John Crenshaw - Profile

SEO isn't going to go away, but it is very quickly becoming a dramatically different field.

SEO companies that want to survive need to adopt some or all of the following:

• Specialize in a niche
• Integrate PR with SEO
• Learn to create interesting content
• Learn to build quality links to that interesting content manually
• Have a deep understanding of the technical aspects of SEO (especially on-site)

There's probably some others, but two major ones are integrating PR and learning to create interesting content. These are much more like traditional marketing / PR than what is historically thought of as SEO.

The SEs, but especially Google, are getting much better at identifying quality content. It used to be that no matter what quality the content, you could usually overwhelm it with link quantity and get it ranked.

Not anymore. It's incredible the advances Google has made in detecting quality content and I think it's only going to continue.

I've seen quite a few cases of penalties, and in almost every single case it was cheaper, easier, and faster to start from scratch with a new domain.

I know that's the absolute worst thing any website owner wants to hear, but it's true. I just haven't seen disavow-ing links like Google suggests do much at all.

The only case I saw where it actually worked was when the site had a handful of spammy paid links, a handful links on a few blog networks, and maybe 100 spam forum profiles. Those weren't too difficult to clean up.

As far as anchor text distribution goes...I'd recommend only a small fraction of all your links contain keywords. Like less than 10%...perhaps less than 5%.

Co-citation is quickly becoming more important anyway. Case in point: I own a local SEO shop and one of our clients is a roofing company ranked #1 in their local area for the term "roofing companies"...not a single anchor is exact match.