Here's some more proof white hat SEO works
-
I guess this is the most logical place to share this with you. I do SEO for many sites. I've recently been focusing on two in particular for the same client. We used Netfirms SEO services to get links--he insisted--which basically consists of writing articles in broken English and placing them all over blog networks with our desired anchor text.
On the other site, I simply refused to employ those services. This was the client's main site, and was way too important to mess around with. I built links myself, the legit way.
Long story short, for months I watched the shady, black hat site climb and climb in the SERPs, while the white hat one kept falling.
This morning, I checked my SEOmoz campaigns and my white hat site went from #8 to #2 and my black hat site went from page 2 to no longer being in the top 50.
Just another example of what's been happening with Google lately and how great it is. Interestingly, the black hat site never got a warning in GWT about buying links.
Now I just have to figure out a way to break the news to my boss and tell him I told him so without actually using those words.
-
it doesn't!
but i had no where better to put it!
-
Hmm . . . how does that relate to coat hangers?
-
Another one for a case study?
http://www.hangerworld.co.uk/blog/keep-calm-and-de-optimise/
-
what is white hat SEO? this is question i am looking to answer.
Google consider some link white hat in past. now grey or black.
what are all the time what hat seo link building? can some one share it?
or can you share marisa?
Thanks.
-
Yeah, that was a joke. I'm not really going to tell him I told him so. I just need to break the news to him in a way that will remind him that I was never behind this decision.
-
Yeah, that was a joke. I'm not really going to tell him I told him so. I just need to break the news to him in a way that will remind him that I was never behind this decision.
-
I would not say anything.
You never know what google will be targeting next week.... or where errant arrows will hit.
-
How about: sign the resignation, go in, slap him, and he wants to fire you... Then you say: "Nonono! You miss understood me, you don't fire me, I quit! :D"
And BTW: There is a need for them to know that anyone can make mistakes, bosses, managers too.
-
Would be funny though.
Personally I'd just use it for him to trust you in the future and bring it up whenever you need to back up a point he doesn't agree with.
-
Thanks Marisa, nice cool to get good feedback fom other SEOs, after all we can be a very critical bunch
I'm going to do another you moz post soon as a follow up as I'm still getting some great traffic from my efforts. Though, I haven't yet heeded my own advice and put an hour aside to jump on another meme.
-
The best is not "I told you so" it is a lesson in general, that slow and steady wins the race....
There is some falacy in business that has been perpetuated that the analogy work smarter not harder is somehow true, and a longterm winning strategy.
In most areas of business working harder AND smarter is needed...
and SEO is one of those areas for continued growth, and to alleviate the sleepless nights of worry if that "Last Tactic" will be the straw that breaks the camels back
Not sure if i could have worked in more metaphors in there
-
Hilarious. BTW, I enjoyed your recent case study as well.
-
That's like signing your resignation
-
Great news. A win for the Good Guys.
This may help you tell your boss...
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_say_i_told_you_so_in_20_languages
-
I'd just go with I told you so.
Then Google slap him
-
"Now I just have to figure out a way to tell my boss I told him so without actually using those words." I feel your pain!
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
-
Inbound links to internal search with pharma spam anchor text. Negative seo attack
Suddenly in October I had a spike on inbound links from forums and spams sites. Each one had setup hundreds of links. The links goes to WordPress internal search. Example: mysite.com/es/?s=⚄
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Arlinaite470 -
Sudden influx of 404's affecting SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, We've recently updated a site of ours that really should be doing much better than it currently is. It's got a good backlink profile (and some spammy links recently removed), has age on it's side and has been SEO'ed a tremendous amount. (think deep-level, schema.org, site-speed and much, much more). Because of this, we assumed thin, spammy content was the issue and removed these pages, creating new, content-rich pages in the meantime. IE: We removed a link-wheel page; <a>https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Asuperted.com%2Fpopular-searches</a>, which as you can see had a **lot **of results (circa 138,000). And added relevant pages for each of our entertainment 'categories'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChimplyWebGroup
<a>http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians</a> - this page has some historical value, so the Mozbar shows some Page Authority here.
<a>http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands</a> - this is an example of a page linking from the above page. These are brand new URLs and are designed to provide relevant content. The old link-wheel pages contained pure links (usually 50+ on every page), no textual content, yet were still driving small amounts of traffic to our site.
The new pages contain quality and relevant content (ie - our list of Wedding Bands, what else would a searcher be looking for??) but some haven't been indexed/ranked yet. So with this in mind I have a few questions: How do we drive traffic to these new pages? We've started to create industry relevant links through our own members to the top-level pages. (http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians) The link-profile here _should _flow to some degree to the lower-level pages, right? We've got almost 500 'sub-categories', getting quality links to these is just unrealistic in the short term. How long until we should be indexed? We've seen an 800% drop in Organic Search traffic since removing our spammy link-wheel page. This is to be expected to a degree as these were the only real pages driving traffic. However, we saw this drop (and got rid of the pages) almost exactly a month ago, surely we should be re-indexed and re-algo'ed by now?! **Are we still being algor****hythmically penalised? **The old spammy pages are still indexed in Google (138,000 of them!) despite returning 404's for a month. When will these drop out of the rankings? If Google believes they still exist and we were indeed being punished for them, then it makes sense as to why we're still not ranking, but how do we get rid of them? I've tried submitting a manual removal of URL via WMT, but to no avail. Should I 410 the page? Have I been too hasty? I removed the spammy pages in case they were affecting us via a penalty. There would also have been some potential of duplicate content with the old and the new pages.
