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Assuming they have literature, webinars or other things available as part of their service, you could make some of that info available for free to bloggers or others within the industry and could possibly request they provide the public with a review of the quality of the material.

And beyond that, if they've really successfully coached some people into great lives and incomes, maybe those happy people would be willing to provide links from their web properties to the site, with a thanks, or a review of the work they do or so on.

In most platforms we work with, the "retail" pricing and descriptions are all the spiders see, because the wholesale pricing is hidden from the general public and is only presented when a wholesale customer "logs into the site".

To pitch the "wholesale side" you would simply optimize a page or pages for the terms relating to wholesale coffee you want to rank for.  There would be no need for the "wholesale prices or info" to be crawled in that case.  Only the pages pitching your wholesale program would get crawled.

Now many make the mistake of creating two separate sites, and in that case, you run the risk of them competing against each other which is bad for rankings.

Problem being, the nail polish strips and stickers are the same product.  It's just that Nail Stickers gets a boat load more traffic than Nail Polish Strips.  In the public's eye, they don't really know the difference, but those that do would be alienated because they have a bad association with stickers.  It's a conundrum that we're in.

We didn't want to have a whole 2nd page that listed the same exact products, just optimized for a different keyword.  Post-Panda that's a bad practice.

But honestly, our competitors that are bashing stickers are just trying to make sure people don't mix up this new type of product with the old more inferior stickers.

Christopher, did you test add this against using say Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest tools all separately?  Many need to include 4 to 5 different social media tools, and loading each one of them separately in my experience has typically always been more of a burden on the cover than using even add this.

I think I myself actually moved into primarily using ShareThis, but that only had to do with liking their look and feel better for various projects.

I have in fact seen a slow down in performance but it depends on how and where you're placing them. I don't think the slow down has ever been enough to have an impact on your rankings, but I've seen situations where it would annoy a visitor.

I've had better luck using the 3rd party services like AddThis or ShareThis.  Sure they have limitations, but for me at least they seem to perform a bit better in terms of speed than if you're using Facebook or Twitter's tools directly (and separately).

OK, so here goes.  We have an odd situation on our hands.  Our website sells a product technically known as "nail polish strips".  We are a small player at the moment, but the reviews we've gotten in "side-by-side" comparisons vs. the big boys have been crazy, and literally always in our favor.

Now the issue.....

The best way to describe our product as mentioned above is they are Nail Polish Strips.  Our domain name includes the term "Nail Strips" in it.  Of the 200+ bloggers that have done reviews and provided us links, about 80% or so have linked to the home page, most just using our websites name, some have been nice enough to actually use keyword terms like nail polish strips.

Moral of the story, for the term nail polish strips, our link profile would indicate to the google machine that our home page is stronger for this term.

THE BIG ISSUE HOWEVER......

Our main category on the site that shows products is the page we originally intended to optimize for the term Nail Polish Strips.  And our aim was going to be to optimize our home page for something else, like maybe plain old Nail Strips.

THE BIGGER ISSUE......

At any given moment, Google is having a hard time figuring it out.  Based on our link profile, we should be on page one, but what we're seeing is today, it's our Nail Polish Strips category page that ranks for that term, and tomorrow that listing will be replaced with our home page.  Literally, last night the home page was on the top of page two, and today, the category page is on the middle of page two.  They keep flip flopping.  Sometimes they both appear within the first 3 pages, sometimes only one appears on page two, the other drops out of the top 10 pages.

OUR THINKING IS.......

Our home page obviously has more strength and if the google machine is even implying they like it for that term, we might as well accommodate that.  Keyword spy shows this term has a volume of around 18,000 searches.  The term isn't hugely competitive, so we planned to 301-redirect the current category page URL that is competing with the home page, to the home page, and re-create and optimize the category page for something different, like Nail Polish Stickers or something to that effect.

THE FINAL ISSUE.......

