"he knows nothing about." - I don't know everything about google or seo, but I have been semi-professionally paying attention to these issues with multiple sources for many years. Back "in the day" webmasters associated the google index update with moon phases and a mysterious "googleguy" would occasionally confirm new indexes are now live.

So I've watched many keywords and sites and used google for many results for a long time. I've read a lot of other professionals and tried to keep up with things.

Dare anyone to make a better engine? Google had one prior to panda and whatever other animal spam eater around that time. Of course this is an opinion and they will vary - as a user I felt google was better at delivering less censored results long ago, as a user I admit their local results are better than ever - but the censored ones are certainly worse for my use cases.

I am glad you search is very strong, I hope that continues for you.

I really don't care for the long posted advice "have a good article" and google will rank you high. I could write a great article, I could pay Nobel writers and scientists to write a good article. Fact is if you don't have the right places linking to you you won't be found most of the time. In competitive search phrases if you have not gotten placement in a certain group of online portals, then you won't stand a chance.

The whole "bad backlinks" can cause you to lose your position has been weaponized for a long time. The time it takes to create the right utf encoded link disavow things is a bad joke, and if you are in a competitive area, you may find yourself trying to figure out how someone gets 100 bad links to your site each month when you can't get 10 good or bad links with lots of trying.

You must be an amazing writer to have your site ranked high on "important keywords" just by "mak[ing] good web content". I am glad that's working out well!

I rarely see good quality links on fbook, since I only check it a few times a year. However I have watched the trends, and I can say that depending on google as a webmaster or a user is not a wise idea - you have no way to know when they change things and affect what you can show and what can be seen.

I have watched facebook and others increase their usage and can say after running more than $100k in google ads and fbook ads, that at one time google was king for quality traffic, however I strongly believe fbook is much better for quality leads / customers for the time or money spent.

I stand behind what I said about my experience and current state of thinking in my original comment. I am glad your experience is not the same.

I still feel like google is today's yellow pages, and if not for their forced defaults in android would be fading in usage, and if not for their purchase of youtube would be worth much less today and in the future.

There was a time when many businesses had to out spend each other in the yellow pages to get business, now you can't give away the thick books. I have the last yellow pages I saw in my city, it's from 2013 and it's quite tiny.

> Fact is if you don't have the right places linking to you you won't be found most of the time.

In my case that is definitely not true.

I will tell you my specific use case: if you search for "make my own rpg" on google, my site rpgplayground.com is at #1. It's above the most well known product for this: RPG Maker.

If you look at the links to my site, they are nowhere near RPG Maker. Everybody in that world knows that product, all links go there. Nobody know about my product. Yet I'm at #1.

If you search "make your own rpg", RPG Maker is the top one, mine 2nd.

How did I get there? I wrote some decent blog articles explaining how to make your own RPG.

> You must be an amazing writer to have your site ranked high on "important keywords" just by "mak[ing] good web content". I am glad that's working out well!

I am not, English is not even my native language. But I provide valuable content for people who search for "how to make an RPG" and other related searches.

Congrats on the rankings! It appears from my search here that you may have 2 sites that are both in the top 10 results for that search phrase!

I am guessing that those keywords are not highly competitive money wise, just a guess, as I would assume there would be lots of competition and articles via mashable, tech crunch and similar pushing links around, along with a fair amount of negative seo phishing bad links from multiple pbns to different sites.

I'm sure others have faster access to tools that show what the keyword is worth for adword clicks, what the estimated traffic is and value of such sites.

I have stopped using the seo type tools like the one the article is from, as I have determined that the more valuable spaces to be in are already saturated with players in the index and the cost for time and money is not really worth the expense of the tools and the stress.

I've had a hundred or so domains sent to my email to add to a disavow list, but it seems no one really reads the notes I put in there, so I've lessened my focus on google obviously - the time and money spent elsewhere has bigger rewards for me and those I try to help promote.

I can see how your particular niche is likely to do better with google and not have as many groups of interested people on facebook or snapchat - again just a guess.

