I’ve been laughing my behind off at the number of (un)relevant results that Google has been returning since their latest update to quash the evil thin affiliates and spam sites. I absolutely love the blank and unrelated pages that I have been seeing over the last couple of days in the top 10 positions.

What I really find funny is that several of my own thin affiliate sites have actually gone up in the ranks, while my thick, original content sites practically disappeared from the index. Good job big G. Thanks for the income boost.

But this brings me to the point of this post…

I don’t believe in SEO.

I don’t waste my time on it.

I don’t worry about backlinks.

I occasionally comment on other people’s blogs, and when I do I usually link my name to one my other sites at random.

I could care less if anyone ever finds this blog. But somehow it manages to get a few thousand visitors each year, even though I rarely post… And on those occasions where I post a lot, it gets a ton of traffic.

Over the years I’ve discovered that there are three things you can do which will keep you towards the top of the big G’s index:

1. Have a domain like this one which is several years old.
2. Post content on a regular basis.
3. Don’t do anything stupid.

The last one in the above list can be the most difficult of the three. Especially if you’re impatient. I’ve had sites that were deindexed rather rapidly after I did something especially stupid, or less that white hat. Of course, none of them were money sites, in other words they weren’t making money yet, so it didn’t really matter.

Now this site has never made me a dime in income, but I have had a few that went from $0 to a lot in 30 days. I’ll give you an example…

When the gulf oil spill happened in 2010, I immediately registered a related domain, installed WP-Robot, and created a news site that would pull from all over the web on that one topic. The site went from 0 to over 30,000 unique visitors per week in less that 30 days. Page views were in the 150,000 to 200,000 range each week, and time on site was pretty darn high.

The site was picked up by several huge sites (like the Huffington Post) and promoted by them as the place to find the latest information on the spill. Needless to say, traffic to that site boomed. Because of that, the income from that site was awesome for the first 9 months and as the spill was taken care of, slowly started to taper off.

After the first two posts, I never posted any other original content to the site. It was all done automatically by WP-Robot and the site more than payed for itself.

Now the reason I mentioned this site is because I did ZERO promotion for it. I put it up for my wife so she could keep up with what was going on with the spill (at the time we lived about an hour from the coastline in Louisiana). When I noticed how much traffic it was starting to get I put some ads on it.

The only way big G could have found it was because of the built in ping function of WordPress.

By the way, that site held the #1, #2, and #3 position for several gulf oil spill related search terms with no effort on my part for 2 years. The domain is up for renewal next month and I’ll probably let it lapse since the traffic has died over the last 6 months to a trickle. But it made me several thousand before it dried up.

That site made me realize just how ridiculous all the talk of SEO and backlinking truly was. Since then I haven’t wasted one minute of my time worrying about any SEO garbage. And it works for me.

Now if you want to waste your time worrying about SEO and all the crap associated with it, I can’t stop you. But remember this…

While you’re out there spending the next 2 hours backlinking your site trying to get on the first page of the big G’s results, I just built another thin affiliate site that will make me $100 a year.

I Don’t Believe In SEO

I had a small issue with my site today and totally destroyed it by accident. Thankfully I didn’t lose any of the old posts, but since I’m to lazy to fix it, I probably won’t be putting any of the older material back online.

As the saying goes:

“Out with the old, in with the new!”

Looking forward to a great year. I wish you and yours all the best for 2012 and beyond.

This is exciting!