The term stickers in this industry as it relates to our product has been the victim of a negative PR campaign because the big boys (or girls) are trying to say "Nail Stickers" are garbage as opposed to "Nail Polish Strips".  The problem is Nail Stickers gets a lot more traffic.  So we figured, we'd optimize the category page for Nail Polish Stickers, and explain in the text, that despite what some of our competitors say, just because we're using the word "stickers" to describe them, doesn't mean they are bad, so on and so forth.  I ONLY MENTION THIS SO YOU SEE WHY I'M HESITANT TO PULL THE TRIGGER ON OUR ABOVE FIX.

I know this is long, and I'm not doing a great job of putting it in to words, but any insight will help.  I'm supposed to pull the trigger today or tomorrow on this re-direct and new strategy, but don't want to do so until I get some of my fellow ninja's opinions.

I assumed that he wasn't an affiliate marketer, hence me telling him this service isn't "above board".  Link building for affiliate marketing is exactly what this type of service is for. I didn't read the sales pitch enough to draw the conclusion that they were specifically targeting affiliate marketers, but I suspect you're right.

Either way, we both agree, if he's not an affiliate marketer looking for some quick hit rankings that will very quickly die, then he needs to run from any of the services like this one.

Hey, I still have some MFA sites floating around resulting in Adsense checks each month, so I'm no stranger to the shady link building industry.  I just avoid it like the plague when it comes to my actual ecommerce sites and for our clients. Actually, I avoided it even for my Adsense sites, hence the fact I'm still getting checks, even after not touching them for quite literally years.

A ton of people within this community, us included, provide link building services. I never plug link building services simply because it's a very personal thing. Not everyone's service will fit your particular business model.

You could private message me your details and needs and I could possibly point you in the right direction, whether that be point you to a couple of places we outsource to, or maybe we could help you directly.

But in the end, if you're budget is super-tight, maybe it would be better to be "consulted" on how you can best spend your own time building links. For companies that have very minimal link building budgets, I find just an hour or three of consulting time on how they can effectively link build on their own almost always pays off the best for them.

In the world of link building, cheap is almost never effective in the long run. Quality link building by its nature is almost never cheap.  If you're looking for cheap, the best thing to do would be to do it yourself. Otherwise you'll have to shell out some decent money in order to get the job done right for you.

GhostRank also claimed their links were white-hat. And believe me when I say they weren't.

I mean, part of their sales pitch is "Rank Any Site With Our Quality 100% Safe BackLinks"

I've never heard of a reputable SEO firm claim you can rank any site through their link building efforts. It's just not a claim in the SEO world you can make, at least not for the price they are doing the links for.

$50 for any link building plan is rarely ever going to help you.  However, I suspect you're just pushing SEOMaximus' service and that this post will be yanked as it smells of spam to me.

After looking further, towards the bottom 1/3 of their 1 page site, the My name is Maulana T and his picture is a weird avatar?  I'd stay very far away from them.  He's hiding behind a cartoon character.

I mean, c'mon, their based out of Indonesia (that's kind of a joke, but kind of serious).

My guess would be NO. Now don't quote me on that for sure, but after visiting their site, to me it smells of a link network like GhostRank (that Matt Cutts and cronies just demolished) and that (a) YES, it would absolutely improve your rankings for a bit but (b) that once it's found it will surely get you an email from Google Webmaster Tools stating that they have found some shady links in your profile.  Granted the (b) scenario isn't as bad as it sounds as they usually just notify you they won't be counting them anymore, but that does not in any way look above board.

When it comes to shady link aquisition which I assume this could be classified under, I think it's always better not to take part. At best you'll get a small boost for a while (maybe even a big one), but it will be short lived because at some point those links will be devalued and you run the risk of getting your site hurt.

And it's kind of like pi$$ing into the wind to some extent.

So I always enjoy doing quick reviews of sites with situations like yours because it gives me insight into some issues I have on my own sites/projects that I'm just too close to see.  The "distant nature" of reviewing someone else's site is sometimes that fresh perspective you need.  Anyway, upon my poking around......

