Yeah, the negative SEO thing is a huge debate. There are actual negative SEO services cropping up. I really think this is just about Google limiting access to their serp results for increased profits. I recently did a search for "Music Marketing Manifesto" to see how "relevant" the results were. Of the top 30 results, 17 were Youtube videos (Google properties). That's of 140,000 (ish) competing pages when you search in quotes. That's nuts. In contrast, I searched in Bing and found the results to be much more varied.

I don't know about you guys but I when I search something I want to find a mix of the the leading resources as well as new and fresh dialogue on the subject. A search engine that only delivers their own properties along with giant corporations sounds pretty lame to me. That seems to be where they are heading.

And ironically, it's removed a lot of teh incentive from investing in quality sites and forced many to return to black hat SEO techniques. I know that has happened in my case at least. I think what they are doing is lame. I expected Google to be better than that for some reason.

I wouldn't get too bummed. Google is being a real bitch, but these things have happened a lot over the years. The internet is fueled by content. The rules will change a lot, but the game will always be more or less the same. It's just frustrating if you are a legit site who is hoping to be rewarded for authentic effort. I just wanted to keep you guys in the loop on the SEO front. Because you are going white hat, I don't think you can go all that wrong. Hardcore Troubadour for example is a new site that is seeing a nice and steady uptick in search engine traffic with almost no effort and with content that was not written with keywords in mind, for the most part (the content was submitted by users who were looking for links).

The idea is to think of what you are doing (with your authority site) as a real business that offers real value and which people might recommend to their friends, and then you can always explore other traffic sources should Google ever dry out. With that said, I really don't think it will. It's just changing, as it has many times before.

And as I mentioned, music is seen as having pretty low commercial intent for the most part. That means that their are more opportunities for us compared to the average online business.

Put it this way, I'm not daunted in teh slightest about my future prospects online 😉

Great, start with some nice long tail keywords and see what happens. The site is still new so the traffic isn't crazy, but it is there. If nothing else it's a backlink. But I do suspect traffic will continue to grow as will the sites authority.

That's kind of awesome. For some reason here in new Zealand it just redirects to bing.co.nz. i had to check it out through a proxy, and with a proxy the search isn't working for some reason. Pretty smart though.

I honestly do think bing has better results right now, for the most part. Everything I test seems far more varied. Google is trying to tell us what we actually are looking for right now. Going as far as changing your site's title tags in some instances and displaying something you didn't actually create for the user.

I used to search for keywords that I knew would be in the content I was looking for and always found what I wanted. Now Google is deciding that my long tail search is more relevant to broader results and displaying a lot of lame stuff. I may just stop using them. I'd love to find out if bings traffic is on the rise.