Quotery.com Suggestions?

[JasonMOZ]

Hello,

I'm hoping to find some advice on how to proceed with a site I started last year — Quotery. I've spent a ton of time and money on it, tried my best to build value to what is typically a copycat niche, and adhered to Google's SEO recommendations (I believe, anyway). Yet, subpar sites rank well above mine. Now I'm wondering if I should find a buyer for the site and cut my losses. Does anyone have any suggestions on what the next steps might be in order to rank higher?

Here is what we've tried/accomplished so far:

1. We were mentioned on Netted.
2. We built a well-designed and easy to navigate site that works on all devices.
3. We've added topic descriptions and images, unique author descriptions and pictures, and exclusive picture quotes.
4. We built a well-designed and useful WordPress plugin, and kept the backlinks nofollow (note: our main competitor also has a subpar WordPress plugin with dofollow backlinks, yet they don't get penalized for it).
5. We've published curated blog posts, along with infographics that have been shared millions of time #1, #2, #3.
6. We've built up significant social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere.
7. We even tried hiring 97thFloor (highly recommended on Moz) for 4 months, although most of their efforts seemed spammy and/or very basic to me (and cost a fortune), so we decided to take SEO into our own hands afterwards.
8. We've added sources, pictures, and relevant information for thousands of quotes (e.g. example seen here).
9. We started working on user profiles, and had plans for much more down the road.

However, despite these efforts, sites like BrainyQuote dominate Google's rankings. So is it truly value that will earn you rankings... or is it still all about gaming the system? Of course, any suggestions in my case specifically would be much appreciated.

[EcommerceSite]

I think either of those would be better. If you do the change make sure you do your 301s correctly.

[Kingof5]

If Google tells you to do something for better SEO, it's unlikely to produce any significant results short-term. You might get some results if you stay at it for years.

I'm not going to endorse any specific tactics, but if you rely on Google for your SEO advice, you're being fooled. Google DOES NOT want people to be able to manipulate their search engine - why would they give you accurate advice on how to do it?

[DonnaDuncan]

This is a great post to help with site architecture. Published in 2011 and still relevant today.

Site architecture determines, in part, how your link equity is distributed across the site. Right now you have it spread too thin because the vast majority of indexed pages sit in the root directory. I think you'd be better off grouping pages by related topics, much like you have in your left-hand margin, by author and topic. Read the post and see what you think.

Another thing I though of is when I search for a quote, I tend to type in whatever I can remember of it. For example, if I search for "never give up", brainyquote is the 2nd result I see. They have that specific text in their title tag. I don't see quotery anywhere in my search results. It doesn't have quote text in title tags.

Now in this instance, you could say it's because the actual quote is "never give in" (in vs up), but you could use that common misconception as an opportunity to add more text to the page and increase your chances of ranking.

Another example is a search for "nasty, brutish and short". You guys don't show up anywhere although I do see you have that quote in your inventory.

[JasonMOZ]

Thanks! I'll have my developer work on fixing some of this. Could you please elaborate on: "Your site architecture is very flat."

[DonnaDuncan]

Hi Jason,

I have a couple of suggestions.

1. The site is slow. That will bump up your bounce rates and impact your rankings. You should try speeding it up.
2. You have a ton of redirects going on. I did a partial scan of your site and found roughly 20% of the html files found were redirected. For example http://www.quotery.com/rick-warren redirects to http://www.quotery.com/rick-warren/. If it were me, I'd check to see if I had an incoming traffic or links to these pages and if not, I'd delete them and get rid of the redirect. It'll help speed your site.
3. You also have a lot of duplication. For example http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/15/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/16/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/17/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/18/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/19/, http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/20/, and http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/page/21/ are all competing to rank for "william shakespeare quotes". I see you've canonicalized them so they point to themselves, but that isn't helping. You should be pointing the pages to http://www.quotery.com/william-shakespeare/ or using rel = next / prev.
4. Your title tags all contain your brand name. That's unnecessary. Yes I see Brainy Quotes does the same thing, but that doesn't mean you should too.
5. Your search is funky. I searched for "h jackson brown" and found 0 results. I searched for "h. jackson brown" (notice the dot after the h) and found two.
6. Your site architecture is very flat. That's spreading your SEO equity too thin. I'd group content differently.
7. You have a lot of "thin" content, less than 400 words per page. I'd be looking for ways to beef that up.

Those are just a few things I noticed. You should probably get an independent audit of the site and supporting processes and use it to identify risks and opportunities, and then set priorities for next steps.

[JasonMOZ]

Thank you for the suggestions. Originally I was under the impression that urls didn't carry much weight anymore, so I decided to stick with the simplest url structure possible (cater to the user). But I think you bring up some fair points that I'm going to try.

What are your thoughts on www.quotery.com/quotes/mark-twain instead?

or maybe even...

www.quotery.com/author/mark-twain/quotes instead?

[JasonMOZ]

What — specifically — are you referring to?