DISCLAIMER, if anything I say is wrong, it's either that I'm just wrong, or I didn't spend enough time looking into it because we're all very busy peeps (I'll claim it's the later)...

(1) Your Links VS. Theirs...
No arguing that you have more links than they do, but I suspect many of your links are from low quality blogs, I saw a bunch from directories that probably don't even pass strength anymore and so on. Without doing a full look through, links are hard to gauge. I didn't look at Sterlings in any detail, but I saw a few pretty decent links even though they have peanuts compared to yours in terms of quantity. So I'd say your link profile is definitely better, and it probably does help you more than theirs does, but obviously it's not enough.

(2) Your Content VS. Theirs...
This is where I think you're falling victim to being "too close". When I compare your content to theirs, I really don't see you as having better content. You have a bit more "descriptive" text than they do on product pages, but they have more "category-like" pages that has decent content on them (as do you).  And to top it off, they have this "questions" section on each product page similar to a commenting system, where customers ask questions right on a product page, and Sterling staff members answer them right their on-page. So when I look at content comparisons, I see that as being a wash in terms of "quality" and they murder you in terms of quantity.

(3) HTML and technical "crap"...
When I compare your source code to theirs, theirs is definately cleaner, but it appears yours may be being compressed, which could be the only difference. I don't see any huge holes in that respect. Again though, I'm only glancing. But in my experience, you have to do some pretty dumb things in terms of your code structure with errors and what not to make that hurt you, which it doesn't seem you're doing. So I call this a wash also.

HOWEVER, when I'm on your main Velux Windows page, the content in your Welcome tab isn't viewable.  The search engines don't care about that because it's included in your source, but I can't see past your 3rd paragraph in that area.  I can see there is content below it, but the In a Loft Scenario and For Open Ceilings it gets cut off and I can't see the rest.  That is likely hurting your conversions.

CONVERTING THE TRAFFIC YOU DO HAVE, IS OFTEN BETTER THAN GETTING NEW TRAFFIC, depending on the market you're in.  I'm using the latest version of Chrome, but the problem is also present in IE10.

(4) Are you a CANNIBAL?
Now research this yourself, and don't put too much stock in what I'm about to say, but from a content perspective, is the way you're interlinking your so-called "helpful" content in a way that is actually hurting your ability to rank overall?

The pages that you have that you say are putting you above SterlingBuild in terms of content quality, is your linking to them from every product page causing you issues?

I see almost every product page within the category I looked at links to the Protect Velux From Snow and Ice and the Velux Product Codes Explained pages.  I think this is something someone else touched on in response to me and my blog issues with our site. You're telling the google machine that these pages are uber-important because every single product page you deem them to be relevant to are linking to them.

If you check the SERPS and go deep all the way into pages 5 through 15, are you seeing these Video & Article pages ranking for terms that maybe are to "general" in scope for them?  If so, it could be causing a loss of strength when it comes to your product pages ability to rank on their own.

I'm not sure on how I'd fix that though, or if it's even a legit issue.  it's just something I'd chew on and maybe play around with. You have to ask yourself, does linking those articles from product pages like you do actually provide the customer with insight that may push them closer to a purchase?  Even if it "could" be helpful, is anyone actually ever clicking on them?

Just a bit of insight. Hope it's helpful.

Doug, our issues were that we just weren't careful enough when writing up each blog post and what we were targeting. We ended up having blog posts competing for terms that we only wanted our actual ecommerce site (and the pages within) to rank for.

Now what is also interesting, is that via the blog, we ended up ranking for a couple of odd "low hanging fruit" terms that turned into gold. So rather than 301-redirect them to a more suitable "category" page and target the category page to those terms, we just further optimized the blog post, but featured products on it and so on. We did this mostly out of fear of losing those rankings if we jacked with "the good thing".

So with the blog, it's really just a simple case of keyword cannibalization and we've been working on formulating a plan to ditch the WordPress blog and move its valuable content into the actual site.  The blog does sit on the same domain as the site (site is domain.com, blog is domain.com/blog/) so we figure, we'll transition from having a blog, to having more "educational/information" pages in the site. I think this will allow us to better utilize these pages for the greater good of our site in terms of improved interlinking, using them to help improve conversions and so on.