Maybe you are someone with faster access to a backlink checker can explain how many quality links you have gotten to your articles just by publishing.

If it's just sitewide links in your header pointing to your other site along site a few hundred blog posts written by you, that would be so funny.

Glad it's been working out for ya, seriously. Google is a fickle friend who can be generous at times, enjoy.

It's true that every niche and business is different.

Those search phrases I'm referring to, are probably too niche to make advertisement revenue from them. But if you sell a product, it definitely helps to be on top there, especially since people really search for what you have to offer. So in that sense they might not be listed among "popular keywords".

I don't use a backlink checker, and don't really do anything specific for SEO, except for the more general advice. I also don't have a few hundred blog posts, but just a few good ones.

This is just a guess, but google also tracks how long people stay on your page. Since I offer what they are looking for, they might stay longer and google lists me higher. I don't know, maybe I was just lucky. But it shows that it's definitely possible to rank high for your specific niche.

My sincere apologies for my snappy "he knows nothing about.", that was uncalled for. You seem to know what you're talking about, only from a different perspective than me.

I found a free version of the hrefs backlink tool and put your site in there to take a peek. It does not show ALL the links in the free version, however the links it did show tell a very different story than the one you were painting in your original comment / rebuttal to my statements.

Scanning through the list of links, it appears to be a lot of comment spam and profile spam linking to your site. This may not be your doing, I get that. My guess would be that you made the comments and someone else did the profile spam.

My second quick scroll through of the links, I think there is one good link - in an article from gamesfromscratch site - I thought there were two good site links, but it appears the second one (on gameddev dot net) was placed by you.

The other links that stood out, are links that you added on your own sites to your other site.

I mentioned a sitewide header link on your web site with hundreds of posts... I assumed you had hundreds just by looking at your monthly archives listed in the sidebar - if you just have dozens - I apologize, I did not count.

However, the point is the same. You did not just create a good article and good put you in the top results.

Your site made it in the top results using SEO techniques that are supposed to be strictly forbidden, and detected by the magic algorthm, and penalize your site for doing. (no dofollow links on your own sites, PBN use, profiles, comments or other links added to the net specifically to rank up your pages)

Unless you have filed some disavow lists, but you mentioned that you don't really do anything specific for SEO so I am assuming you have not disavowed links.

So, for sure your initial statement was misleading, even if just an oversight, I am writing this so others you may see this thread are clear.

I also have pages online that also "offer what they are looking for" as do many other sites, however google is downranking many of them and in lots of cases just removing them from the results completely.

What we may also be seeing here, is that google is selectively censoring the internet search results - by saying "don't do these things or you will be downranked or delisted" - and yet it appears they are not downranking your site (which should be super easy for them to determine you are violating the webmaster guidelines, I am able to see this with a free tool in a few minutes, without cloud data centers crunching info) -

However other sites are often down ranked and instead of giving webmasters info in the webmaster dashboard / console - they just point to the general advice and blame the algorithm - when it appears that the general advice is not sufficient for all, only some sites on the net.

Again, google's lack of transparency is my main beef here. Personally I think what you have done is fine - but they laid out all these rules in steps over the years and it is what it is.

As I mentioned in most of my disavow reports, I think google should give webmasters and option to check a box in the webmaster tools that says only count links that I manully approve in the dashboard for or against the site.

This way negative SEO attacks fail, and if someone was purposely trying to spam a bunch of profile links to rank up, the only way it would help is if they vowed, er vouched for the link spam in the dashboard - which would be proof that they are aware of the links and think google should count them to help rank up.

this is an easy option to make things better.

I'd also like to see an option to only count links that have dofollow added to them (as it's hard for some web page makers to make WP menu links nofollow for example)

And people should be notified that google has gotten complaints / spam reports from other internet users / webmasters - like they do with dmca and such.

There is so much more that could be better - this old system they are using is just blanket censorship for multiple reasons by multiple groups of people. It's not fair to users or webmasters, imho, selection bias, your mileage may vary, etc.