Are you suffering from the Google Sandbox, the -30 penalty, the -950 penalty, too many reciprical link partners, an anchor text or link spam related penalty, duplicate content issues, or the latest algorithm, search index, or quality update? It may not be what you think. DigitalGhost recently described Google's most common SEO related penalty:

Let me tell you about the most common penalty Google uses.

It doesn't have a catchy name, and people generally refuse to talk about it because this particular penalty requires taking responsibility. It's much easier to blame the +-30 penalty, the Sandbox or the new 950 penalty than it is to accept that you've been nailed with the most common penalty of all. What is it you ask?

It's the My Site Sucks Ass And Google Just Figured It Out penalty.

I have a theory that for most people it is easier to create something worth marketing than it is to push something of no value. And that is probably one of the hardest things to get around as an SEO, because SEO can make it seem addictive that we can influence markets without creating real value, but the people who make growing income each and every month are generally those who have at least one real site of real value. Sure you can use SEO to boost it, but it works best if the SEO is done in conjunction with other marketing and real market integration.

It sorta ties in with that whole how easy is it to clone your business concept I recently mentioned. If what you are doing is easy to clone then why not think of a way to add value and make it harder to clone. Sometimes that added value can be just slapping on a few marketing hooks, other times it might be listening to the needs of the market, or commoditizing the business models of competitors.

Recently a friend of mine launched a site and I got them to the top 20 using the general SEO techniques I can apply to any site, but I had them read that clone post and they told me brilliant ideas they could do to add value to their market by commoditizing people who do not even realize they are in the same market. If your marketing strategy is just SEO eventually you lose out when an SEO aware competitor cares about their market and/or uses other marketing techniques.

The more closed off a data source is the greater potential value you can exploit from understanding it.

General Keyword Research Tools:

Many people use the Google AdWords tool and Overture Selector Tool, thus if you are in a competitive marketplace the odds of you finding high value under-priced keywords is going to be lower than if you track data from less used sources.

Paid Keyword Research Tools:

Tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery may help you find a few more valuable rare keyword phrases. Since accessing them costs money, less people will use them.

Follow Clever Competitors:

If you come across high ranking spammy sites you can let them do your keyword research for you. If you find one smart competitor that keeps showing up for keyword phrases that few other people are bidding on you can see what types of keywords they are buying by using tools like KeyCompete or SpyFu.

Both of those techniques were covered in Using Profitable Spam & Thin Content Sites for Keyword Research.

Your Own Website Research Data:

The highest value market research data you can collect is collecting how the market is already reacting to your site. If you listen to your site you are not only going to find unique keyword phrases that do not show up on other tools, but you also know that

• real people are already searching for them

• those phrases convert (if you track conversions)
• you are already trusted in some search engines for those phrases

It is typically easier to bump a number 6 ranking up to number 3 than it is to go from nowhere to top 10.

Use some keyword phrases to help you think of related topics and use rankings in one engine to help you find content ideas for others. If you use your own logs and tools like HitTail you can uncover entire categories and keyword baskets where there is little to no competition. Write semantically sound legitimate content targeted at those keywords and those articles should be able to rank for keywords related to other phrases you are already ranking for.

Also giving your visitors a site level search box will give you another source of data for related terms that you should be covering but may not be.

If a market is saturated and you operate in nearby markets with limited competition you can keep growing your revenue base until you have enough brand and authority to take on the established competition.

Apply This to Anything:

And while it is easy to use keywords as an example, you can apply this to anything. The more unique data you can collect the broader you can make your sales funnel and more efficient you can make your sales copy. And if you write timely news dong things like being opinionated, tracking a few persistent searches, or using Google news alerts can be the difference between having a complete story and getting all the links or just being one of 1,000 people writing about the same thing, watching Techcrunch get all the links.

In the information age unique data sources = profit.

BusinessWeek published an article about small advertisers being priced out of AdWords. Given quality score adjustments that may boost ads for sites which have strong trust associated organic SEO, it is prohibitively expensive for many businesses to use AdWords unless they are already well trusted in organic search.

What Types of Sites Rank?

The sites which are already well represented in organic search typically fall into one or more of the following groups

• old

• has many signs of authority (new and old links, repeat visitors, brand related search queries)
• associated with a rich powerful offline entity
• unique & remarkable

News Sites as God

News sites tend to fit all 4 of those categories, plus get additional easy linkage data by writing about current events and being included in select indexes like Google News, and have many other advantages. The bias toward promoting large trusted sites which are already overrepresented in the organic results starts to look even uglier when news outfits are

• writing for Google (as noted in the NYT's This Boring Headline Is Written for Google)

• creating high ranking lead generation pages that leverage their domain authority (like this one http://www.bizjournals.com/resources/bad-credit-debt-consolidation-loan....)
• buying up keywords, as reported in the Wall Street Journal

From the WSJ:

Britain's famously competitive newspapers have a new battleground: Google. ... Newspapers are buying search words on Google Inc. so that links to their Web sites pop up first when people type in a search. ... Paying to put their stories in front of readers by buying Google ads -- a practice the papers say has intensified in recent months -- is different from past marketing efforts

In spite of Google claiming otherwise, there is a direct connection between buying AdWords and ranking in the organic search results. If a news article is read by a few more people and gets just a few more links off the start it will become the default article about that topic and acquire many self reinforcing links.

