Why it's impossible to get traffic from search engines

[reCharge]

​

In my 15 years of SEO career I saw and did a lot but now, even for a professional like me, I will change and go into a non digital Industry. The reason for that was an increasing impossibility of improving rankings for clients. About a year ago, I stepped while I analyzed rankings and metric of a clients page, on a metric which power seems to increase over the past few years. Its name is “Trust Flow” by Majestic which is very similar to “Domain Authority” by MOZ. I'm very sure that a big search engine has also such a kind of metric, which measures the trustworthiness of a website.

But who judges about the trustworthiness of a web-site?
Links which are come from other “trustworthy” sites and they will get their “trustworthiness” from other “trustworthy” sites and so on and so forth. Anyway, every trust score (measure in % by the way) was “build” sometime, somewhere from someone who thought “That website is good, so I give 80% of trust score”. But what if your page was NOT the page who was judged so good? Maybe your company was not even formed or you not even born, or your website was ugly but with very valuable content for a specific niche which is hard to understand to externals. Anyway it doesn't matter YOU DON'T have the score like another one who was very big and successful in business at this time.

So the only way for you to get some trust flow, rankings, customer and money now (in spring 2017) is to get backlinks from “trustful” websites and the problem is solved right? Let's see …

I've been watching that EVERY website who is “trustworthier” than one of its link partners, lends (when a backlink is removed the trust score goes back) a small amount of its own trust flow to them. So the link partners are gaining trust, rankings, sales and money. On the other hand the “trustworthier” page is reducing its own “trust” which results in falling search engine rankings, sales and revenue. So it doesn't make any sense for a “trustworthy” site to link to a smaller, low traffic “untrustworthy” and “rouge” site.

Now you will ask yourself why big, all knowing and “trustworthy” websites even set links to other pages, they should fall like apples on the ground of certain search engines.

Well the only website who has nearly 100% of “trust” (slowly but surely its getting funny right) presented a small piece of HTML-code which is: rel='nofollow'
This small piece of code tells a search engine to NOT pass some of the “trust” of the “trustworthier” site to the smaller, low traffic, low sales, “untrustworthy” and “rouge” site. The result is that the “trust” and the best search engine positions are encapsulated on the side of the big, shiny, all knowing and “trustworthy” website, while the smaller “rogue” one will get NO trust, NO ranking, NO sales and NO revenue.

Is there any way around this?
Not directly, a smaller website is forced to pay a bigger website a certain amount of money, because the bigger site tends to lose their rankings and revenues caused by the backlink(s) they are building to a smaller “untrustworthy” pages.

They are some economical consequences which can proof your theory?
Not directly, but 8 of 10 start-ups fail within the first 18 months. 50-60% of them are failing caused by missing demand and if you imagine how far search engines and their content is influencing our lives, it is easy to find the devil.

May you noticed that this article is telling about “trustworthiness” all the time without even mentioning the content of a website. Yeah that's true, because when it comes to the metric called “trustworthiness” of a website, content of any kind like advices, reviews, offers, prices, inventions, even scientific knowledge or potential is worthless.

Does this represents the reality?
Well yeah their was a time between 1933-1945 may the biggest tragedy of mankind, but now it is main business model of the established digital technology industry of mankind.

Trust who/whatever you want, but we have a big “error” in the digital economical system of global scale! For me, I'm very proud to have been a part of an internet which was free, open and fair.

 

[reCharge]

After my article about “trust” flow, I received some inquiries where or how to get trust flow on the most cost efficient way.
So here I have some words about how to get trust flow.

On many SEO platforms or forums you can find numerous offers for backlinks from domains with a high trust flow. But trust flow is NOT assigned to a specific domain. It is assign to a specific URL which is located on a domain. So when the main-page of an URL has a trust flow of 30 it does not mean that a sub-page (an article) has the same trustflow. If this article is freshly written and located on the start page if gets a certain amount of the already mentioned trust-flow. But as older this article (which contains a link to your page) gets the more hidden it become of that domain. After some newer articles it losses its position on the start page for example … so the trust flow shrinks.

So it is NOT possible to BUY links/articles with a high trust flow. The older the article/links gets the trust flow shrinks. If you have a large amount of links with a low trust flow, YOUR average trust flow will be reduced as well. That's the main reason why it is NOT recommendable to BUY high trust flow links.

The only way to get trust flow is to RENT backlinks on URLs which have a high trust flow. When the trust flow falls under the current average trust flow of your page, cancel your subscription.

