Welcome to the Q&A Forum

That page is nothing special.  It simply resides on a Gorilla domain.

A person could spend hours in an attempt to "guess" at the reason a page is ranking above others.   Heck, if I could divine why my competitors are ranking well I would be beating them.

Right now, and even after study, if I was going to place my bet, the reason for their rankings is.....

" this particular domain is an extremely huge player in this industry "

And, once you know that, or if I point to some feature of the page that gives them an advantage, it still will not enable a lesser site to pull off the same ranking

Go to one of the image SERPs that used to bring you traffic.  Scroll to the bottom of the first page and see if you find a notice like this....

In response to multiple complaints we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 3 results from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaints that caused the removals at ChillingEffects.org: Complaint, Complaint.

That is what occurs when people use my images.

I agree.  100%.

I noticed some low keyword volume for a keyword term that is close to our main term, but is slightly different. We don't optimize for this term at all on our website.

This is called "long tail traffic".  Most of my traffic comes in for "terms that are close to my mail term but slightly different".  I honestly make a living off of this stuff.

We rank third for this term, and actually show site links in the result, which doesn't happen for any of our other pages.

Awesome.  Go out for beers.

Index not found when doing site: search:

This can happen when you have another page on the site that is optimized similar to the homepage - but a little better in the eyes of google.  If you click to the end of the SERPs (if you have a small enough site) you might see that the homepage is filtered.

A SearchMetrics Ranking Study for 2014 says longer content and more content ranks higher

I believe that this is only true if content quality is equal.

If your competitor has one million pages of rubbish content on a site and you have one hundred pages of unique, high-quality, authoritative content, I am confident that your site will pull more traffic in the long term.

Should I be building big (but high quality) sites?

In general, yes.  It is very important to measure quality rigorously and competitively.

A site with high quality content competing with a site with a site that has even better content has a good chance of losing.  If people see both sites, which one will they share with their friends, spend more time on, navigate directly to by name next time?   Lot's of people have "high quality".   Few people have kickass quality.

This is just my opinion.  I think that a lot of people who run PPC on informative content are running a "mission" and not a "business".  To them the mission is more relevant than the costs.

And, I am sure that a lot of people running PPC for the informative content of a "business" are blowing a lot of money.  Of course, all forms of promotion have a cost, so I don't promote my content.  I allow and hope that my visitors will do it for me.  So far, I am having more success than failures.

Your greatest resource can be a tribe of like-minded people who will share your content with other like-minded people on social media, personal blogs and other channels.  The value of this can not be overestimated.

To start or grow your tribe of like-minded people, set up your website so that your best content or most important content are obviously linked to on every page.  This can be done with nice big images and enticing captions like you see done with Taboola, Outbrain and other content marketing sites.

Produce a monthly newsletter for these people to keep them engaged.  Tell them how they can help you.  Draw them small maps to make it easy for them.

Advertise on websites where lots of like-minded people read frequently.  Spend your advertising on like-minded people, even if it costs more, because like-minded people are the most valuable asset you can find.

Some people simply want visibility.

Linda suggests that they have embarked on a new desire for visibility and that their organic efforts will follow.  That could be true.

Maybe they have no organic efforts or inept organic efforts.

Whatever the reason, you might never know.  All that you know is that they have decided to pay for exposure at this time.  It could be a vanity effort or a sign that something impressive is about to occur.

You are probably right.  They seem to have a "mission".  _These are not the kinds of competitors that I enjoy.  This is a situation where Google results  reflect "mission" rather than "merit". _

These might be good competitors to have if you want to sell a website that ranks above them.  But, at the same time they might not be the type of buyer who's money you would enjoy as much as owning the website above theirs..

Its target is very big i.e. 1 million unique visitors per month (organic).

That's a lot of traffic.   I would be surprised if there is that much traffic for this target.

What should be the best strategy in this scenario?