_popular-searches.php/event-services/videographer _may have clashed with _profiles.php/videographer, _for example.
Should I have kept these pages whilst we waited for the new pages to re-index? Any help would be extremely appreciated, I'm pulling my hair out that after following 'guidelines', we seem to have been punished in some way for it. I assumed we just needed to give Google time to re-index, but a month should surely be enough for a site with historical SEO value such as ours?
If anyone has any clues about what might be happening here, I'd be more than happy to pay for a genuine expert to take a look. If anyone has any potential ideas, I'd love to reward you with a 'good answer'. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.0 -
Advanced Outside Perspective Requested to Combat Negative SEO
**Situation: **We are a digital marketing agency that has been doing SEO for 6 years. For many years, we maintained exceptional rankings and online visibility.However, I suppose with great rankings comes great vulnerability. Last year, we became the target of a pretty aggressive and malicious negative SEO campaign from another other SEO(s) in our industry - I'm assuming they're competitors. Overnight, there were 10,000+ links built on various spam domains using the anchor text: negative marketing services poor seo butt crack kickass ... and more (see attached image) The issue we face are: Time Investment - Enormous investment of time and energy to contact each web admin for link removal. Hard to Keep Up - When we think we're getting somewhere, new links come out of the woodwork. Disavow Doesn't Work - Though we've tried to generally avoid the disavow tool, we've had to use it for a few domains. However, it's difficult to say how much effect, if any, it's had on the negative links. As you can imagine, we've seen an enormous drop in organic traffic since this all started. It's unfortunate that SEO has come to this point, but I still see a lot of value in what we do and hope that spammers don't completely ruin it for us one day. Moz Community - I come to you seeking some new insight, advice, similar experiences or anything else that may help! Are there any other agencies that have experienced the same issue? Any new ways to combat really aggressive negative SEO link building? Thanks everyone! UUPPplJ
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ByteLaunch0 -
SEOLutions - Paint it White... Has any one used?
Has anyone used the tiered link building service offered by seolutions (http://seolutions.biz/store/seo-solutions/premium-solutions-paint-it-white.html)? If so, can you provide any insight into how effective it was in the long and short term? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Big loss in Google traffic recently, but can't work out what the problem is
Since about May 17 my site - http://lowcostmarketingstrategies.com - has suffered a big drop in traffic from Google, presumed from the dreaded Penguin update. I am at a loss why I have been hit when I don't engage in any black hat SEO tactics or do any link building. The site is high quality, provides a good experience for the user and I make sure that all of the content is unique and not published elsewhere. The common checklist of potential problems from Penguin (such as keyword stuffing, web spam and over optimisation in general) don't seem relevant to my site. I'm wondering if someone could take a quick look at my site to see any obvious things that need to be removed to get back in Google's good books. I was receiving around 200 - 250 hits per day, but that has now dropped down to 50 - 100 and I fee that I have been penalised incorrectly. Any input would be fantastic Thanks 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ScottDudley0 -
How is this obvious black hat technique working in Google?
Get ready to have your minds blown. Try a search in Google for any of these: proform tour de france tour de france trainer tour de france exercise bike proform tour de france bike In each instance you will notice that Proform.com, the maker of the bike, is not #1. In fact, the same guy is #1 every time, and this is the URL: www.indoorcycleinstructor.com/tour-de-france-indoor-cycling-bike Here's the fun part. Click on that result and guess where you go? Yup, Proform.com. The exact same page ranking right behind it in fact. Actually, this URL first redirects to an affiliate link and that affiliate link redirects to Proform.com. I want to know two things. First, how on earth did they do this? They got to #1 ahead of Proform's own page. How was it done? But the second question is, how have they not been caught? Are they cloaking? How does Google rank a double 301 redirect in the top spot whose end destination is the #2 result? PS- I have a site in this industry and this is how I caught it and why it is of particular interest. Just can't figure out how it was done or why they have not been caught. Not because I plan to copy them, but because I plan to report them to Google but want to have some ammo.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Seo style="display: none;" ?
i want to have a funktion which shortens text in categorie view in my shop. apple is doing this in their product configurator see the "learn more" button at the right side: http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC915LL/A apple is doing this by adding dynamic content but i want it more seo type by leaving the content indexable by google. i know from a search that this was used in the past years by black had seos to cover keywordstuffing. i also read an article at google. i beleive that this is years ago and keywordstuffing is completly no option anymore. so i beleive that google just would recognise it like the way its meant to be. but if i would not be sure i would not ask here 🙂 what do you think?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kynop0 -
What happened with Hayneedle's rankings?
Hayneedle is an e-commerce company that operates 200 niche sites selling indoor and outdoor home products. They were ranking at the top of the first page for most terms related to their sites (fire pits, fountains, benches, etc.), but all of a sudden at the end of April they lost their rankings, getting dropped to page 4 or lower for tons of their sites (barstools.com, patiofurnitureusa.com, adirondackchairs.com, benches.com, etc.). Does anybody know what caused this? Other than one thread on an SEO forum, we haven't been able to find any discussion about it online. It seems like cross-linking between the sites could have been a problem here, but we'd love to hear thoughts from the experts here on this. Our company is using the same business model of one brand with niche sites and we want to avoid anything like this happening to us.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | outdoorliving0