Hi everyone-- I'm honored to be a part of this little adventure and hope to have some good discussions here.
For my inaugural post I'd like to mention a little gem from a post on High Rankings Forum's Florida update thread. (Seems every forum has one or ten.) The moderator Old Welsh Guy, in his normal brilliantly funny fashion, has composed a verse for a Christmas card to Google.
Your Algo sucks times are now hard here's your XXXXXX Christmas card
He's kidding, of course (he did fine in the update), but it's pretty amusing.
The upshot of this (long, of course) thread, and the related (very long) threads on the other forums I frequent, is that: 1) Florida's been really hard on a lot of people. The jury's still out on the conspiracy theories, and there's currently a lot of debate among those who chose to make changes to their sites to recover rankings and those who made no changes-- it seems ranking are returning to many, and they're returning to both those who changed and those who didn't. 2) Content sites have fared well. Content seems to be as important as ever, if not more so. Which is a premise from which I will be making a lot more posts in the future: if content is king, how do I get some good content?
3) Don't take free traffic for granted. We're all looking forward to the day when Google has some decent competitors. But, again, see #2: they all like good, quality content.
I'm probably biased, as a professional content creator, but I think that's a good thing. As pointed out in the Cre8asite thread by member NorthStar, " a large content heavy site with unique content that people want to link to is very tough to fake."
As things settle, I'm planning on posting a bit about good ideas for content creation that I've come across recently. I'll leave the algorithm analyses to those who understand them better-- content can never hurt your site if it's decent, so decent content we shall pursue.
