The Ultimate Question
-
This is probably going to look bad, but Im going to do it anyway.
Ive owned my own business for over twenty five years. Due to the economy and a health crisis, my business has come to an end. Im left pretty much with nothing except my family, which is on shakey grounds as well.
anyway.
Ive been working on the IM, SEO thing for about two years. Ive made some money, but nothing that would make a difference to my situation.
I now have a site in a competitive niche. The site is rated A by the app here on seomoz. But my site is lacking in authority backlinks. I write my own posts, about two a day, and honestly, it is of much better quality than those ranking . My site stays right around #11. Every other day, the site goes to #7 or 8. When that happens, I make between 300-400 a day. Then it falls back to 11.
So the on site is good, rated A here.
My site is speedy
Not enough backlinks
The content is good
I was foolish enough to believe the G story about backlinks not being important. Concentrate on the content. All of that crapola. The sites that are ranking well have all the typical xrumer links. Totally not related links. Junk. And from what Ive seen, I believe the sites ranking 1-3 are making about $1000. a day.
So you can imagine what being this close, after losing so much is doing to me.
So....
Right now I am just writing content, pinging, social bookmarking and submitting rss feeds daily.
Does anyone have any real information on how to bump my site up in rankings. Please, no stories about guest blogging, or attempts to sell me your SEO service
I know I would do it for someone else and I have many times in the past.
If you can help me, please reread, and contact me. I wish you all the best. Sorry for the melodrama.
-
I think it is very difficult to judge your own site objectively. I tend to snap at my wife when she is critical of something on my website (although I am more tolerable with other people weirdly). It sounds like you need fresh eyes on the situation. I am no expert at SEO although I know enough to know when something is not right. I am pretty new to SEOmoz so I am not sure what the rules area about sharing sites etc but if I have your web address I would be happy to give you feedback on your campaign at no charge (if this is allowed) and whether there are any obvious steps that could improve it. I am not looking for SEO business so this is in no way going to lead to me selling you anything. From what you are saying though it sounds like you need to divert some of your time from content creation and syndication to developing relationships with authoritative sites so that they link to you although without looking at your site etc it is hard to make any solid recommendations.
It sounds like you are in a situation where you could really benefit from a professional SEO but do not have the resources to fund one and I really feel for you with this. If your assumptions are correct it is very easy to see how in as little as two months getting the right SEO expertise to add value to your efforts could really pay for itself many times over as if $1000 or $2000 a month makes you an extra $200 plus a day it very quickly pays for itself.
-
You ask for no stories about guest posting, but at present I think this is one of the best weapons an SEO can bring to bear. I have had superb success with guest posting over the past 6-9 months which has resulted in top 3 rankings across all my main keywords.
If you shared your URL, we would be able to make some real critique that may uncover some underlying factors that are hindering our site.
Best of luck with which ever strategy you move forward with.
-
Justin my answer will be short and smile and i am pretty sure that you will not like it too much!
Now when you said you don’t have enough links, so you have two options left
- Similar to others you can also order junk links
- Or focus more on quality links pointing back to your website (that can and cannot be guest posting)
Move for option one will make your condition worst, you might even fall from #11 spot (dangerous option)
Moving for option two might take a bit of a time like (a month or more) but you will move to page one with stability and you will make more money from it.
The choice is always yours but keep yourself updated with the result of each option available.
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
-
Subdomain Question
Having a difficult time on our site and looking for some advice. Our site pages are indexed perfectly, however, we have a subdomain where we have all of our images and PDF's. We only have the main domain set-up in Search Console with our sitemap. We can't seem to get any of our images indexed by Google that are in the subdomain however all the PDF's are indexed. My thought is to add the subdomain to SC and create a new sitemap that is just for the subdomain. Assuming we are not blocking any folders or files with our robots.txt can anyone think of any other reasons why the images wouldn't get indexed.
Technical SEO | | cbathd
Thanks0 -
Identify hidden content + Question of impact
I have a client that had a web agency which systematically implemented hidden content. Is there a tool that will compare source content vs what is readable on from the browser? Otherwise, can you recommend articles that focus on doing this? What are the impact on hidden content these days? Another client had hidden content on the first page and when we took over them they were ranking nr 2 with the home page on their brand name (nr 1 with a sub page). We have checked the link profile with Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz and nothing spammy comes up so I doubt it is Penguin related.
