Many thanks guys; very much appreciated
Posts made by ChrisHolgate
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RE: Tips for promoting the blog section of our eCommerce site
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Tips for promoting the blog section of our eCommerce site
Hi,
With the recent Google updates we're thinking that unique content is more important than ever in order to gain high quality, natural links from genuine users.
As such we're thinking that our blog (http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/igloo/) might be more important than ever. Don't be put off by the lack of Page Authority or Google Page Rank; we've only just moved to this address from the subdomain igloo.refreshcartridges.co.uk.
The content is certainly rather niche; an article like http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/igloo/how-to-the-reset-purge-counter-on-a-brother-printer-with-a-numerical-pad/ will be helpful to thousands of users who own this particular range of printer but it's debatable as to whether it is sufficiently mainstream to be openly shared and linked to.
We ping to sites such as Technorati, produce videos to accompany much of the content (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dxmm4-blN8&list=UUH93Kwax4CcEIAOsXWb6CiA&index=1&feature=plcp for example) and provide easy sharing buttons. I do however think that we could be doing more to actively ‘push’ this content on to potential customers.
I'm not naive enough to think that niche articles like this will be enough to get hundreds of links and tens of thousands of reads but printer news, reviews and support is pretty much the only thing we can write about while being relevant to our core business. I would however like to get the best exposure that we can for these articles which is why I’m asking for your advice today.
I would really appreciate any ideas you may have as to how else we could gain the best value from these unique articles and videos. I apologise for this being such an open ended question but any and all advice on how to maximise this resource would be appreciated.
Many thanks!
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RE: What is an example of good anchor text?
I'm hearing you, honestly I am. This is a steep learning curve for me but I'm trying to take on board everything that I've been told. Your advice especially been invaluable and you are a credit to the SEOmoz forum.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not going off on a link building binge, I was just asking the question because some of the advice out there is conflicted. As much as anything the question was designed to enhance my overall knowledge and allow me to understand the Google algorithm a little better. The question wasn’t necessarily designed to be linked to a Refresh Cartridges link building campaign nor our on-going attempt to get bad links removed. In many ways I’m now a little bit embarrassed to have this post public on the forum since we’re now talking about my business and website so candidly.
With regards to McAfee, I didn’t state that I placed a huge value on the link, it just so happens that as part of our membership we do get a link. The same with PayPal - I don’t think it’s going to set the world alight but it’s a link on a widely recognised site and if I’m offered a link on it then I’m going to take it.
The press release has had 500 reads on the PRWeb site alone, ignoring any third party news sites that it was syndicated to. As such, ignoring what Google wants, I would argue that from a human perspective it was potentially worth doing. I’m probably not going to do another one for some time (if ever) but just wanted to check that I wasn't doing anything stupid by making the link read 'www.refreshcartridges.co.uk'
When it comes to my grammar I’m almost certain that both 'parner' and 'partners' could be potentially correct but we may need an English teacher to answer this one. The fact that the preceding word ‘cartridges’ is pluralised makes ‘partner’ flow better and a quick search on Google News shows companies using both in equal measure:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&gl=uk&tbm=nws&q="partners+with"
https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&gl=uk&tbm=nws&q="partner+with"I will ensure that anything I write is looked over by a second pair of eyes in the future!
I would love a link from a major manufacturer promoting our scheme but alas it’s not going to happen; not only do they all have their own recycling schemes but the idea of cartridges coming back and being refilled horrifies them. I will however try to push the ITF for increased exposure using their partners as leverage and see how I get along.
I’m finding the whole SEO learning process incredibly interesting and like the idea of getting to a stage where I have sufficient knowledge to have complete control of my destiny. I do promise you that I’m trying to take everything on board but every now and again expect a question to pop up that implies otherwise as I attempt to increase my knowledge by looking at things from two different perspectives.
Thank-you again for your help and for being so open and honest.
I’m off climbing now to hopefully take my mind off Google and Penguins for a few hours
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RE: What is an example of good anchor text?
I'm not actively building links per se, and I'm not looking to rank for a specific phrase.
My current goal is to become a little more well established by writing about what I know best (without being in the slightest bit spammy) in publications geared towards our target subject matter. Coupled with good old fashioned genuine customer reviews and feedback, this seems to be the future for us.
