If this is inappropriate, please delete, but here goes:

I have an idea for fairly simple website and have a domain ready. I don't have the knowledge to implement it myself, yet, but I think with a little bit of help, it could be up and running fairly quickly. Without getting too much into it, the website will have a database of local products from local vendors and the means to search them in relation to your location. I can't find any competition and the keywords I would use have a relatively low level of competition with around 15k to 30k monthly searches in the US.

I want to exchange ownership for mentorship. I need a partner that would be willing to help me learn how to build a site based on PHP and mySQL. I'm willing and eager to listen and learn. I have a little bit of knowledge of programming but nothing practical yet. What I really want is the experience of learning from one of the many knowledgeable posters on here. If there is any interest, PM me and I'll give you more details about the idea.

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ph...ining-regimen/

Slightly of/on topic here, but since you are promoting your idea with the idea that there is little competition with keywords (only 30k?).

SEO is virtually worthless. Google owns the internet, and if they don't like your site, no matter how much optimization you do, you have no web presence.

With that said, if you are successfully entered into their queue, don't expect to be a millionaire over night. In fact, don't even expect to be on the front page, which despite the "low competition" is still the "best" 10 out of 10 million similar sites (actually it is usually less than this since so many sites get multiple listings). It sounds like you don't have much money since you aren't offering any, but if you do come across it, spend the money on advertising.

I think a single CMS like wordpress would be enough for it.

And no, SEO is not worthless. Get some quality backlinks for different keyword combinations with (mixed) good anchors == profits. Get some expert if you aren't in the field to make articles for you == profits.

I used to think SEO was worthless as well, I thought it was a bit of a black art that really doesn't have much value anymore since engines are content based and more intelligent than they have ever been... but after reading for hours and hours, visiting whitehat forums and blackhat forums, I can definitely say SEO is not worthless! A lot of it is subtle, but can make big differences.

As far as I know, there are many different ideas on SEO, and I believe that it is mostly worthless.

I agree that for right now, the best thing to do is use expert opinions and writers, and that is about where the site begins and ends on a content level.

I guess I am jaded about SEO because I did SEO writing for so long. I know that for all the things that they warn against, none of it is worthwhile to listen to. For one, do not use those joke automated SEO programs, just stick to what you know and create good content. Don't worry about all the bad argot, like "keyword stuffing:" that crap's not important either.

Google recently changed their algorithm, which ended up costing me 3 contracts in January, and I can assure you that the reason isn't anything at all to do with better/worse SEO. Google loves to screw with the websites. On one hand, that is good since it forces content to be better, but on the other hand, it is hypocrisy. If Web3.0 (to use their buzzwords) is expert-driven, then why is Wikipedia still on page one of many queries?

Anyways, I got off track. I'll tell you about what happened with a few of my prior and short-lived contracts.

Site #1:

This was a "secondary news source," and the way they paid was on ad generation. So, how did they create ad money? It wasn't through Google, although they demanded SEO-content that was able to attract Google search. The problem was that Google black-listed the site on several occasions. Yes, they took the site out of the news section and out of the search engine.

I'm not entirely sure why that one happened, but the base of the readers ended up coming from Twitter, et. al. This strategy somewhat worked. I don't know about Twitter and for me, that site is highly confusing. Whatever, I got paid and that was fine for the time.

Then along comes Sally. Google decides to un-black-list the site (this black-listing was cyclical) and now all of a sudden, with the apparent influx of readers, they were told by some SEO "experts" that the way to ensure their site had good standing was to disallow bots.

This bot thing turned into a nightmare. I'm not sure how they "detected" bots, but according to the new findings, a wopping 90% of traffic was bots. This couldn't possibly be true. What I do know is that they were assigning their own numbers by page load. Now, this site ran on many javascripts that included onMouseOver(), onLoad() and many other things that if say, a user is reading from an iPhone or similar device wouldn't be counted. No mention of the ******** and scriptblocks, and I doubt they were cross-browser optimized.

For all this discussion, let's get back to Google. Bing came along and made a pretty major splash in the SEO world. With 25% (or something like that), no one knew what to do about that portion of the population. The moral of this paragraph is this: While everyone was so hung up on getting hits from Google, they couldn't get hits from Bing. I was the only one who could get equal-share hits from Google and Bing. How? I focused on content quality, not SEO.

site #2:

I learned about the apparent web3.0 from this site. The site fired just about everyone, from executives on down to the researchers and writers. I was a researcher for them and I will say that I did an amazing job. While others could perhaps pull a few links, I was giving at least 12 links for all my findings, cross-referencing (site #1 didn't appreciate my demand for accuracy), and generally doing a darn good job for them.

