Google Goes Back to Its Roots - Local Small Business Marketing Feels the Effect

Content is king, long live content.  Google's intent has always been to organize the information man has created and continues to create.  In the information age, he who controls the primary commodity of the era is likely to have a lot of power.  And, clearly they do. 

During the course of the past year, Google has tightened and tightened its methods for separating the wheat from the chaff, and deciding what content is valuable and that which is not.  This has primarily effected the value of back link campaigns.  And there is no doubt that huge amounts of useless content was being piled onto the internet for the singular purpose of creating back link support for other websites. 

We at Randy Kirk and Assoc., try to maintain 100% white hat approaches to the internet, but I have to admit that I succombed to the siren song of cheap back links and paid the price.  However, in a rare twist, one of my clients seems to have been slapped more than any other, even though his website has massive original and useful content, and he has a ton of white hat back links.  http://www.mortgagehelplosangeles.com has been one of my most successful efforts.  While you can imaging hos hard it is to rank well for mortgage broker los Angeles, we had controlled the number one spot on Google Places for months, and were on page 1 of the Google Everything search with the website. 

Even in the month following the penguin change, our position remained dominant.  Then in the last week or so, the website dropped precipitously and we are flirting with number 3 or 4 on Google Places.  We did buy a few cheap back links, but not a lot.  The client has 40 YouTube videos up with very original content and a blog at http://mortgagelosangeles.blogspot.com/ that is active and has tons of original content.  Of course, both the videos and the blogs are pointing to the website. 

So, if you would like to show off your skills, take a look at the website, and see if you can find the missing piece of this puzzle.  Why do you think we got slapped?