Going to work in the online world is very different from working in the average office; your job description can change often. Webmasters can build a successful website that pays their monthly bills and wake up one Monday morning to find their incomes cut in half. They may have done everything right according to the rules of the past, but this Monday morning, the rules have changed.
The last year and a half has been a roller coaster ride with Google's dramatic algorithmic updates. Even though Google releases over 500 updates/year, Panda and Penguin have hit many webmasters hard, so much so that some still cannot recover after months of endless work trying to fix their sites and back links. When you've been involved with building websites over the years, you realize that things change often and you never know when the rug will get pulled out from under you.
If you're site has been hit hard, you have two paths you could go down. One would be to continue plugging away, trying to fix your website, possibly spending a lot of money to do so. The other path is to cut your losses and cash out before another wave of updates further depreciates the value of your website. The path you choose will depend on how far you have to go and whether or not you have the time or resources to recover.
For new webmasters, the job is much more difficult than it was 10 years ago. The bag of tricks is just about empty and few things actually compensate for hard work. Unless your brand is already well known offline or you are already a trusted authority in your niche, you'll have to earn your wings by creating original, quality content and working to make your brand known online. Chasing down highly competitive keywords and copying everything your competitor does is not a productive strategy. The future is all about pleasing visitors, not search engines, and as search engines become more capable of reading visitor behavior, tricks that mean nothing to visitors fade away.
If you have a weak stomach for constant algorithm changes and your site seems beyond repair, it might be the right time to have your website appraised and see if you can cash out. Technology changes faster than the speed of inflation and the next 10 years are likely to change even faster than the last 10.
Theresa Happe works with Afternic.com where you can sell your domain or search for new ones or have your domain appraised.
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