Hopefully some humans will find it useful and the search engines will recognise a little of that respect and good rankings will follow
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RE: What is an example of good anchor text?
Many thanks all for your helpful responses.
Ryan - I feel I should clarify my question somewhat as I don't think I made it clear exactly what I meant by ‘link building’. You know more than anybody that I have experienced first-hand the result of some questionable article submission and some dodgy link directories that we are now being penalised for half a decade later. I’m not talking about more of the same but the tone of your reply implies this is how I came across for which I apologise.
There are instances where just going around improving your offering to your customers can result in some nice links on reputable sites being earned in the process.
For example, we have recently signed up to TrustPilot who aggregate customer reviews, forward them to Google Product Reviews and provide a link back to us on our review page and potentially their home page if we get a really good review one day.
Then there’s McAfee Secure who supply those little Hacker safe logo's that people seem to still like – They have a directory of ‘Hacker Safe’ merchants that we are to be included in. PayPal recently have also said that because we are a good customer we can be included in their merchant directory. These are all good quality links on well-respected sites.
I have also been a little bit proactive and we have done a press release via PRWeb for a charity recycling scheme we're involved in and I've written for a few industry specific publications. The primary target for these publications is humans rather than search engines but of course there would naturally be a link back to us; it would be weird doing a press release or writing an article for a magazine and not mentioning your company.
My question literally was just that any of these links are just saying Refresh Cartridges or www.refreshcartridges.co.uk and in my mind this is perfect... It’s how it would be naturally written, it’s not spammy and as such in my mind it won’t get me in any trouble.
There are still however a large number of people talking about mixing up the anchor text to make it appear ‘natural’. I was just concerned that in my attempt to keep everything above board and au natural by literally using just my company name that I could be inadvertently kicking myself in the teeth.
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What is an example of good anchor text?
Hi,
I'm sorry to ask yet another question but the advice I get here is always so accurate and friendly that it's almost addictive.
After Penguin I'm constantly thinking about what looks natural to Google.
With regards to link building I can't really envisage any situations where natural anchor text would be anything other than either the name of our company or 'click here'.
The only exception to this I would have thought would be if a customer was referring to a particular product on our site. Even in this situation I would have thought they'd have said 'I bought my cheap cartridges at Refresh Cartridges' with the company name still being used as the anchor rather than 'cheap cartridges'. I think if we're stripping it down to what works best from a human rather than search engine perspective then using 'cheap cartridges' rather than the company name would be just a little odd.
Therefore my question is whether, when link building, I should just use my company name for all anchor text rather than trying to artificially mix it up to make it look ‘natural’. While I could vary the anchor text by saying 'cheap this', 'high quality that' and playing around with the text, almost certainly when used in context with whatever I am writing this would look unnatural no matter how many combinations I used.
Is this correct or would my overuse of the company name make what should be a natural looking linking strategy look unnatural and harm results by not conveying the potential content of the page by using targeted anchor text.
Thanks for your help.
Chris
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RE: BOTW, Yahoo Directory and Joeant - Unnatural linking, surely?
Many thanks for your response. I was only asking to check that it wasn't a 'they're on borrowed time' kind of situation before I parted with any cash
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BOTW, Yahoo Directory and Joeant - Unnatural linking, surely?
Hi,
I have been reading with interest that many SEOmoz forum members still believe that a link in BOTW, Yahoo Directory and Joeant can still add value to a linking strategy.
It's my understanding that the Penguin update was designed to stop unnatural linking and link buying but Google does still seem to place some kind of value (although potentially diminished) in these directories despite them being pretty much exclusively paid for links.
What am I missing here and in a money no object world would you guys still consider them part of a good linking strategy?
Many thanks
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RE: Should I use a subdomain our primary domain for this content?
Hi Rebekah,
Many thanks for your response - It's always nice to get a second opinion before spending your day doing something that could potentially be detrimental!
We're about to write a few dozen 'how to' guides and suddenly it struck me that the primary domain would be getting very little benefit from any people that potentially link in to the content.
Thanks again for your help. I’ll get cracking on the move now.
Chris
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Should I use a subdomain our primary domain for this content?