First, go to the SERPs and look at who owns them.  You will likely find extremely authoritative domains in the top ten.  Are there any with significant resources who will pursue this as a "trophy query" with irrational (or perhaps rational) determination.  Do you have that level of determination and resources?

Then look at their content and decide if you can beat it soundly and by a significant margin. To me, the English language text content is not as impressive as expected, but it is not weak.  The quality, relevance, and informativeness of the images on most sites is rather pedestrian.

The domain is new means there is no domain authority right now.

Do not expect a quick win.  You will first need to develop a significant mass of high quality content.  This might take a knowledgeable and skilled author, working full time and supported by a source of great graphics, a few to several months to produce.  Then you will need genuine audience acceptance and that they will appreciate the content enough to share it widely.  This will be very slow to launch, even if you pay for promotion.  The amount of time depends upon the degree of superiority of your content and/or the  resources that you can put into promoting it.

This will come from awesome work.

There is your answer.   It is not "what you do", instead, it is "how well you do it".

Everything I've ever read about modern SEO says this isn't necessary and it's just a solicitation to get people to pay them for something they don't even need.

Nice work.  Even though a big web company sent this message, your BS meter rang.

Makes you wonder if they know the domain and hosting business, no ?

I hope somebody who has an SEO blog publishes a post titled.. "Rubbish from NetworkSolutions"

I have lots of articles that are updated with I get new info.  Some started out as very short pages with a photo, slowly they have grown to 2000 words and lots of photos, graphs, data, sometimes video.

It is much more efficient to update an article than it is to create a new page and set-up redirects.  Those redirects place a small load on the server that can add up over time if you accumulate a lot of them.

Actually all of my sites are info sites and all of my sites are retail sites.  I'll explain below....

INFO SITES

My info site has thousands of content pages, but it also has a store that sells hundreds of items.  That's an info site with a small store.

All of the info pages display ads from adsense or another ad network.  Some of the info pages have a very closely-related product in the store and we have house ads on those pages to move interested visitors to the store.  The info pages usually outrank the store pages, but that's OK because they also outrank almost every competitor too.  If we don't make money from a sale we make money from the ads.  Its all good.    Most of the revenue comes from ads.

RETAIL SITES

My retail sites have lots of info.  Lots.  More than all of our competitors and the manufacturers combined.  They also have more info pages than retail pages.  That is how much content we are attacking with.  But, these sites produce more retail revenue than ad revenue.  So they are retail sites, but they really are content sites.

All of my sites are content sites, but a couple of them produce more retail revenue than ad revenue.  All revenue is good.  I don't worry about my competitors ads taking a sale.  I took a piece of their ad budget and their ads on my relevant pages usually pay pretty good.  And I am under the assumption that they are wild ass bidding and don't realize that they are losing money.  :-0

How do you find a good niche?

I don't "find" them.   I live them.   My info sites are about topics where I have formal education, decades of industry experience, a passion to learn more, and I write for them like a craftsman who does very careful work without regards to the cost and the time.

My retail sites sell products that I have used for a very long time.  I know a lot about them and about the types of people who use them.

How do you find the right suppliers for that niche.

Most of the things that I sell are only available from a small number of suppliers in the United States, maybe the world.  Some of the things that I sell are more difficult to obtain than they are to sell.

If you are a really small business and trying to sell the same stuff online that people can buy at Kmart then your chances of making money are very very slim.

URGENT:   I checked the text on a few of your product pages, then searched for a snippet of your product description in quotes.  Your descriptions are posted on other sites.   And that text on your site for some products is verbatim identical to the product descriptions displayed on amazon.co.uk.   That is deadly.    Google is filtering several other websites where this same text appears verbatim.  I see amazon with verbatim and four filtered results here.  So, I would be sure that the text on my site is unique.   If you are spreading it to amazon, rewrite what is on your site.  If other people are stealing your text, that's a harder problem to solve.

