Re: My Very Strange Webhost, SBI! -- Opinions, Please

On May 9, 5:19 pm, Mark Goodge <use...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>
>
> No, they're not. *All* the SEO s**** oil salesmen claim to have "the
> secret" that no-one else knows.

Indeed -- and let me be fair to them: "SEO" is actually not something
they claim to deal in; not as such...I use the term "SEO" because they
do claim to help with SERP matters, but they are actually anti-SEO and
decry the SEO mindset.  They actively advise against keyword games and
basically anything that pisses off a search engine (link farms, etc.).

I'd used the term "SEO" to describe their claim to fame because it's a
familiar term but they themselves describe it much more mystically as
"The Tao of SBI!" -- I kid you not.  Though meant with a tongue-in-
cheek affection, they claim to out-SEO the SEOers by "keeping it
real"...what they emphasize is honest-to-goodness content generation
in conjunction with the proprietary set-up they have...again, I simply
don't know enough about SEO to gauge whether what SBI! does is
something I could actually do on my own (without gross
inefficiencies)...I find it hard to believe that all SEO is junk, as
you seem to suggest...after all, search engines do have their
mysterious ways, and certain SEO principles seem valid enough in a
common sense way....

> It's pretty much the surefire sign that they are selling s****-oil,
> since, in reality, the only reliable methods of getting to the top of
> the rankings are already very widely known

What are they, please?

They can't be that widely known since Google is supposed to be
changing their algorithms every so often to throw off SEOers.  I'm
curious where you get your anti-SEO attitude from.  SBI! is actually
very anti-SEO themselves, and they actually advise against SEO -- I
use the SEO term to describe one of their claims to fame because
insofar as they help with SERP matters, they're doing SEO in effect if
not in intent...but they claim to out-SEO the professional SEOers by
"keeping it real" with quality relevant content, in conjunction with
their proprietary database system that tracks SEO matters (who's
visiting, from where, how many, how often, etc.)....

> There's nothing special about those Alexa rankings. It may sound
> impressive to say that they're in the "top 1%" of websites, but pretty
> much any active site can acheive that.

Top 1% out of ~56 million sites means ranking, what, within a half
million of Alexa, which sounds impressive indeed pro****tionally but in
terms of making real money I have the suspicion that one needs to be
under 100K of Alexa -- and as for "financial independence" (which is
what SBI! sells) probably less than top 50K, likely even as low as
15K....

So, yeah, in a sense it's not really impressive if you know what the
numbers mean (and, low-res metric that Alexa is, it still gives an
useful idea)...but I don't know how you claim that "pretty much any
active site can achieve that"....

> The web has a very long tail -
> every semi-comatose or unmaintained site is still listed by Alexa,
> despite only getting maybe one hit a month.

Yeah, but we're talking about the ranking on their list, not simply
being listed at all.

> You can get into the top
> 1% of Alexa rankings with only a handful of visitors (one of which
> will obviously be yourself) using the site regularly.

I find that hard to believe, even while agreeing that "Top 1% Alexa"
covers a lot of territory, so much so that it could almost be
meaningless, depending on what one's trying to evaluate, exactly...in
terms of monetization potential, one would need much more than a
handful of visitors a month -- they say the Google Adsense click-
through rates are only like 3%, or $1 per hundred visitors....

So what would be the "secrets to website success," then?



> Mark
> --
> Stuff, some of it good, athttp://www.good-stuff.co.uk
> "Take me or leave me, don't have to believe me"