Hi,
We have an eCommerce site www.refreshcartridges.co.uk and currently publish videos, unique articles, troubleshooting advice etc. on a subdomain igloo.refreshcartridges.co.uk. The hope is that the content on igloo will prove sufficiently useful for someone to either link to or bookmark for future reference. Eventually this will hopefully result in sales through the main site.
We were assured several years ago that we should host this content on a subdomain but the more I think about it, the more I think that this content should be hosted as part of the main site (for example www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/igloo/).
My logic is that this would extend a couple of advantages, not least that any links built to this unique content would be attributed to the primary domain rather than the subdomain. Although I appreciate the subdomain does link back to the primary domain I can't help but feel this dilutes the potential strength of any link. Post Penguin I think it would be nice to get genuine, natural links appreciating content on our primary domain rather than a separate subdomain.
It should probably be pointed out that we only publish articles related to our key business activity (printing, cartridges, technology) on igloo. There is no unrelated content designed simply as link bait.
If we were to make the move we would of course 301 all the old pages..
I would really appreciate your opinion on whether you agree or whether you would be tempted to keep the content on a subdomain.
Thanks for your help!
Chris
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RE: Link Building - Post Penguin
That's great, many thanks for your help Donnie. Have a good day
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RE: Link Building - Post Penguin
Hi Donnie,
Thanks for getting back to me.
I think my desire to have some kind of all-encompassing guide (such as the one that SEOmoz produced prior to Penguin) was driven by hopefully being able to potentially avoid spending time pursuing a potentially flawed strategy.
For instance, I was speaking to one SEO who said that article writing was dead but it's my impression is that article writing is still good as long as the article is relevant, unique, well written, is only posted on a relevant site and contains only one link in the by-line of the article. Would be nice to have something in black and write from a recognised source such as SEOmoz confirming exactly what I should, and should not, be doing
I think being penalised is just making me a touch jumpy!
Thanks for your help again, it’s appreciated.
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Link Building - Post Penguin
Hi,
We have an eCommerce site that has recently been hit for some unnatural linking, resulting in a warning in our Google Webmaster Tools account. We weren't doing anything particularly underhand (and indeed before Penguin there wasn't a cause for concern) but nevertheless Google has picked up and penalised us.
We've instantly removed the worst offending links and requested a resubmission. If this doesn't result in positive action from Google we're planning on employing the services of an Oracle member on SEOmoz who was kind enough to give us some fantastic free advice in order to go through and remove any further links that may be seen as questionable.
Moving forward however I'm a little bit overwhelmed as to exactly what we should be doing in order to create a positive, natural link portfolio. I understand the emphasis is on ‘natural’ linking but we’ve been online for 8 years and I think it’s fairly safe to say that the number of links we have now is probably representative of about our ‘lot’ when it comes to 100% natural links. It would be nice to give our portfolio a nice gentle push in the right direction.
I’ve checked through SEOmoz and the most up to date link building article they have appears to be http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links - This guide however does seem to suggest some things that are potentially frowned upon now (for example, highly optimised anchor text I understand is now a no-no).
Obviously, in days gone by I could look at Open Site Explorer to try to emulate my competitors but, to be honest, most of them have what I would describe as a fairly poor link profile and if I'm going to invest real time in to this I want to make sure I'm heading off in the right direction.
Does anybody on here know of a really high quality post penguin link building guide, either on SEOmoz or elsewhere that I can use as some bedtime reading? Our website is eCommerce in nature so an article tailored towards online selling would be ideal.
Thanks for reading!
Chris
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RE: Google Penalisation - Any help would be appreciated!
All in all this has been a pretty bad news day
Right then, time to get cracking. Thanks for all your help today Ryan, it is really appreciated.
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RE: Google Penalisation - Any help would be appreciated!
Actually, sorry, one more question. I appreciate all the help you're giving me and don't mean to bombard you with what if's!
I'm assuming that you're allowed a certain percentage of 'bad' links when compared with the number of 'good' links. For example, if the webmaster of a massive website such as Amazon log in to their Google Webmaster Tools panel I'm assuming they don't have any penalty notices caused by a few crummy links that will invariably be on a FFA site somewhere when weighed against their 425,000,000 good links.