=============================

If this was my site, I would do the following with the category page.  I am not saying that everyone is going to agree with me, but this is where I would bet my money and time.

-- Include two to three sentences, in proper language, about each of the products.  Give the visitor enough information so he/she can decide to click.  Don't give me a whiff and make me click to taste it.  People who buy tea are the kind of people who don't mind reading by hate clicking into fifteen pages just to get some idea about the product.

-- Personally, I would ditch the hover-over effect and get that text onto the page.  You NEVER know how search engines are going to treat it.  You never know how devices are going to treat it, or how old men like me, who enjoy their tea are going to react when it doesn't seem to work when I click on it.  Also, I believe in getting all of my info out for the visitor.  Don't make the visitor click to another page unless he is really interested.

-- I would show the rating on the page.  Ratings  are like bling.  Flaunt them.

Yes, lots of people think that "only the first link counts".  So, I would say that is a "general belief".

To me it makes more sense to give higher credit to links that are used in multiple locations.  Certainly they would be links that the webmaster wants to present to the visitor in more locations and contexts.  So, if I was Google, I would count those destination pages as "more important".

Who knows what Google really does?

I used to do web design, SEO and content development for others.  At the same time I was working on a couple of my own websites in product and information niches that I know very well.   I found that I could make good money working on my own sites.

I also found that the projects that others brought to me were very often in niches where they didn't have the resources to become competitive or I didn't have the resources to mount their attacks.  As an example, a local office supply store wants a 10,000 product website.   Their expectation was to spend a few thousand dollars and be able to compete in a national market with product descriptions drawn from a data feed already in use by a huge number of other merchants.   My expectation was that this project was not going to be successful given their available resources and my inability to talk them into unique product content and something that would make the site a valuable destination for visitors in its own right.

I could have made lots of money from clients with predictably unsuccessful business models.  Instead, I told them, "I don't think this is going to work".

Most websites only make money for hosting companies and people who develop websites.  This isn't much different from other areas of business.  Most businesses of any kind don't survive their first three years.  Much of this is predictable but the business owner doesn't receive a prediction or doesn't want to believe it.

How does this relate to the amount of money that you should charge a client?   If you are able to make money from your own projects you can simply divide your income from those projects by the number of hours that you put into them.  That sets the basic rate that you must charge a customer to compete with your own work.   Be sure to factor in the amount of time that you are going to spend evaluating and declining to accept projects from clients that you know are not going to be successful.

I think that every person who starts a business of making websites for others should have some experience making websites for himself.  It's a good way to see how much your time is really worth and better helps you assess your ability of taking an idea from another person and turning into a business that can make money for everyone.   I've found that I can't do the later most of the time.  So, I happily work on my own websites.

.

Now, this is wrong for a host of reasons,

This is right for two reason (it serves the customer by making financing more obvious and it may serve the dealer if he profits from financing).

This might be right if the dealer profits from financing and search engines give extra weight to pages that have multiple links in the persistent navigation (they surely must be more important pages if linked to twice in the template - though many SEOs will disagree with me).

I see nothing wrong with it.

My main site has multiple links to multiple pages in the template.

I jumped out to the SERPs and looked at the cached version.  If you get out there before google recaches you can read it.

If you are too late to see it, the question was about... If you get a new client with a problem website, when do you tell the client that he needs a new website instead of doing SEO on the existing website.

It's too bad the question was deleted.

If I spend time answering a question, I am doing it for anyone who wants to read the answer at a later time.  So, if I see members deleting questions after someone like Patrick spends time giving them a very good reply,  I am probably not going to answer questions from that person in the future.  Just sayin'.

Each location has their own page, and each location page has their own departments listed with their own pages as well. Each department then has some content such as the NAP, an employee directory, and links to other resourceful pages on the website.

If this is making many pages for each location, then I would worry about them.  However, if all of this information is on a single page then you might be fine.  If I owned a company like this I would require each location to give me substantive content.