Be careful many SEO vendors tend to publish just the domain average trust flow or the trust flow of the main-page, but not the trust flow of the URL where your link is or will be located. Ask every seller before you place an order, because trust flow is only most effective when it flows directly to your page. As many subpages are in between as more trust flow will be reduced. The best choice would be a sticky article (up to 300 words) on a high TF main-page with a link to your destination.

 

[denisehilton]

I wouldn't say it's impossible. However it has become quite hard considering the level of competition in different niches. It requires a lot of hard work to get your website to achieve good ranking in search engines. So you can still get there but it will require a lot of hard work.

 

[SEOPub]

You are giving people absolutely terrible advice. They should not be worrying about Trust Flow. Trust Flow is a third party metric. Search engines do not rank pages based on Majestic's data.

And renting links versus buying links is equally stupid. Who cares if the page's Trust Flow goes down? Having links removed because the page dropped below so arbitrary number that has nothing to do with rankings sure as hell is not going to improve your site's rank. If I have a choice, I will take a permanent link over a temporary every single time.

Link age is far more valuable than Trust Flow.

Sorry, but this is just completely misleading and awful advice. This kind of stuff is why people are so confused about SEO.

 

[reCharge]

reCharge

Hahaha as long as you cannot proof anything you have not the right to judge proven facts! My analysis has shown that the coherence between trust flow by Majestic and search engine rankings are 95%!
You can bullshit talk whatever you want, my case studies are still better and by far more valuable than you embarrassing bullshit talk. I mean I can understand you, you make money by SEO which is more or less obsolete because of my results. OK, maybe a new domain can get a trust of 20% with SEO and a lot of luck but that's it, you will never get any project much higher in trust or rankings and you know that yourself.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

Then quit talking made-up crap and publish those results for everyone to see. You have not even accurately described what your case studies were or how you went about them. From what you have said so far, you looked at a few SERPs, saw some pages with a high TF ranking highly, and then concluded that TF is all you need to rank.

Even if you do publish the results in detail, there is a huge difference between correlation and causation that you are clearly missing.


As far as SEO being obsolete, you apparently do not understand what that word means. What you are talking about is still SEO. Completely wrong SEO, but still SEO. You are talking about a way to judge links, but you are still talking about building links.

Your "findings" do nothing to put my business at risk. You did not prove SEO obsolete. My concern about your posts have nothing to do with my business. My concern is the way you are misleading people that don't know any better.

 

[reCharge]

reCharge

Well first of all TF is a metric, just like other metrics (they are about 300) but it is the only metric which cannot be created, produced or multiplied it can just be shared, rent or lend. This is the problem, there is a limited amount of TF in the whole internet which makes this metric so dangerous for 'the not lucky ones'.
Anyway.

You want some proofs, sure:
1. visit google.com and search for something
2. take the URLs of the first two and the last two matches of page one into the checker and look at the TF values. Do the same with page 2 and 3.

You can do this with different search phrases over and over again you will get similar results like me. You don't need to use majestic.com because they give you just 3 scans as a non member.

P.S. SEO would get back into game when someone creates a method to 'produce' or 'multiply' trust flow in any kind. Then SEO could be effective just like 2005 very easily.

 

[Website Design Ltd]

Website Design Ltd

You, my friend, are a fool.

I'm all for free speech, and this forum is a place for others to discuss marketing freely, but I am imploring you not to pass off this information as fact.

As SEOPub has quite rightly pointed out, the only thing you appear to be doing is speculating (poorly) that due to the fact that you have struggled to see results yourself, you have lost faith in the concept of SEO as a whole.

It is this kind of speculative 'fake news' style marketing 'advice' that is the precise reason that there are so many discrepancies in marketing practices around the world. Take it as par for the course. Dust yourself off, and by all means give up if you want to, but don't drag well-meaning others down with you.

 

[reCharge]

reCharge

Thanks for your insults but web designers are the poorest ones on the net so I will not reply to that.

Why you don't try it yourself instead insulting me?
1. Use and big search engine and type in any phrase
2. Get the URLs of the first 2 matches and the last 2 matches and submit them to the majestic checker (I will send you a free bulk majestic checker which I'm not allowed to post here).
3. See the truth.

Yesterday I did a larger check-up and found out that every result page (I always checked the first 3 pages) contains 1-2 websites which have a significant lower TF than the other ones. Some hours later they are gone, maybe some SE pushing up smaller websites to give them a chance, but only for a few hours.

