Very Frustrated SEO
-
Hi Guys,
I wake up this morning one very frustrated, tired and fed up SEO.
I have always used very traditional link building methods upto last year directory submissions, social bookmarks, article submissions and maybe a few profie links but I always up front and honest with my clients what they were getting for their buck!. and sent them reports showing all links done.
Obviously with the recent algorithm changes, I have switched my focus to content marketing (i hear you all cheering lol), however, I am stumped!. I have read everything I can get hold of to do with content marketing, registered with buzzstream for outreach opportunities and joined myblogguest just so I could understand the process a little bit more.
I have watched the whiteboard Fridays and actually have a great opportunity to get in with a site using "guest post + niche". I love writing content which is a bonus.
Okay here's my moan. Coming from a traditional SEO background and coming to content marketing late, do I ditch everything else. Is content marketing all I should be doing? or can I still do the some directory submissions (good PR moz rank only), social bookmarking (only for content marketing articles), profile linking (maybe I need to drop altogether).
Is content marketing enough to rank a client?. I look at some clients competitors links and they have 100's of links to stuff that looks unnatural.
Kind Regards
Neil
-
Hi Neil,
Glad my response gave you some encouragement!
Whenever something changes in SEO there is always a massive over exaggeration that something is dead or no longer works but the truth normally is we have to tweak the way we work rather than revolutionise.
-
thank you so much this is exactly what I was thinking. I mean content marketing is the way to go no doubt about it, but hey you can't write 15-20 quality blog articles, using outreach every month on say "fencing". So I am thinking:-
- PR verified Directories
- Reddit, Digg etc (for content marketing promotion too)
- 2-3 Guest Blog posts (outreach)
- My Blog Guest - Easy way to get guest blog posts but not as Good quality
Obviously volumes will depend upon the competition.
You have made my day!!!. I was seriously considering packing all this in but now I will dig my heels in instead.
Kind Regards
Neil
-
Don't fully write off your 'traditional' methods yet, yes invest more time into content marketing but find a balance between the two.
The directory, social, article, commenting all still 'work' but you just need to be a bit more strict with the websites you chose to do this with (make sure they are 'good' quality sites) and if you are commenting or submitting a piece to them make sure it is of good value to their audience, isn't nonsensical and non duplicated.
That's my opinion anyway and no-one yet has convinced me that doing the 'traditional' methods of link building don't have any benefit any more or will penalise you if you take a professional and common sense approach.
-
I found doing the old tactics in a really quality way mixed with content marketing works well. So instead of blog commenting on any site saying great post we now comment as the client offering value based on the post on very related sites etc. -
I feel your pain hope this helps
-
After a steady drop in rankings (which I suspect to have been because of the link building company I used for 3 months - Feb/Mar/Apr - then sacked them off) I poked around for bloggers that are semi-related to my industry. In the last month, I've been using about 5/6 different ones, probably getting 10-15 links in the process. PR for these are 1-3 (but hey, who believes in PR, right?), and the domains are in 3/4 different countries I think so I'm getting spread around too.
Perhaps it's a mix of ceasing the use of the crappy link building company and then using these new blogs, it's impossible to tell. Pretty sure that the directories, article submission and 'social bookmarking' (*laughs) were bad for me because it's when that stuff starting going up that I had that horrible feeling when checking my poor rankings on Monday mornings.
And yeah, I'm still targeting the same keywords - in fact, highly-competitive ones, and seeing some encouraging results for which.
-
Just out of interest how many much content (i.e links) are you getting back each month? Are you targeting keywords still?
-
I feel your pain, Neil.
My niche is quite a hard field to work with in terms of getting backlinks - our competitors have bigger budgets and have dominated almost every site out there we could possibly work with. When I do approach sites we can't compete in terms of offering the same incentives to feature our blog fodder as our competitors can.
In a bid to help with rankings, I hired a third party company to help with 'manuel' link building with the intention of using them for a few months. They got us on some terrible directories, distributed terrible press releases to equally terrible PR/Article/Whatever sites, and after a month or two I'm pretty sure their crappy methods dented our decent rankings.
Then I started offering one-off content to better blogs and things seem to be on the up.
A huge frustration is looking at one of my competitors, who rank pretty well, and seeing that they have links from the worst 'blogs'. Clearly, some dude has bought an expired domain that has a bit of historical weight and now publishes half-arsed nonsense posts (including rubbish for my competitors) and now the competition is winning off this highly-questionable technique that Google isn't picking up on. What can I do? Slightly heart-breaking, but then again, another competitor has been doing this kind of thing - they're pretty big in the industry - and they've been nailed so, so hard. I'd hate to have been their SEO for the last few months.
Yup, I feel your pain, brother.
