains and don't take on a stronger opponent. Your life may depend on it".

While I was on the look out to revamp my sites that have lost rankings on Google, while I was frequenting SEO forums, participating in discussions to find out what I must have been doing wrong I came upon a post which at last shed a little light without the poster holding anything back.

Sometimes it's good to read between the lines.
After reading what Akpan was trying to say on his blog, I stopped building links to my already compromised websites, set up new ones and started to keep to Google’s rules to the best of my abilities. The results are that those same new websites now rank higher on Google with only a few links than my old sites which were having over 5,000 sites linking to them and just today I was rewarded. I made $259.98. The new site has only 8 links and just today was #5 on Google SERP page. How that happened I may never know.

The Results
It is never a hard thing for seasoned webmasters to get information about a particular webmaster nor is it difficult to get to their profiles and online presence. Just check for this name Yeremi Akpan and you will get the picture. This guy is awesome.

Now I was not so selfish to keep the information to myself but share it with one and all.

Now you too read between the lines and figure out why your sites are not within the first 10 listed on the first page of Google search.

If you depend on search engines for traffic to your websites as I do, the worst thing you would want to do is make an enemy of them.