P.S. It is a kind laughable that so called webmasters, SEOs and web designers are unable to check the trust flow of third party websites which can be found in SE rankings. Maybe they simply don't want to see the truth.

 

[Website Design Ltd]

Website Design Ltd

Let's just put the tin foil hats down and agree to disagree.

I refuse to participate in a childish argument about things that are of no real concern.

Whilst I apologise for calling you a fool, I would argue that you need to work on how to get your point across without getting so defensive.

The fact remains that TF score isn't the be all and end all when it comes to SEO, and renting backlinks is an utterly ridiculous concept.

The evidence you have provided is of no real significance, and my argument, along with SEOPub, was simply that the information you are evangelising is speculation rather than fact.

I'll call it a day there.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

Here is the first search I looked at.... "search engine optimization".

41 http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
55 https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
51 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
49 https://www.bruceclay.com/seo/search-engine-optimization.htm
37 https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/01/21/seo-basics-22-essentials-you-need-for-optimizing-your-site/
32 https://static.googleusercontent.co.../search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
49 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en
42 http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/SEO.html
43 http://neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/
41 https://www.redevolution.com/what-is-seo


These are in the order they ranked. The TF score is listed first. Pretty obvious these are not in order of their TF.

I can go on and find millions of results like this. Do you know why? BECAUSE TRUST FLOW IS NOT A RANKING FACTOR.

Let's just forget about everything in this thread up to this point and talk about one inconvenient truth that you have not seen yet. Google would never, ever rely on data from a 3rd party that they could be shut out of at any given moment. If Google was using TF as a ranking metric, what happens if Majestic goes out of business tomorrow? The entire algorithm would be thrown completely out of whack.

It is the same reason they don't use things like retweets from Twitter and Facebook likes. They could be blocked from Twitter or Facebook at any moment. Don't think it can happen? Twitter blocked Google for awhile a few years ago. Look it up if you don't believe me. Facebook and Google already have a rocky relationship and more and more are moving into areas where they are competing with one another.

Lastly, TF is an attempt my Majestic to measure the quality of incoming links to a page. However, Majestic has nowhere near the resources of Google to crawl and index the internet. Google has way more data and finds way more links than Majestic. Often times Majestic finds less than half the links pointing at a page compared to what Google has found. Why would Google use data that is incomplete from a 3rd party when they themselves have access to much more data?

 

[reCharge]

The reason for that was an increasing impossibility of improving rankings for clients. About a year ago, I stepped while I analyzed rankings and metric of a clients page, on a metric which power seems to increase over the past few years. Its name is “Trust Flow” by Majestic which is very similar to “Domain Authority” by MOZ. I'm very sure that a big search engine has also such a kind of metric, which measures the trustworthiness of a website.

@SEOPub:
As You can see above, search engines has their own trust flow measurement systems. I never wrote that google uses a 3rd party metric like TF by Majestic or DA by Moz.

TF by Majestics is only suitable to get a feeling about how good a websites is ranked in the SERPs. And you can see it in your own results as well, the pages with a TF > 50 are on the first three positions ...

So for me it is pretty clear that a trust measuring metric influences the rankings significantly and if you get a high Trust Flow / TF in the majestic stats you may have similar high raking in the trust measuring systems of the search engines which are linked to the ranking positions.

To the social network stuff:
I already mentioned in other threads that these networks are mostly closed for search engine bots. So we are on the same level here.

 

[SEOPub]

Okay now I am really confused at what you are trying to get at.

You keep talking like you came up with some new ingenious theory that makes SEO invalid. I believe in the other thread you called this thread a "game changer". It's not.

SEO has long been about building authority to a page. You can call it authority, trust, whatever. Google's algorithm has always been about trying to judge the authority of a page. This is nothing new.

 

[RenaeFab]

When looking at the percentage split between paid and organic search, a quarter of the sites only ran SEO campaigns and received no paid traffic, whilst one was a relatively new site and received three quarters of its search traffic.

 

[jamiehennings]

It is not impossible to get traffic through search engines. But it is a fact that it is very very hard. A survey revealed that 60-70 percent of visitors prefers websites on first page of the search results.

 

[hostingsafety]

hostingsafety

What exactly you wanna say??

being on the first page gives a website a lot more growing opportunities.

 

[hynds]

80% of my traffic comes from search engine. Why you said it was impossible? I'm still living on search engine

 

[reCharge]

reCharge

It depends how much trust your competition has. If your competition on page one has 5-10% trust it is possible for you to beat them with a trust value of 20%.
I can reach 30-35%* trust with my link building techniques, but when my competition has 50-70% I'm absolutely chance-less. That's the problem I currently have.