Most of the blog is fluff anyway, and isn't really benefiting us the way we hoped, so I suspect we'll actually see a decent jump in position for various terms because the site and blog won't be competing against each other anymore.

Sorry to not be more informative on that topic, but the issues we are seeing is a very clear and textbook case of our site eating itself for dinner. Something which can very easily be fixed by simply back-tracking and by being more careful in the future.

I think this you're over-thinking it on this one personally.  I think that if you simply write the URL based on what you think will be most useful to your visitor, without making it over-complicated that you'll be fine. If there is benefit to be had, having the keywords there in a simple manner will give you that benefit, but you'll be spinning wheels if you spend too much time on it.

I think you'd be fine cutting out words. We always cut unnecessary words out of the URL as you mentioned doing above simply to keep the URL's a bit shorter.

I know it's cliche, but if you write the URL so it make sense to the visitor, without being over-complicated and spammy, then I think that's the best way to get whatever strength may be available to be passed by "the google machine".

You're just not looking quite hard enough then. When I click on their "Shop By Brand" Velux category, that has a bit of text, well written, title and meta description are decent, then you click past that to Velux Centre-Pivot Roof Windows and once again, more content, mostly text.

You get into the actual product pages at some point, and they include a decent content set, but upon first glance you'll notice that most of that content is duplicated between "like" products.  Have no worries though, because they are using the canonical tag to point all "similar" products back to a single product of that type, so that duplicate content doesn't war against itself.  It looks like from every category page that includes products, they are pointing all of the products canonical tag back to what I assume is the most popular size.

So where you're seeing content that isn't great, I'm seeing enough content that is "good enough" to be considered great due to the quantity, and the organization of it. Not to mention, it seems like behind the scenes they've actually tried very hard to make sure every page is geared towards targeting specific terms. Therefore, they aren't spreading themselves thin.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, you ask, what are they doing that is so great compared to the others (like Wickes and so on), and I see them doing a lot better. But you can't just look at the site. You have to dig into their source code. For instance, Wickes is allowing their site to eat itself stupidly by having similar pages pointing to themselves via the canonical tag, as opposed to pointing identical products (other than in size) to a single item like the site you mention does.

I compete in a similar "home improvement" industry and we are up against sites like this all the time. Our issue is that we cover a specific "niche" within this industry and many of our competitors do it all, and we're constantly battling their "quantity of decent/ok content" vs. our "quality and more focused content".

Like you, we also have a superior link profile to most of our competitors, but I often assume it's their content that gets us. We tried to offset that by being the only company in our industry with a blog, but we just ended up cannibalizing ourselves to the point that I think we'll have to ditch it soon.

As I said, we're only approaching, legit blogs, mommy or otherwise. So that isn't a worry. I was just worried that the bulk of our links are going to end up being blog reviews. And I'm also not worried about the passing of strength in theory, because in the end it's really more of an "ad campaign" than anything else.

I'd say around 1/3 of the reviews done so far just happen to be blogspot blogs, but that's just because they were quicker to respond.  When the dust settles, 70% will be from unique domains, while about 30% will in fact be blogspot blogs. But that's the nature of the beast.  Mommies love free blogs.

So it turns out, we aren't in fact "requesting" the link.  At the bottom of the email we put a "relevant" links section that includes a link to our home page, our "product application" page which shows them how to apply the product, as well as links to the product page of the items we sent them.  We make no mention of "requesting" the link formally, so sounds like we're all good.  And thus far 100% of those that have actually done the reviews have provided links and I've been surprised at the anchor text some of them have used.  It has worked out very well so far for us, and the industry is very competitive.

Thanks for the 2nd thoughts.  It's what I thought myself but it's always nice to get confirmation from others.

We own a site that lends itself extremely well to getting boat loads of links, only down side is that those on the boat are all bloggers.