[EcommerceSite]

You have certainly built a nice looking website. I looked at this page, http://www.quotery.com/mark-twain/?PageSpeed=noscript and assumed you wanted this page to rank for the keyword "Mark Twain quotes".

1. Have you looked at changing your url to http://www.quotery.com/mark-twain-quotes/

2. Your first image has correct alt text, but the ones after that say "grid-author". Instead of using the same picture 20 times on this page I would either get rid of the pictures after the top one, get a variety of pictures, or at the very least fix the alt image tag.

3. I see at the very top you have "Mark Twain Quotes" in your h1 tag. But not anywhere else on the page, even though Moz showed you used it 4 times in the body. When I looked at the source code it seems like it appeared mostly with the addthis buttons. Keyword density is pretty dated but I would try to have it in at least one place in the body.

[Kingof5]

Adhering to Google's SEO recommendations is your biggest problem. You won't be successful for a long time - if ever - doing that, and don't let people here brainwash you into thinking you will be.

[RafalJ]

Jason,

You seem to understand the concepts very well so as Kevin has said, just keep plugin along... use that 5k, or part of it, on your own marketing ideas and eventually you will get there...

You can still promote that video you know? It's a bit depressing for my liking but I see people sharing similar content on social media sites nearly every day.

The spammy example you gave is technically not spammy - it's a website for content publishing, article is in relevant section, fairly well written and is linking to relevant websites (even though it's 3 different businesses) using no-follow links. It certainly isn't spammy but I can see why you would expect more for your 5k.

Good luck!

[KevinBudzynski]

Jason, I couldn't get whois.org to pull up your domain, so was just taking an educated guess since you said "with a site I started last year". I took a look on archive.org, and saw it being a lot longer! Thanks and good luck!

[JasonMOZ]

Our site went live weeks before a PageRank update, which is why I believe we have a 0. Unfortunately, now that Google has announced they no longer plan to update it, we may be stuck on 0 indefinitely, which I believe puts us at a disadvantage since some publishers might be reluctant to link to us (you'd think Google would have thought of that) (here's an example where they linked to our Twitter account, rather than our actual website).

"a) your content is not unique or pages are too similar"

It is a quote website, so the uniqueness of a page has its limits. As mentioned, we did our best to provide value (and did a much better job at that than most other quote sites that are currently ranking).

"b) majority of your links are spammy (and since you have 100k links pointing to your site I would suggest this is the most probable scenario)"

Using OpenSiteExplorer, the tool is showing 2,810 total links to the homepage, but only 129 root domains. Most of the multiple links are coming from things like a) slideshows b) sitewide links coming from the WordPress plugin (which are nofollow... a factor that Google swears will have zero effect on your site).

"Also I find it hard to believe a large, well-known agency would be involved in spammy techniques, any examples please?"

Sure, I'll provide three examples of what I believe to be

Spammy example: This article on B2C has what is obviously a forced backlink to Quotery. In addition, 97thFloor knocked out three different clients in one article (increase their profits, lessen their workload). Their clients are easy to spot. Hint: "Biz Stone said" ""Entrepreneur developer" and "mobile app developers".

Basic example: The first month, they'll simply present a "report" to you. This is essentially a copy/paste report taken directly from Moz.com itself. The only difference is that instead of paying $99 for a Moz subscription, you're paying 97thFloor $5,000 to present the report to you.

Marketing Example: Finally, I'll provide an example of what they do on the viral end. I gave them free reign to do whatever they wanted for a viral video, seen here (I provided the logo animation for the intro). This video went absolutely nowhere. It wasn't shared a single time on our social media accounts, and I even spent some money on YouTube advertising for the video (to no avail). The only viral campaign they worked on that went anywhere was an idea I actually gave to them (this infographic that was shared hundreds of thousands of times). And believe it or not, they recommended dumping the idea and doing something else.

So while 97thFloor might be well-known, and extremely costly, they absolutely do not provide any value that I have witnessed.

[JasonMOZ]

Quotery (the domain) is 15 years old, and it's registered for the next 8... so if either of the two patents you mentioned do have a beneficial effect, we're already getting that advantage.

[RafalJ]

Without doing a serious analysis of your site, links, stats etc. its like drawing circles on water, but...

Google Page Rank 0 while domain authority is pretty high (38), suggests you have an algorithmic penalty, so:

a) your content is not unique or pages are too similar

b) majority of your links are spammy (and since you have 100k links pointing to your site I would suggest this is the most probable scenario)

c) both a and b are true

To answer your question - gaming the system never really works in the long run Jason.

Also I find it hard to believe a large, well-known agency would be involved in spammy techniques, any examples please?

[KevinBudzynski]

One factor is that brainyquote has been around for many years (the domain was registered in 2001, but how long they had a site up--not sure). The age factor (IMHO) has a decent weight in the algo, and a Google patent states:

(1) … the date that a domain with which a document is registered may be used as an indication of the inception date of the document.
(2) Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. … Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

Just keep plugging along. Good luck!