The problem are the 'chosen ones' which are website with a trust flow of more than 50% WITHOUT a link profile! I saw websites (mostly big financed tech-startups) with just 10 backlinks but a trust of more than 70% That's pure scam.
Anyway you can live in this ponzi-scheme but if someone with cash comes into your niche you're done.


But one weak point has this trust scam. It has NOTHING to do with content, so it tends to be vulnerable to different user expectations. I compared the results between Bing and Google the last weeks. And Bing was better, I was able to find more and the results better matched to my phrases while Google always gave me highly trusted but irrelevant stuff. So I was forced to search like in the 90s with question marks, and minus signs to sort out the 'trusted' but irrelevant crap. So, if you don't find what you searching for on Google give Bing a try.


* A high value for a SEO, Some can reach 50% but there is the end.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

All nonsense. Again, you are talking about Trust Flow as measured by Majestic, which has nothing to do with Google. It is a 3rd party metric. Google does not use it for rankings.

You will see sites with low TF and high TF ranking well because it is an inaccurate 3rd party metric.

Plus what TF does not do a good job of taking into account is internal links. It is measuring external links from what most people have been able to test with it. Which just makes it even more inaccurate to try to make judgments off of.

Link authority flows through internal links and if a site owner knows how to build solid silos on their site, they can make it look like a page is ranking with almost no links (according to 3rd party link checkers).

Basically what all of your posts say is, "I cannot figure out how to rank a page, so it must be Google being unfair and not me."

 

[reCharge]

reCharge

I just found something about that topic (Google results getting worse):
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/jdI4HV81Ugk
or here:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/Bsd481KWM0Y

Reasons:
1. Paid positions first
2. Trusted but less relevant pages first

When Facebook is the cancer, Google the HIV of the net.

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

You didn't "find something out" about anything.

What you found were a few bellyachers whining about Google. The same kind of bellyaching has been going on about Google for 10 years. Nothing new.

 

[paul1129]

Trust flow, DA, PA etc. These are all third party metrics. How they can effect the SERP's?

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

They don't. Not one bit.

 

[reCharge]

Its name is “Trust Flow” by Majestic which is very similar to “Domain Authority” by MOZ. I'm very sure that a big search engine has also such a kind of metric, which measures the trustworthiness of a website.

@SEOPub:
As You can see above, search engines has their own trust flow measurement systems. I never wrote that google uses a 3rd party metric like TF by Majestic or DA by Moz.

TF by Majestics is only suitable to get a feeling about how good a websites is ranked in the SERPs.

All nonsense. Again, you are talking about Trust Flow as measured by Majestic, which has nothing to do with Google. It is a 3rd party metric. Google does not use it for rankings.

You will see sites with low TF and high TF ranking well because it is an inaccurate 3rd party metric.

Its name is “Trust Flow” by Majestic which is very similar to “Domain Authority” by MOZ. I'm very sure that a big search engine has also such a kind of metric, which measures the trustworthiness of a website.

@SEOPub: I'm not sure which skills of yours are "better", the skill of reading or the skill of understanding. But I laughed about 2 minutes long, thanks for that.
@paul1129: Please read before reply.

 

[paul1129]

They don't. Not one bit.

Yeah exactly.

And now the OP is telling me

@paul1129: Please read before reply.

Its funny.

 

[reCharge]

I think it's time for a little bit constructive again. One of my fellow SEO dudes wrote something else about the trust topic.
One interesting aspect is the "topical trust". Backlinks and their trust is only valuable, when it is in the same topic as the link destination. Well that's clear, but it seems to have an effect on PBNs as well and why they are very hard to rank and get trust when their old backlinks does not match to their current topic and link destination(s).

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

That is very much not true. I buy old domains all the time and rank them for stuff their links have nothing to do with. You take the link authority flowing into the site and re-purpose it through relevant internal links. It is really easy to do.

And that article doesn't back up anything you said. He is talking about looking at a page's TF to decide if you want a link from that page or not. Nowhere does he say that TF plays a direct role in ranking.

Given that TF is an attempt, albeit often times a highly inaccurate one, to judge the quality of incoming links to a page, that makes sense. TF, PA, etc... are attempts to judge how strong the links are pointing at a page. A link on a page with really strong links pointing at it is going to be stronger than a link on a page with weak links pointing at it.

The problem is you should never make judgments based on TF alone because it is often times wrong.

