"Iffy" Question
-
Hi Guys and Girls,
I have been studying SEO for a few years now. I have learned quite a bit along the way. One thing that I have had BEAT in my head is "Create Quality Content". When I used to ask "What Should I do to get more visits?" I was told, "Create QUALITY CONTENT". That was great advice, and I have done that. I have created over 600 pages since then. I went from 200 visits per month to now just over 5,000. Even more importantly, I have increased my lead conversions.
I say all of this because, about two years ago I told a competitor basically how you rise up in the search engines. He turned around and bought a domain that was 3 years older than mine and had a main keyword in the domain. He then just started building links with a bunch of blog comments and forum posts (The blog comments have like 2,000 comments on them). In other words, he did what I would NOT do yet he is #5 for this keyword and I am #9. (Although, I turned around and built another site and now I am at #13 for that and it has been up for a year now.
I say all this, not to bore you but to tell ask you, DOES IT WORK IF YOU DO BLOG COMMENTING, FORUM POSTING, LINK WHEELS, ETC. Do you obtain higher rankings?
Should I be doing a bit of video marketing?
I know a lot of people will say, "Why would you spend your time on things that may slightly impact your rankings, but obviously it did something for this guy. Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated.
-
I wrote about this topic a bunch here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421 but basically, I ask myself a number of questions:
-
What are my goals in web marketing? Is it purely to make the most money possible? Am I trying to build something bigger than myself? Something that will make people happy? Something that can last even if I'm not around?
-
Do I want to prioritize the short term or the long term? Can I afford to make more revenue, get more traffic in the next 6 months, if it means the 5 years after that might suffer?
-
Do I want to work on building a brand and a company and a product or just a website that gets traffic?
-
How much stock do I put in Google's webspam team vs. my ability to outthink them? Do I have the mental discipline to withstand the nervousness, doubt and fear that comes with spamming/manipulation the engines?
-
Do I think that spam and low quality sites can convert at the same rate as a high quality brand? If not, does the delta make spamming non-viable, even if my only goal is revenue?
The answers to those questions for me are clear, and they're what's led me to always pick white hat for the projects I do.
Hope that helps!
-
-
I agree with Yannick here. Even though I always run into various competitors who are successful with shady techniques, I don't believe that this makes sense in the long run. Sometimes it can take incredibly long until these spammers get detected, but eventually they do go down the drain. Be patient and don't worry. Linkspam will go away, good content is here to stay:)
-
It won't be today, it won't be tomorrow, but someday his rankings will plummet like a rock dropping to the bottom of the ocean. SE's are getting smarter and smarter and they will find out how to compute for this lousy way of doing SEO. You on the other hand, have absolutely nothing to fear. I say, stick to your strategy, but try to turn your pages into more link magnets. Involve people in the content creation so other people can endorse your content. (By tweeting, blogging or liking your content). You will be the winner in the long run.
Should you be doing video marketing? Like Yeeees? Video results in the SERP's get higher ctr's compared to results that are higher up the SERP's, so that would be perfect for you to screw with your competitor.
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
-
Using hreflang="en" instead of hreflang="en-gb"
Hello, I have a question in regard to international SEO and the hreflang meta tag. We are currently a B2B business in the UK. Our major market is England with some exceptions of sales internationally. We are wanting to increase our ranking into other english speaking countries and regions such as Ireland and the Channel Islands. My research has found regional google search engines for Ireland (google.ie), Jersey (google.je) and Guernsey (google.gg). Now, all the regions have English as one their main language and here is my questions. Because I use hreflang=“en-gb” as my site language, am I regional excluding these countries and islands? If I used hreflang=“en” would it include these english speaking regions and possible increase the ranking on these the regional search engines? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SilverStar11 -
Location in URLs question
Hi there, my company is a national theater news publisher. Quick question about a particular use case. When an editor publishes a story they can assign several discrete locations, allowing it to appear on each of those locations within our website. This article (http://www.theatermania.com/denver-theater/news/full-casting-if-then-tour-idina-menzel_74354.html), for example, appears in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver section. We force the author to choose a primary location from that list, which controls the location displayed in the URL. Is this a bad practice? I'm wondering if the fact that having 'Denver' in the URL is misleading and hurts SEO value, particularly since that article features several other cities.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"
Greetings Moz Community: I purchased a SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit. The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly. My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors. So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the SEMrush audit. Thanks, Alan BarjWaO SqVXYMy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Where the "fudge-nuggets" are my internal links?
Ok, so... Google Webmaster Tools Internal Links are not showing any links to my site's homepage. I only link to the homepage by wrapping the logo with the link throughout the site. Does Google need these to be text links to show them? [/](<a class=)" title="Kona Coffee">![](<a class=)http://1s93mbet6ccj5zkm31703gqj8.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/kona-coffee-1.png" alt="Kona Coffee"/> Site is here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AhlerManagement
http://goo.gl/4C8GKc Could CDN image source be affecting it? Lost... please help!0 -
How use Rel="canonical" for our Website
How is the best way to use Rel="canonical" for our website www.ofertasdeemail.com.br, for we can say goodbye for duplicated pages? I appreciate for every help. I also hope to contribute to the SEOmoz community. Sincerely,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZZNINTERNETMEDIAGROUP
Amador Goncalves0 -
Could large number of "not selected" pages cause a penalty?
My site was penalized for specific pages in the UK On July 28 (corresponding with a Panda update). I cleaned up my website and wrote to Google and they responded that "no manual spam actions had been taken". The only other thing I can think of is that we suffered an automatic penalty. I am having problems with my sitemap and it is indexing many error pages, empty pages, etc... According to our index status we have 2,679,794 not selected pages and 36,168 total indexed. Could this have been what caused the error? (If you have any articles to back up your answers that would be greatly appreciate) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Site Structure Question
Hi All, Got a question about site structure, I currently have a website where everything is hosted on the root of the domain. See example below: site.com/men site.com/men-shorts site.com/men-shorts-[product name] I want to change the structure to site.com/men/shorts/[product-name] I have asked a couple of SEOs and some agree with me that the structure needs to be changed and some say that as long as I dictate the structure with internal links and breadcrumbs the URL structure doesn't matter... What do you guys think? Many thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
How do you rank in the "brands for:" section in Google's search results ?
There's a "brands for:" section that appears above the first organic listing for certain search queries. For example, if you search for "dedicated servers" in Google, you will see that a "brands for:" appears. How do you get listed there? Thanks, Brian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InMotionHosting0