After reading through the Widgetbait Gone Wild blog post and reading over 180 comments, I am taken aback that nobody suggested that JustSayHi stick to their gun and keep the website running. This is going to set a bad precedent for many other online businesses.
Before you read this, I am neither an expert in online businesses nor in the SEO world. I am still struggling through the online landscape and I am not writing this to provide business advise to JustSayHi. I am writing this as I have issues on a personal level with closing a well to do business for the sake of Google, who doesn’t give a damn about your business.
That being said, here are some reasons why JustSayHi should keep working on their site:
- 500,000 members = large audience with relatively strong brand.
- 475,000 pages on the internet linking to you = vote of confidence.
- 260,000 visitors/month (Quantcast) – I know it has dropped to 50% of what it was, but the site is still in the top 10,000 sites out of tens of millions of websites.
- JustSayHi is very creative, and their success is proof of that.
JustSayHi should be working on diversifying the traffic sources and consider the following:
- Should they buy other dating sites?
- Should they be partnering with sites where they get teen traffic and drive referral traffic to their site?
- How can they personalize the site and experience?
- They can use email as a marketing tool to drive another 10 million users. I am sure if you have 10 million users, most searchers will be on your site finding partners.
- Get on Oprah/TV shows and reach a larger audience.
- Do they have a product to sell? If so, they can build a large affiliate channel. Creating an ecosystem around the site will help make the business more stable and have a larger following.
- If they have revenue, spend on SEM – Google will definitely take their money then.
- Have banner ads on every other website – checkout Chevrolet ads, classmates.com, or amazon.com
They should keep going until they have > 10M users and are in top 100 websites. Then, file for re-consideration if they still need to file for one. If they have 100,000 spammy links compared to 10 million total backlinks, I don’t think it will impact them.
P.S: I am not supporting spam but I don’t care about changing my business for sake of Google, either.