There is actually a much better, and much more obvious way to judge how Google feels about the links pointing at a page. Not sure why more people don't use it, but the best way to see how Google really feels about the strength of a page is to check its rankings. A page ranking well for lots of competitive keywords means that it has links pointing at it that Google feels are really strong.

Much more accurate than TF.

 

[reCharge]

reCharge

I did that about a year ago. I wrote a small PHP script which checked the rankings of link partners for the same relevant KWs. Unfortunately Google pops up captas after a while, so I'm forced to sit down and solve captchas in order to keep it running. :computer:

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

Yeah I would never do it that way. A domain is likely to rank for tons of keywords you would never think of. Simpler to use SEMrush instead. It will miss some keywords, but just to get an idea for evaluating a page's links, it works really well.

 

[reCharge]

OK,
lets conclude the knowledge we have in this thread.

Trust Flow / Domain Authority:
Are 3rd party metrics which are NOT used by Google or Bing to rank websites. Nevertheless they can be used to get a feeling why some pages are how ranked. Both metrics a vulnerable to bot-blocking techniques which can reduce their Trust Flow / Domain Authority values or even set these to 0. A better method is to use SEMrush to compare the rankings of the competitors and THEIR link partners. These link partners seems to be trusted by Bing or/and Google so these sources are good to gain trust from or further SEO knowledge.

PBNs can be used as a trust source as well but they need to have enough of it. Similar to competitors, these should be checked with SEMrush as well and THEIR link partners. Today, a PBN and their link partners must not have the same topic like the new content which should be hosted on that PBN or their link destination(s). But this could be changed in the future, so PBNs should match to the own topic (and destination topic) as good as possible.

 

[SEOPub]

I still disagree with most of that. Trust Flow and DA values should not be used to get a feeling of why a page ranks or doesn't rank. The only thing to use 3rd party metrics for are to decide if a page is a page that you might want a link from. That's it. using those metrics for anything else is a waste of time. And even for that, it is still dicey. The metric is till only based on the limited data that 3rd party vendor has and their interpretation of link quality, not necessarily Google's.

A better method is to use SEMrush to compare the rankings of the competitors and THEIR link partners.

I never said that. I use SEMrush to judge the quality of links to a page. If a page is ranking well, chances are Google thinks the links are pretty good that point to that page.

Today, a PBN and their link partners must not have the same topic like the new content which should be hosted on that PBN or their link destination(s). But this could be changed in the future, so PBNs should match to the own topic (and destination topic) as good as possible.

I am not sure what you are getting at here. Really a domain's topic and link relevance doesn't matter that much before you buy it to use as a network site. If it happens to be relevant, great. If not, it is not a big deal. Hell, I once bought a site about a famous actress. I changed the content on it and used it for a link to an affiliate site about VPN's. It shot the rankings through the roof. None of the links pointing to the network site had anything to do with VPN's.

 

[reCharge]

So, I'm back...
What about Web 2.0 I mean that kind of Web 2.0s where you can host your own blog / website and so on. These are mainly used as "Tier 1" in link pyramids.
Their content can be match to their link destinations(money site) but they have 0 PR/TF/DA when they are started. Back in 2013 the usage of GSA/SEOnuke/Xrumer/MoneyRobot/BacklinkBeast solved that PR/TF/DA problem by generating backlinks on the Tier 2 and Tier 3.

Why are PBNs superior than Web 2.0? I mean self created backlinks on Tier 1 and Tier 2 (Tier 3 is the spam Tier) could better match to the topic ...

 

[SEOPub]

SEOPub

A network that you own yourself is so much better than Web 2.0 links. Web 2.0 links are only valuable if you point links at the Web 2.0 pages and build up their authority. Why would you want to spend the time, energy, and money building up authority on something that you do not own and that could be taken away from you at any time?

Not to mention, Web 2.0 sites can change their policy and go to all nofollow links at any moment without any notice, like several of them have done in the past.

 

[Judas2018]

It pretty much is impossible to get traffic from search engines unless you're paying someone and have been around for YEARS as a business, site or brand. Also it depends on getting your articles or blogs shared by the right sites. Sometimes one major site grabs one of your articles and the traffic comes rolling in. However I have seen sites work years, long and hard... blood sweat and tears to build healthy back links. Only to see the sites they were linked to go offline because the owners could no longer afford to host the site, or was just done and ready to move on to new projects. So suddenly, your 3,000 plus back links become 2,500. A hit that can sink your site from the top 3 pages of a search engine to the top 6.