Also, if I "noindex" the pages to start, add some good content then "index" them, how long in your experience has it taken until you saw a considerable increase in traffic/see those pages indexed?

I republished two of my thin content pages last week.  These were noindexed for about two years.  They were upgraded from two or three sentences and one photo to nearly 1000 words and four or five photos.  One appeared in the index about five days later and went straight to #4 for a moderately difficult single word query.  That single word query is the name of a software product, the name of some type of "gold" in the minecraft video game and has a lot of competition from .gov and .edu. .

The second one was published about eight days ago and we have not seen it in the SERPs yet.  This is an unusually long time for us to wait on a republished page for this site which has a DA of about 80.

The way I would approach it would be to crawl those pages manually in Search Console (RIP Webmaster Tools) once I updated the "index" tag.

I have never done this.  I just republish the page.

In my opinion, publishing a lot of thin content pages will get you into trouble with the Panda algorithm.   One of my sites had a lot of these types of pages and it was hit with a Panda problem.  Most pages on the site were demoted in search.   I noindexed those thin content pages and the site recovered in a few weeks.

Here is the code that I used...  name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

Although those pages had thin content, they were still valuable reference for my visitors.  That is why I noindexed them instead of deleting them.

Those pages have been noindexed for about two years with no problems.  Slowly, I am adding a good article to those pages to reduce their number.  I worry that some day, Google might change their minds and hit sites that have lots of thin content pages that are noindexed.

I don't know how big your website is.  But I am betting that 285 very very thin pages added to a website of a couple thousand pages will be a problem  (that's about what I had when my site had a problem).  However, if that many very very thin pages are added to a website with 100,000 pages you might get away with it.

Good luck

In 2013 we moved a lot of information that was already visibly published on some pages into accordion-style content.  Traffic into those pages from search engines dropped significantly.  In 2014 we decided that accordion content was not working for us so we made that information visible again.  Traffic climbed slowly back to good levels.   So, I have sworn a strong oath not to use accordion content ever again.

Google knows lots of synonyms.   As an example.  If you have a page optimized for "widget photos" it can also rank for widget images, pics, photographs, pictures and other related terms.

If someone links to your page with the words "cool widgets" as anchor text, you might rank for "cool widgets" even though those words do not appear on your page.  Anchor text transfers.

I hope I didn't offend you, that is not what I was going for.

You didn't. Absolutely not.

I responded with "what I do" rather than "what I think" because, honestly, I don't think about doing those types of promotions.  I write content and the content performs well.  It doesn't matter if it is published on a weak domain or a strong one, it tends to rank well most of the time - against retail or informational competitors.   It almost never ranks well immediately, but it slowly climbs the SERPs.  In a year - or two - it is usually on the first page of Google.

I make a big investment in the content, not in its promotion or placement.

I don't think that everyone can do this.  I am lucky that lots of people like my writing.  I've been doing it for over 50 years and have been fortunate to have many excellent editors, who each taught me different things.  At the same time, my writing only performs well for a limited range of topics - those that I have been exposed to for a very long time.

But on the other hand I have seen companies that might gross 20k in a month "buy" an article from a major publisher and then gross 200k that month.

These are remarkable situations that I have never seen.  My content pulls in lots of traffic, but none of it is written for the purpose of selling.  It is written to answer questions posed by students, retail customers, or simply curious people.  Each of my sites have has a store and products related to my content are sold there. But, my profits are mainly from ads.

The articles on our website are done in house and have a cost of $500 and up each.

We don't pay for articles on any other site, we don't submit our articles to any other site, if we see our articles on any other site we file DMCA or  take other action.  We have not done any linkbuilding for about eight years.

We publish and if our visitors like the article they share it for us.  The goal is to have our content market itself and for our visitors to become our ambassadors.  Each article is made with that type of goal and the quality to make that happen.

Don't spend time or money on promotion.  Instead, create another article.

I use absolute URLs all of the time.