We are selling a product that retails for $6.89 per unit.  They are for women.  Our target market is any woman/girl who is between 14 and 50.  Even better, our cost per unit is only about $0.40.  So what we've been doing is sending them out by the hundreds to legit fashion blogs all the way down to blogspot mommy bloggers and the reviews have poured in, literally all of them positive.

Moral of the story, we have a good product, and no shortage of bloggers that would be willing to write us up a legit, human written (by a red-blooded American none-the-less) on almost exclusively legit blogs.  We're not trying to manipulate what they say, how they link to us, what anchor text they use or anything.  We're just sending them product, asking that they do a review and give us a link and that's it.

Our worry is that given the nature of the site and the product offering, it's going to be easy to get these legit blog links, but more difficult to get links that "aren't on blogs".

Is this going to hurt us, or will Big Google be kind and realize this isn't shady manipulation.  It's legit part of our ongoing effort to get the word out.

Further evidence that our campaign isn't to manipulate (although we all know we're in it for the links) is that so far 75% of our sales have been driven by these reviews.  A few of the bigger sites that have done reviews have each directly resulted in 10+ sales from that single review.

So what are all ya'll's thoughts?  I suspect we'll be OK, but wanted some others to provide their views.

I agree, when you glance at OSE, and only OSE, it could make you scratch your head.  However, I look at their volume of content and there is TONS of it, it's well organized, relevant, well written and legit.  As I went through the first two pages for the term velux windows (via Google US) I'm seeing it competing with the big boys like HomeDepot, Ebay, as well as a slew of "informational" authority sites that touch on the topic.

Moral of the story, I suspect it would be an example of "content is king".  They may not have the link profile others in the industry have, but they sure as hell have a boat load of content, all related to windows.  They have over 1,000's in stock, which leads me to believe their site has 1,000's of pages of related content.

I didn't dig deeper, but just by looking at the little bit I checked out, I assume each page is highly targeted and that their handling their business "on-page" which is probably why they rank well.

Then again, you may have already come to that same conclusion.

Interesting note to add to this, I did just notice via Google Webmaster Tools, that our blog had been hacked and 150 or so of our blog posts were injected with hidden link spam.  In webmaster tools it said that the 2nd biggest keyword within our site was Viagra.  So that is definately playing into these drops in rankings I'm guessing within the last couple of months.

We have a site that based on your research tools, holds its own in almost all aspects in regards to # of links, # of different linking domains, quality of links, mozrank, moztrust and all that stuff.  Compared to our top competitors, we do very well based on your tools via our campaign monitor.

The issue is we seem to be dropping like crazy every month in our rankings and traffic despite this fact, and we can't get our head around the cause.  I do have a couple of ideas, and I wanted to run them by you guys to get your opinion.

Domain:  bonitaj.com

My Thoughts On Possible Issues...

1.  Text Content & Panda Update

I know one of the big things with the panda update was quality of content.  I know one thing we have for sure is a lack of "text-based" content.  Sure, we have home page, main cats, sub-cats and product pages, but they are mostly just windows into the product pages, and don't have a whole lot of good copy.  THIS IS MOST EVIDENT ON OUR PRODUCT PAGES, where each product page is loaded with content, but only 3-4 very short paragraphs of text.  Do you think this is hurting us?  THE ONLY ISSUE IS THAT our competitors also don't have a whole lot of text-based content on their pages.

2.  Too Many Category Pages & Same Products Featured Somewhat on them

I think another problem may be that on each category page, we do have a lot of the same products featured.  I don't think its crazy duplicate content or anything, but I do think that back in the old days we got a little crazy with creating "niched out" category pages that pretty much feature the same products as some of the more important and base category pages.  Do you think this is hurting us?

I've pitched a solution to this that involves trying to tone down the amount of sub-cats we feature that were originally geared towards attracting long-tail traffic.  In the end that really isn't working anymore anyway, so maybe we're spreading our site thin by going to deep with some of these niche category pages?

