Doomed to Fail
Posted On: 2015-05-27
So it's the end of the month and I for one am very glad that it's coming to an end because this month has been totally crazy for us ... and not in a good way.
We've had serious problems getting our home office online and my partner, who usually works full time from there, had to spend the last three weeks virtually hot-desking (think what submariners do with their bunks but this was done with a desk) down here at the office and that put us way behind.
Now that we have limited connectivity at home and he can get some real work done we have serious problems with his computer. For some reason it is struggling with things that it would normally have run without a hitch but at least it is still running because we just don't have time right now to have it down for repairs ... even for a few hours.
Fortunately for us the end of this month is also the time that we will be away for the weekend at a conference and our computer guy is going to use that time to do whatever it takes to get Steve's machine running again.
Isn't technology wonderful? When it works it's great but when it starts to hiccup and struggle it can bring your business down in no time at all.
Sometimes failure can be guaranteed
Something else that can almost totally destroy your business in the blink of an eye are the schemes that regularly go the rounds of the Net that offer easy ways of getting traffic from Google. Right from the time when Google first began to put a lot of emphasis on inbound links people started popping up with linking schemes that were guaranteed to get you lots of inbound links and great rankings for very little effort.
When they first started they were fairly simple. You would join with a bunch of other webmasters to build up a network of links and, because none of them would be reciprocal, people thought that Google would never wake up to what was going on.
If I linked to you and you linked to someone else and they linked to some other person how would Google ever wake up to the fact that it was all just some great scheme to have more links and so have a better chance of ranking in Google? I have to admit that I played that game for a while but Google is not dumb; it didn't take them long to see that there was a pattern and they penalized every site that was using that linking system.
Some months before Christmas I noticed that someone else had come up with what they claimed was a sure-fire way of getting better rankings in Google. Their idea seems to have involved building a whole bunch of very targeted micro-sites that all pointed back to one single site and, while that had been tried before, the guy behind the latest variation on that scheme was pretty persuasive. He used big words and lots of data to impress people encourage them to sign up and pay for what he was offering ... and he succeeded.
Over in mainstream there are a few guys who talk about legitimate ways of making lots of money online and of course they have lots of followers and one of those guys decided that the micro-site scheme could help him make even more. He even promoted it to his followers and I think that at least some of them signed up for the program too.
Unfortunately for them the whole micro-site scheme was something that was doomed to fail ... and it did. The whole scheme got hit by a Google update just before Christmas and the guy who promoted the scheme disappeared from view.
But people like him never seem to learn and now he's back with a new scheme that seems to involve taking content from other people and publishing it on your own website. I'm not sure whether his scheme involves publishing the content as your own or giving some credit to the person who originally created the content but it's another scheme that is doomed to fail.
If you like to wear a darker shade of hat while you play in the search engine optimisation space then you do it knowing that everything you do has a very short life span and you are always preparing for what comes next so you're never caught short and you are always ready to move on.
But most webmasters aren't playing in the black hat SEO space. Most of us are trying to build something that will last and go on making us money for years to come and if that's you then you are doomed to fail if you keep getting sucked in by every fast-traffic get-rich-quick scheme that comes along.
The only ones who make money from those schemes are the people who promote them; everyone else just sees their hard work go for nothing when Google spots the scheme and penalizes everyone who is involved in it.
So don't be lured into these crazy schemes. Don't let glib talk and lots of dubious data put you in the position where you are always doomed to fail.