Google's form for "Small sites that should rank better" | Any experiences or results?
-
Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google".
There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html
Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share?
*private message if you do not want to share publicly...
-
I personally get phone calls/emails claiming to be Google and to "confirm" business information for rankings. [...] Likewise, if they receive a call/email from "Google" and choose not to respond because they are used to spammers, they would be unfairly dropped lower in rankings even if they have great CS.
I get calls like this all of the time. They make me angry because I believe that they are spammers calling. But could they be from Google?
** If there was an official setup like that, the two could get confused and people taken advantage of.**
Yes, how can Google discover who takes care of their customers and who does not? The small company selling nationally often can't afford the feedback and ratings systems that google can monitor, or support for their website and Google Plus.
I can't put myself out there to do tech support for all of the third party sellers on Amazon, WalMart, Sears, ebay and dozens of other big brand sites that sell my product.
-
Very solid idea - track email response times, phone call wait times, etc. But I think it would be very hard to implement while preventing spammers.
Phone numbers and email addresses can be spoofed with ease. I personally get phone calls/emails claiming to be Google and to "confirm" business information for rankings. If there was an official setup like that, the two could get confused and people taken advantage of.
Likewise, if they receive a call/email from "Google" and choose not to respond because they are used to spammers, they would be unfairly dropped lower in rankings even if they have great CS.
But I'm with you... Google definitely needs to give small businesses a fighting chance against the big boys. Just needs to be extremely well thought out.
-
Maybe Google should invent a robot that calls or sends a question to customer service?.
-
To be fair, they were clear they wouldn't just boost rankings just because you submitted a page.
They would instead look at all the sites that were submitted, look for patterns on what makes them great and try to develop an algo tweak that would help similar sites rank.
Could you imagine if they form actually functioned as a "submit good site > site gets better rankings"... they would drown in requests.
-
No Results!
Google loves brands.
You can have more content than all of your competitors combined, greater selection than anyone, have intelligent people who answer the phone and give free advice, respond immediately to email enquiries with generous advice......
A third party seller on a big brand website posts one crappy page with one low-quality item that is such a piece of trash that we refuse to sell it and they are above you in the SERPs...
Then the customer who bought that piece of crap from the third party seller on the big brand website (who offer zero support - you can't even find a phone number or an email on their site or in their packaging) are calling and emailing us wanting to know why they can't get that piece of crap to work... and ask us to send them a replacement!... and then get pissed because we tell them to "contact the vendor where you purchased it".
-
Hi Egol ...so does that mean "no results" ...or does it mean you can't share?
-
Has anybody used it?
Yes!
Any experiences or results you can share?
No!
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
-
Removing indexed internal search pages from Google when it's driving lots of traffic?
Hi I'm working on an E-Commerce site and the internal Search results page is our 3rd most popular landing page. I've also seen Google has often used this page as a "Google-selected canonical" on Search Console on a few pages, and it has thousands of these Search pages indexed. Hoping you can help with the below: To remove these results, is it as simple as adding "noindex/follow" to Search pages? Should I do it incrementally? There are parameters (brand, colour, size, etc.) in the indexed results and maybe I should block each one of them over time. Will there be an initial negative impact on results I should warn others about? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Help with Schema & what's considered "Spammy structured markup"
Hello all! I was wondering if someone with a good understanding of schema markup could please answer my question about the correct use so I can correct a penalty I just received. My website is using the following schema markup for our reviews and today I received this message in my search console. UGH... Manual Actions This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Site-wide matches Some manual actions apply to entire site <colgroup><col class="JX0GPIC-d-h"><col class="JX0GPIC-d-x"><col class="JX0GPIC-d-a"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reversedotmortgage
| | Reason | Affects |
| | Spammy structured markup Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google's Rich Snippet Quality guidelines. Learn more. | I have used the webmasters rich snippets tool but everything checks out. The only thing I could think of is my schema tag for "product." rather than using a company like tag? (https://schema.org/Corporation). We are a mortgage company so we sell a product it's called a mortgage so I assumed product would be appropriate. Could that even be the issue? I checked another site that uses a similar markup and they don't seem to have any problems in SERPS. http://www.fha.com/fha_reverse shows stars and they call their reviews "store" OR could it be that I added my reviews in my footer so that each of my pages would have a chance at displaying my stars? All our reviews are independently verified and we just would like to showcase them. I greatly appreciate the feedback and had no intentions of abusing the markup. From my site:All Reverse Mortgage 4.9 out of 5 301 Verified Customer Reviews from eKomi | |
| | [https://www.ekomi-us.com/review-reverse.mortgage.html](<a class=)" rel="nofollow" title="eKomi verified customer reviews" target="_BLANK" style="text-decoration:none; font-size:1.1em;"> |
| | ![](<a class=)imgs/rating-bar5.png" /> |
| | |
| | All Reverse Mortgage |
| | |
| | |
| | 4.9 out of 5 |
| | 301 Verified Customer Reviews from eKomi |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |1 -
Big discrepancies between pages in Google's index and pages in sitemap
Hi, I'm noticing a huge difference in the number of pages in Googles index (using 'site:' search) versus the number of pages indexed by Google in Webmaster tools. (ie 20,600 in 'site:' search vs 5,100 submitted via the dynamic sitemap.) Anyone know possible causes for this and how i can fix? It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? Any help appreciated, Karen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
When Google's WMT shows thousands of links from a single domain... Should they be removed?
Hi, Looking at Google's WMT "links to your site" it shows few sites that have thousands of links pointing to mine. There are actually only 1-2 links pointing to me from a site that Google shows 2000.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
I assume that it is simply because they don't have canonical tags. Should I ask for the 2 links to be removed? Thanks0 -
Is it possible to lose rank because my site's IP changed?
I manage a site on the 3dCart e-commerce platform. I recently updated the SSL certificate. Today, when I tried to log-in via FTP, I couldn't connect. The reason I couldn't connect was because my IP had changed. Last week the site experienced almost across the board rankings drops on lmost every important keyword. Not gigantic drops, a lot just lost 2-4 postiions, but that's a lot when you were #2 and you drop to #4 or # 6. Initially I thought it was because I was attempting to markup my product pages using structured data following guidelines from schema.org. I am not a coder so it was a real struggle, especially trying to navigate 3dCart's listing templates. I thought the rankings drops were Google slapping me for bad code, but now I wonder....could I really have dropped down because of that IP address change? Does anyone have a take on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing. Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
End of March we migrated our site over to HubSpot. We went from page 3 on Google to non existent. Still found on page 2 of Yahoo and Bing under same keywords " parts washers" Beyond frustrated...HELP PLEASE "www.vortexpartswashers.com"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhart0 -
Google SERPs do not display "cached"
When I am signed in with Google and searching sites, the snippets do not display the "cached" link. Not good since I am trying to see when a particular page was crawled. If I login to another server that I never use to browse and search from there the "cache" link does show up. Assumption: google knows who I am on my machine and is "helping" me.......but is there an easy way to turn this help off?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eyauuk0 -
Why is my site's 'Rich Snippets' information not being displayed in SERPs?
We added hRecipe microformats data to our site in April and then migrated to the Schema.org Recipe format in July, but our content is still not being displayed as Rich Snippets in search engine results. Our pages validate okay in the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool. Any idea why they are not being displayed in SERP's? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Techboy0