3.  Lack of a sitemap?

We used to use an xml sitemap, and really don't anymore.  We have nothing on file with google webmaster tools.  I've recently read in one of your blog posts that a simple thing like adding a good sitemap could help our 600+ page site or so get crawled a bit deeper allowing more pages to rank?

IN THE END, MY QUESTION IS SIMPLY, IF THERE IS ONE OR TWO THINGS I CAN DO TO GET OVER THIS HUMP, WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST?

So we have operated one of our retail sites, BonitaJ.com for many years now.  Through a lot of work, link building and optimizing around 2009, we were in a prominent spot on the 1st page in google for just about every main term we were targeting.

Towards the end of 2009, nearing December or so, we started slipping here and there, and began being displaced for our main terms by newer sites that according to several factors, don't have near the strength our site holds.  And by strength, I simply mean, based on link volume, mozbar stats and many other factors, it seems we should rank well above most, but still find ourselves just hanging to 8-10 positions on page one, and in many cases somewhere on page two for terms it seems like we should be in the top 5 positions for.

I believe some of our slippage is due to google's devaluing of many of our incoming links.  We achieved our early ranking dominence off a lot of directory links and things like that over time, but ever since 2009 when links began getting devalued we immediately broke into getting quality blog links via LEGIT blog relationships where we'd offer up contests, bloggers would review our products and so on, and these relationships continue through today.  We also do a lot of guest blog writing, article postings on various networks, as well as press releases, all with the goal of keeping our link profile happy and healthy.  So we still have work to do there, but we're on the right track.

So my thought is that to get back over the hump, we simply need to continue with the legit link building methods, but I'm also thinking that maybe we need to improve some things navigationally.

Things I was hoping people would chime in on are....

1.  If we're mainly trying to target bridal/wedding related jewelry terms, should we ditch the "Jewelry Sets, Pearl Jewelry & Swarovski Crystal Jewerly" terms from our main navbar.  They are featured inside each of the categories, and in the end, we don't rank or pull traffic for them anyway.  Would ditching them from the main nav, help pass more juice from home page and other pages to the pages that better target our niche?

2.  A while back, we ditched including actual product on each of the main category pages.  I'm leaning towards breaking the main category pages up into sections, for instance once on the "Bridal Jewelry" page, it would list each of the sub-cats, with a 5-10 product sampling of the most popular items, with a link that says "view all necklaces" at the end of each sub-section.  Do you think that more wise than just trying to direct them into the sub-cats with no actual product offering?

3.  Anything else you see glaringly wrong with what we're trying to do?  This site is just on the edge of blowing up from a ranking perspective if I can just get some confirmation on some things that I know I should do, but I'm wary due to fear of screwing things up.  If I can get some solid feedback, the rest is history.

I was leaning towards this as being the culprit.  We re-launched the site towards the end of January and had completely yanked it offline for roughly 3-4 months or so.  Thanks for the quick "chime in".

Now, I'm not a stickler for pagerank, and actually haven't checked the pagerank of ANY of the sites I own and operate in the last year or two, but one of my cronies noticed the other day that our BathroomGetaways.com websites pagerank is 0, despite the fact it ranks well and gets a decent amount of traffic for a great deal of the terms we target.

My guess is that we still just don't have the quality links we need, and we're working on that, but is there anything glaringly obvious that anyone else can see that can be the cause of this?

One thing to note, we did take the site offline for 2-4 months or so towards the end of last year and just relaunched it in January of 2011.  It climbed right back into the rankings almost immediately after our re-launch, so maybe that has something to do with it?

Yeah, but I want the image to be linked. I don't want to do away with the image links in the search engines eyes.  I just want to link to both the most seo friendly way possible.  That's why I figured placing the thumbnail and the product name within the same anchor link could possibly be the best bet. Our images actually rank fairly well in google images so doing what you suggest would be suicide in that respect, either for the image, or for the anchor text which is likely way more important.

We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name.  So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links.

Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link?  We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy.  It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.