As such, will our task be to just remove as many bad links as we can and then whatever remains will hopefully be offset by the good?
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RE: Google Penalisation - Any help would be appreciated!
Oh dear, that's not what I wanted to hear!
I really don't want to have to get a new domain name so I guess we'll have to just get cracking. Purely out of interest though, surely a competitor could just keep adding our site to FFA directories and unrelated blogs and make it impossible for us to get the penalty removed?
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RE: Google Penalisation - Any help would be appreciated!
Would it be less time to get a new domain name and start over?
I'd like to think that it's not quite at that stage. Regardless, it would be nice to know what exactly had been done so we could ensure that it just wouldn't happen again.
I lose sleep at night worrying because I posted in the World Rock Paper Scissors Associations Website's forum a comment about a bankruptcy lawyer.
Waaaaaaa? I'm really worried now. Ryan, when you say there is actually such an association are you talking between such a site and Refresh Cartridges?
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RE: Google Penalisation - Any help would be appreciated!
Hi Ryan,
Thank-you so much for such a helpful post. I've removed the links from refreshcreations.co.uk, computerarticles.co.uk and vatloophole.co.uk with immediate effect. These are all sites which I own so removing links to my 'baby' felt a little bit gutting but as the links were all sitewide it is entirely possible that Google saw them as being manipulative. I'm assuming that once they confirm that they are no longer penalising us that I could reinstate the links with a nofollow attribute?With regard to the link for http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Digital_Technology_for_Graphic_Design I have e-mailed them asking to be removed but I don't hold up much hope for them doing so - God knows where this link came from! Rather naively I'm hoping that Google isn't worried about an odd link here or there on a PR0 site which I have no control over so will now request reconsideration and see what happens.
Just to confirm, am I correct in saying that article writing is still alive but that the articles should be relevant and of a good quality but only include a link to the site in the 'about the author' section? I only ask as this was going to be our next project; writing high quality articles for various technology sites with a link back to Refresh Cartridges.
Am going to have a thorough look through your http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012 post now and the comments and ensure there's nothing else we can do.
Thanks again for your help.
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Google Penalisation - Any help would be appreciated!
Hi,
We’ve recently received a Google notification of unnatural linking along with a confirmation that we're being penalised. There were a few other sites that we owned that perhaps had too many links pointing to our main domain so we trimmed them down and submitted a reconsideration request and got the following back:"Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team"I want to stress that we have never in the past and do not currently buy any backlinks. The problem that we face now is that our site has been online for best part of a decade, there are thousands of people linking to us and I have absolutely no idea where to start.
We don’t use an SEO Company but in the past few months have been using SEOmoz to improve our on-page optimisation. I know it’s a massive ask but if could a member of the SEOmoz community or a staff member quickly take a gander and let us know if anything in particular sticks out like a sore thumb it would mean a great deal to me.
Of course, if needed we’ll employ the services of an SEO company but I’m hoping one of you guys will see something immediately obvious that could really help us out!
Thanks in advance.
Kind regards
Chris
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RE: Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to our website
That's great; many thanks.
Have removed all the potentially offending links and request reinclusion.
Kind regards
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Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to our website
Hi,
We have been using SEOmoz for a good few months now and have found it incredibly useful. Unfortunately however I think we may have slipped up a little bit as we have just received the following message in our Google Webmaster Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/
I have a funny feeling I might know what the problem is but I'd like a confirmation before I potentially go off on a wild goose chase.
We also own the domain name www.computerarticles.co.uk and recently started introducing the author at the bottom of the post along with both a link to the website homepage and a link to a deep, popular page on our website. For example, check out http://www.computerarticles.co.uk/twitter-time-saving-tools/
We genuinely didn't realise this was a bad thing and thought it would just provide Google with a way of deep linking straight in to popular areas of our site. I would really appreciate advice as to whether you think it might be these links that are causing the problem or whether there is something else that could be causing the problem.
In the event it is these links that are causing the issue would you recommend removing the entire 'about the author' page (as we have published around 500 pages on that site) and simply put a link in the blog roll or simplify it to just link to the homepage.
I appreciate in advance any help you could give.
Regards
Chris