My advice, find some better blogs related to your field, get some rapport going with the blog owner, and get regular blogs off of that iff possible. It's seems to be working for me a bit - I supply them with the content, they publish it with a link or two, everyone wins. Steer clear of shitty directories, social bookmarking (whatever that is), and horrible Article sites.
Relevancy seems to be core - so find bloggers who're related to you and make some new friends.
Other than that, start saving and open a burger joint.
Dave
-
Here is my trick for helping you get the balance right of "should I go for that link"? 1. Go to Google image search and search "Matt Cutts". Find a resulting image and print it out 2. Do an image search for "Rand Fishkin", print one of those out too 3. Pin both image up on the wall behind you - one looking over each shoulder 4. Continue to build links knowing they are watching you Deep down we all know what is a good link and a bad one. Beyond that we are balancing risk v reward. Your new over the shoulder friends will help you stay on the safer/cleaner side of the road if that is your intention.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can piracy sites linking to you hurt your SEO?
Hello, Our website sells software that we have developed, but there are piracy websites that offer a crack/keygen to our software and are linking to our site. From an SEO perspective, are those sites hurtful to us if their spam score is below 30 and their DA is not 1? We'd like to understand if there is any action we need to take from an SEO point or if our site's SEO is not affected by it. Thank you!
Link Building | | marynau0 -
How to create good SEO content for an essentially thin ecommerce site?
I have a retail website that in the past has been hit by a manual action for crappy backlinks (these were all done by a previous agency and up until the penalty providing very good results). We have since removed all of the rubbish backlinks and have come out of manual penalty and are looking in to our long term strategy in terms of content and link building. We have a blog within our site that does well with traffic and with an OK conversion to the products that feature within the posts, we are also putting together a strategy in terms of long term content plans and while this is all very good for the blog, the ecommerce part of the domain continues to suffer. I know that part of this is because we did remove all of these links that were giving it juice, but where do you start with SEO when what you are dealing with is essentially thin content? With around 7000 products, every page has unique descriptions and titles that have been updated to remove keyword stuffing and over optimisation that has occured in the past. We don't want to go down the route of getting an agency that is going to put us back in Googles bad books, but how do you go about getting a retail page juice without firing backlinks at it? Not looking for the holy grail here but just looking for some advice, I want a clear idea of a direction to go in before recruiting an agency to do this.
Link Building | | timsilver0 -
How relevant are citations to SEO?
'How much do citations help your seo in view of the direction that google seems to be headed where content is king? Should the citations not be relevant to your site?'.
Link Building | | arthureray0 -
How to choose a third party agency to help with linking building / SEO strategy?
Hi all, we've not been link building for some time now as we are a small team and been concentrating on other things, such as getting our new look site built and implementing Magento etc. We've historically used external companies to help with link building & SEO... some experience has been good, some bad. Does any one have any suggestions on how a small company can try to choose a decent external company that can help with SEO strategies? There are a lot of options, a LOT of rubbish and a lot of very expensive large agencies that are well out side of our budget (or for a "small" fee simply produce a standardised report on "how to improve your SEO" that can basically be read on the net). We've tried local, smaller companies in order to limit our options .... but that didn't go well either. Any suggestions welcomed. Next is where / how to weight our expenditure and / or our SEO time. Should it be 50% gaining external links (be it by what ever means such as social, checking out where competitiors have links and chasing those possibilities etc) and then 50% internal page SEO, blog content creation, internal linking etc? Thanks again.
Link Building | | jasef0 -
Is commenting on other peoples blogs / articles good for seo?
Hello everyone, Just a quick question, say if I find some websites which are relevant to my service and they have articles I can comment on and include my URL , will these help for SEO? The websites also have a good PR rating higher than 3 does this count towards anything? Would these links be classed 'follow' or 'nofollow' links - could something please explain what this means aswell. Thanks very much!
Link Building | | vanplus0 -
Will online PR with optimized anchor-text hurt my SEO efforts?
With Google's recent phishing expedition and increased focus on natural link profiles etc where does this leave PR distribution with optimized anchor-text? Using the pai for PR distribution services has always been a great way to build backlinks but I just wonder whether these will be considered over-optimised in future?
Link Building | | jamesq0 -
Redirecting a previously expired domain - any SEO benefits?
Is there any SEO benefits from registering a previously expired domain name that is still linked to form an authorative source and 301 redirecting it to another site on a similar subject? Obviously first benefit is giving users who are clicking on the link to be sent to a site on a similar subject that just to a dead link.
Link Building | | Wardy0 -
SEO Agencies
I'm eager to hear peoples experiences both good and bad with SEO Agencies. I have tried many. I'm particularly interested in hearing experiences of types of link building. In my experience many SEO agencies build low quality links, that at least in my view are unlikely to stand the test of time, with one or two expections.
Link Building | | PeterM220