There was a problem: while their youtube division was getting great results (confirmable via Google search), their website was getting less results. Why? Well, the black-list slapped them in the face as well.

The reason was that their content wasn't up to "quality standards." I hate that term with a passion because well, it's too damn ambiguous.

Okay, now this is the quandary: the youtube videos were a friggin' joke, and the site, while alot of content of it was less-than-stellar, was better done than the youtube section (this depended on what you were looking for).

Why? Well, it had nothing to do with experts, I'll say that much. The problem was that with so many writers, the site, which is relatively new, was getting classified as a content farm. A content farm is a site that hires everyone and lets them write whatever (this is suite101, eHow, and a few others that people like to site a "good" sources) . The irony is that while Google slapped this site in the face, the content farms were, and still are, among the top-listed sites on search.

Obviously, if SEO is so darn effective, these issues would have never came about. The point is that the web, and creating a meaningful presence, is a lot of politicking and a confusing mess based on the whims of one company.

To create a good presence (IMO):

Create quality content
Create a nice-looking site that will keep a user's attention
Work Twitter, FB, or whatever else to attract people
Create some youtube videos. The standards are much lower for them.

If your sites were google blacklisted, like actually de-indexed - it's likely they did something obviously shady. if they're rankings just fluctuated, well that's one part of how google works. very simplified, they'll give a site a chance - show it in the top 10. if it get lots of clicks, it's probably relevant and it deserves god rankings. if not, down it goes.

a "content farm" is not ehow, ezinearticles, wikipedia and so on. they are publishing the original content most of the time. a content farm is usually a bot. say you wanted to make a site on red widgets, it will pull articles from all over the net that mention "red widget", and sometimes related keywords too. copy/paste publishing them all on their site, hoping this will create the ultimate site for red widget lovers and rank highly on the google.

oh and OP, your idea sounds very similar to milo. perhaps read this, it's very good: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/30...tartup-973239/

I can think that yeah, with site#1, there could have been a shady deal or two going on, but with site#2, considering its backers, there was nothing unusual going on.

I think where SEO fails is that the idea is built around the assumption that Google is a charity company, and that is obviously not the truth. If you can generate ad revenue, you will be smiled upon.

The issue with site#1, as I understood it, is that they were mis-categorized. They effectively took the same approach to news commentary that one would find in Huffington Post. The difference is that HP labels itself as a "blog," whereas this company did not.

I am not sure why the black-listing happened. I do know that the site worked with Google to get whatever the issues were that was happening. There were other sites who targeted site#1, and they got burned a bit by the politicking. I also know that there was other sites, who were ranked very high on Google, who blatantly copy/pasted many of our articles with no links or acknowledgment. This of course created a huge Twitter war, and that can be surprisingly ugly in 140 words or less.

Anyways, it's just the story as I know it. I can't discuss every last detail obviously, but if there was something very dirty going on that I knew about, I wouldn't place any disdain on SEO.

http://www.seobook.com/worthless-hype

Many SEO heavy-hitters posted in response to this article. Perhaps one of the most telling quotes from a big name:

At the core, Google is an advertising network that has to run the world's largest and most expensive computer to create the ad inventory.

Here is a decent article on content farms. Yes, those of us who write for these guys know exactly what a content farm is:

http://www.website-articles.net/arti...1172&catid=424

First stop, Wikipedia. In a nutshell, the following factors were proposed by Wikipedia - multiple writers generating large amounts of content, written by authors who may not be experts, delivering low quality content and contain huge numbers of articles. Hmmm. Sounds an awful lot like Wikipedia, now doesn't it.