Why Would Google Trust News Sites so Much?

• Most news sites have some type of editorial controls and are typical hard for the average webmaster to significantly influence.

• Most people think what they are told to (and the media is who tells us what to think about). Thus if Google returns a rough reflection of what we should think they are seen as relevant and unbiased.
• Most news sites are associated with economic macro-parasites - not micro-parasites. Google is far more afraid of death by 1,000s of small cuts than by trusting any given domain too much.
• It is mainstream media which makes up a large foundation of Google's index and power. Google is killing off many of the inefficient monopoly based business models, and is thus trying to throw the media scraps to keep the media bought into Google's worldview.
• It is easier for Google to organize information if they allow their algorithms to cause their search results to parallel offline authority structures.

Crawl Delay Has Cost:

Danny Sullivan recently commented about how Digg outranked him for his own headline because his website is newer and less trusted than Digg.

Google has become less willing to regularly crawl and rank sites unless they are aged or have a significantly developed editorial link campaign associated with them. If your site gets indexed slower then your content needs to be much more remarkable to be linkworthy, thus if have not built up significant trust this is a penalty / cost you need to overcome.

Sure Google may say they do not offer paid inclusion, but requiring a huge authoritative link profile or years of aging is associated with costs. They may not have paid Google directly, but Google's algorithms do require that most people pay, in one way or another.

And if you can't get past that crawl delay problem, you can always buy AdWords.

If you have a site which equally covers 4 parallel areas and you put the same amount of content up for each area odds are that one area will drastically outperform all the others. I have a 1,000 page AdSense site which gets about 100 ad clicks a day on the most profitable page of the site, while the site as a whole averages about 1 click a page. The reason one section will drastically outperform the others is not just due to how well that section is integrated into the web, but also due to what types of sites you are competing against. For example, many large corporations still do not get SEO, and in certain high margin verticals (especially with certain high paying keyword modifiers) the top ranked results are dominated by cheesy spam pages. It is going to be easier to outrank the cheesy spam than to carve out marketshare in results dominated by legitimate authoritative sites.

After you get the base of your site up listen to the feedback the search engines provide. They will tell you what they think your site is about and what sections they think have enough authority to merit a top ranked position.

And while this advice can sound like it is geared exclusively toward spammy AdSense sites, the same type of market feedback, if tracked, can be applied to improving lead quality for smaller ecommerce sites. Every market has gaps in it. If you create a base of real content and listen to your site you will find enough easy opportunity to create a revenue stream which builds up a profit stream that allows you to invest in building up the authority of your domain for more competitive queries.

Spammers Are Great Keyword Sources - Here's How to Mine Them:

(Disclaimer: This post might seem a bit confusing if you just read it. You may have to click the links to see the process and fully get what I am talking about.)

The good thing about high ranking spam is that you know that the people who are doing it are probably both creative and focused on ROI, so you might be able to come up with a few good keyword ideas based on their research.

When you see a site in the search results that does not seem like it makes sense, it is probably there because either a spammer bought it, or the site has content management system errors which allow spammers to add content to the site. For example, SafeSurf.com is an authoritative site which was recently ranking for a competitive financial query, which seemed out of character with the nature of that site. So lets say you see one of those spam pages ranking in the search results. If you are doing keyword research and have ran out of topics you can look for footprints on these spam sites to find new ideas. As long as Google's algorithms place as much weight on authority domains as they do right now you are bound to find some people abusing that hole by placing hundreds or thousands of pages targeting expensive keywords on them.

For example, after I got the full URL of that SafeSurf page, I pulled off the file name, and looked for other things in that same folder inurl:spammydomain.com/spammyfolder/. In addition to domain related searches like inurl: many of the spam pages may have other footprints or signature text that you may want to look for.

If there are many results there you can further filter through the spammer's keywords by adding a keyword to your query. For example, search for keyword inurl:footprint.

As you can see, SafeSurf.com is a valuable highly rated website...or at least one which is offering many high value loan related keyword phrases!

Want to Mine PPC Accounts for Keywords Too? Here's How:

Another good idea for coming up with conversion / profit oriented keyword ideas is to go to the Clickbank marketplace, search for a topic related to your keywords (like weight loss, for example), see what top selling merchants match your topic, and then plug those URLs into KeyCompete.com or SpyFu to find related keywords.

You can then run that list of keywords through an Overture search suggestion scraper to get an estimate of search volume. Or put them in the Google Traffic Estimator with no bid prices to see the estimated bid prices AND projected AdWords ad click volume. Then sort those traffic estimator results by search volume or overall value to find the most important keywords and keyword phrases.

Extend Your Content:

If you write real content about the major keyword phrases covered by highly ranked mass spammers or profitable ads associated with top selling products, and then track your referral logs, you can come up with even more specific keyword topics to write about.