Technical SEO | | OscarSE0 -
Questions About The Right Hosting
Hi All, I have a few questions about the right type of hosting that I should be using. I understand that many people say we should be using the best hosting that we can afford. However, when I have a website with just 650 pages / posts is it really worth worrying too much about where I am hosting. I am UK based so at the moment I am using a UK host along with a CDN. I have a unique IP address and on a server that has a limited amount of websites on it. The main question is there really any need to be looking at anything else. The truth is I have used cloud hosting before and the website loaded slower around the world with that than it does with my current setup. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TTGUK0 -
Questions on switching domain name of my site
Hey guys, I purchased a domain name on May 1st and have been running my site on it since then. At the time when I added the domain name to the shopping cart, I felt that it was the best domain name a human could possibly come up with. But now, after two months, I am not so sure about it. And that means I am thinking of getting a new domain name and redirecting the old domain to the new one. Give that the domain is only two months old, there is not much to lose. However, my domain name does have some valuable backlinks, and has built some credibility in the eyes of search engines. According to MOZ Open Site Explorer, its Domain Authority is 10 and Page Authority (homepage) is 20. It's not much, but I fear that if I switch the domain name, I will reset the clock and the new domain name will have to earn the rankings from scratch That said, after searching this forum, I come across articles like this one from google and this 2012 article from MOZ that gave me some confidence. The MOZ article is from 2102, and there have been several changes since then. Is there an updated version of that article, or another legit article on the internet that you can point me to? As you can tell, I want to be more than sure that we don't take any hit during the migration process. Also want to mention that the site is on WordPress -- in case that is relevant. Thank you for your help.
Technical SEO | | deathbyseo0 -
Different links to ultimately the same page on Magento
Hi Everyone, I'm wondering if some of you could help me out a bit here as I'm a bit consfused. If you please take a quick look at my site: https://tesorotiles.co.uk the way it's setup is that you can get to the same page via 3 or 4 different routes as below: https://tesorotiles.co.uk/type/wall-tiles/rho https://tesorotiles.co.uk/by-area/bathroom-tiles/rho https://tesorotiles.co.uk/collections/rho These 3 are the exact same page and we've done it this way to make sure there is no break in the breadcrumb. Is this ok SEO wise or anyone have any recommendation. Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | VIVO0 -
Subdomain question for law firm in Indiana, Michigan, and New Mexico.
Hi Gang, Our law firm has offices in the states of Indiana, Michigan, and New Mexico. Each state is governed by unique laws, and each state has its own "flavor," etc. We currently are set up with the main site as: http://www.2keller.com (Indiana) Subdomains as: http://michigan.2keller.com (Michigan) http://newmexico.2keller.com (New Mexico) My client questions this strategy from time to time, and I want to see if anyone can offer some reassurance of which I haven't thought. Our reason for setting up the sites in this manner is to ensure that each site speaks to state-specific practice areas (for instance, New Mexico does nursing home abuse, whereas the other states don't, etc.) and state-specific ethics law (for instance, in some states you can advertise your dollar amount recoveries, and others you can't.) There are so many differences between each state that the content would seem to warrant it. Local citations and listings are another reason these sites are set up in such a fashion. The firm is a member of several local state directories and memberships, and by having these links go directly to the subdomain they reference, I can see this being another advantage. Also, inside each state there are separate pages set up for specific cities. We geo-target major cities in each state, and trying to do all of this under one domain for 3 different states would seemingly get very confusing, very quickly. I had thought of setting up the various state pages through folders on the main domain, but again, there is too much state specific info to make this seem like a logical approach. Granted the linking and content creation would be easier for one site, but I don't think we can accomplish this in a clean way with the offices being in such different locales? I guess I'm wondering if there are some things I'm overlooking here? Thanks guys/gals!
Technical SEO | | puck991 -
Duplicate video content question
This is really two questions in one. 1. If we put a video on YouTube and on our site via Wistia, how would that affect our rankings/authority/credibility? Would we get punished for duplicate video content? 2. If we put a Wistia hosted video on our website twice, on two different pages, we would get hit for having duplicate content? Any other suggestions regarding hosting on Wistia and YouTube versus just Wistia for product videos would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick1 -
Question about domain redirects
One of my clients has an odd domain redirect situation. See if you can get your head round this: Domain A is set-up as a domain alias of Domain B Entering domain A or domain B takes you to default.asp on domain B. The default.asp includes VB script to check the HTTP_HOST variable. It checks whether the main doman name for domain A is present in the HTTP_HOST and if so redirects it to domain A/sub-folder/index.htm. If not present it redirects to domain B/index.htm. In both cases the redirect uses a response.Redirect clause. I think what is trying to be achieved is to redirect requests to Domain A to a sub-folder of Domain B. It works but seems extremely convoluted. Can anyone see problems with this set-up? Will link juice be lost along the redirect paths?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20110