For instance, Rob Young nailed it when describing ehow.com with the words, "...junk content designed to drive readers to outside sites..." and Stephen at Impact Media spoke of AOL HQ as, "...new pieces of news, information and other such rarefied nonsense spilling out of the sewage overflow pipe that is AOL HQ each and every month." Matt Cutts, in his blog, defines content farms as, "...sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content."

his summation, which is nearly verbatim to what I was told by site#2 before getting canned:

# Multiple writers producing large amounts of content

# Authors are paid and may not be experts on what they are writing

# Content is written around currently popular/profitable long-tail keyword phrases and optimized heavily for those phrases

# Content is of low quality and/or shallow (subjective)

# Content is "spammy" (subjective)

# Content does not link to authority websites or accurate resources

# Content can be considered "intra-domain duplicate content" by the newly upgraded search engine document indexer

# Content is diminutive, without supporting information or resolution

# Website or section of website contains large and growing number of articles

# Pages are designed to drive traffic to other monetized web pages or lead forms

# Content is designed to drive traffic to other monetized web pages or lead forms

# Content is surrounded by multiple advertisements, lead generation forms, contextual adverts, affiliate links or any other monetization techniques

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&h...28b4e38cb62adc

Plenty of articles on content farms. Amazing to note that all the ones I read specifically pointed out eHow as a content farm.

Why do you care about pagerank?

If you pay for an expert to make like 3-4 overkilling articles like a month with 5k+ words with some fancy title like '9 Easy tips to how not lose your boyfriend' (or whatever in the correct niche) you'll get natural linking and you won't be forced for looking to spam your links into lowquality link directories etc. Quality>Quantity

With 10-20 quality backlinks along with correct anchoring you can easily get to the top, but that's not a secret.

Page rank is over emphasised by SEO companies as it's an easy, measurable metric that they can focus on improving to prove they are doing something for their customers.

However, page rank really isn't that important. It's one of hundreds of metrics Google uses to determine SEO positioning. Just_dance is right, high quality content that people search for is super important.

Designing the page correctly is also important, but content first.

I've heard of cases where sites are blacklisted unfairly, but they are rare. I'd love to see the URL's of the blacklisted sites (if you are willing to post them) as I'm pretty sure I could explain why you have been blacklisted or penalised heavily. Recycled content you mentioned, that is basically considered 'poor quality' and Google are making a move to penalise this more heavily. I really hope you didn't use Xrumer or any other unethical tools (such as buying mass links) to 'SEO optimise' sites as this can cause a lot of damage. I want Google to penalise these sites for the good of everyone.

You really should stick to white hat if you have faith in a site, if you don't, and it's a quick money spinner that's tough luck and those sites get what they deserve hopefully in the form of huge penalties when they are discovered.

I really really really hate:

- Searching for something and click a high link result and it's a link farm/recycled content etc. Just incredibly low quality crap that wastes everyones time
- People who use Xrumer or some other unethical tools/techniques to promote these crap sites

They waste everyones time and don't provide anyone with a useful service in any way. People like to kid themselves that their website is a special snowflake and doesn't fall into these categories, but they are often wrong. They also kid themselves that somehow their website serves some useful purpose but it doesn't.

Shame on me if the sites are good quality with decent content, but I really wouldn't believe it without seeing it, and researching the domain/server history, as well as any marketing techniques the sites may have adopted.

The fact of the matter is, if you have BAD quality unique articles, you'll get more hits. If you have GOOD quality articles, those hits will revisit, bookmark, and share. If it's a piece of crap article written by a teenager in India for $1 on the intricacies of atomic reactors it's going to be crap and visitors are going to bounce.

I'm not sold on generating mass content. Those users don't stick. It's low quality traffic. I'd rather have 1 good article that pulls 10 visitors a day than 5 badly written ones that pull 50 visitors a day because I'm in it for the long run, I want to build a quality reputation, serve a genuinely useful purpose and not just fall into the millions of bad websites out there. That's a long term, sustainable plan for success.

That is a good read but my idea is nothing like it. It's much simpler than that and no where near as ambitious. I'm gonna try to finish up a basic version of it with Drupal and see what you guys think. The SEO stuff is a little over my head but it doesn't seem like the negative aspects will apply to my site.

The SEO stuff that matters is very simple. SEOmoz tends to have free trials for their services; you can try them out.

There are so many things in the google algorithm and the reason it is so hard to get to the top easily is because it should be, longevity is an important criteria as far as legitimacy on the internet.

There are obviously other important criteria but certain SEO tasks are not something you can just work for 100 hours straight and have done. SEO is instead something that is done 15 minutes/day and over time you work your way up the google searches based on keywords that you target.

If you can get high up on the google bar for any logical combination of keywords you can expect to have a very profitable website.