Ruth Burr's recent article on this subject is worth reading.  She mentions things that many experts might not know about absolute and relative URLs.

I doubt that the automated approach is a problem.

I like my approach because the anchor text will be natural language as written in the article.  This gives a diversity of potential anchor text variations.  All done naturally.

If your automated system allows you to provide multiple triggering words, then I would take every advantage of that.  For example, if you have an article about widgets, I would load a large number of variations into the program like.....

green widgets, green widget, red widgets, red widget, blue widgets, blue widget, wooden widgets, wooden widget, brass widgets, brass widget, widgets, widget to produce a huge diversity of anchor texts).

..... to produce a huge diversity of anchor texts.  Also note how "green widgets" and "green widget" are both present.  I used an automatic system in the past and both variants were needed.  Also, "widgets" and "widget" are listed at the end.  That prevents the automated system from superseding two-word variations.

I am betting that this "author" is not authorized to be offering links for a fee in Huffington Post articles.

So, you might pay $1000 for this link and be told that it is permanent, but this person does not own the Huffington Post website, then the site owners or staff can take his article down at any time or remove this link at any time.

Also, if that author offers to make links for the wrong person and they report him to the Huffington Post, he will be fired, and all of his links will come down.

Ask him how the check should be payable and then you will find out if he is the link seller or if HuffPost is the link seller.

These types of links can be a result of two things.....

A) Programmers creating spam pages, stuffing them with links, and sometimes injecting the pages into unsuspecting websites.  (If it looks like these links were injected into unsuspecting legitimate sites then I would email them a link to one of these pages so they can delete the pages and get their vulnerabilities fixed.)

B)  Low quality SEOs who were hired to linkbuild to your website.   Do you have any SEOs working for you?    Do you have any weasel competitors who might be trying to tank your site?

I see lots of links from A) pointing at my sites.  They are generally harmless.  You can disavow the entire domain if you don't like the links.

Some companies have several in-house people working all day, every day on SEO.

At my office we have three full time people.  Two of us (an employee and I) work almost full time making rain.  One person does fulfillment and customer service.  (Each week we also get a few hours of work from part time help, and we get a few hours per week of outside SEO consulting and programming).

Honestly, I worry that we are not shoveling the coal fast enough.  There are companies out there if they took a mind to it they could completely crush us.

Here is what I do.  I have not had any problems.   These are article pages that I am talking about.

The first instance of any word or phrase for which I have an article is linked to that article.  In any given article there are at least four or five of these links to a few dozen of these links.  These links are manually placed as the article is posted.

From running CrazyEgg on my article pages, I know that these links get clicked.  Some are clicked a surprising number of times.  So, I am a strong advocate of this type of internal linking because it increases pageviews and readers must find it helpful because they are clicking these links a lot.

Mine will still be there when I attend my funeral.

If your product pages are already ranking in the SERPs for valuable queries this will be helpful.

However, if an Amazon category page is currently ranking this might be a waste of time.

In either case, lowering your price to be more price competitive might be more effective.  With that you become more competitive for traffic coming in from ALL of Amazon's sources.

I think the homepage needs more work.

Thanks for sharing your observations.   I have not seen this, but I only have this type of ad in a few locations that were created for their current purpose at the start.   I will watch for this problem.  Good to know.

I believe that the first paragraph is worth two hours.  Maybe more.

The current first paragraph sells your product short.  It still has several errors.

You are selling peace.  You are selling protection from noise.  You are selling protection from germs.  You are selling better observations of a person's health.  Each of these sells to many types of people, in many different environments, engaged in a variety of activities.  Some of them are of jugular importance.

Your product can be useful to every person who needs quiet, is exposed to loud or annoying noise, or needs to make careful observations.  Students in dormitories, workers at construction sites, a diversity of health care workers, auto mechanics, connoisseurs of fine music, and many others.  Your first paragraph blends these together with no distinction and does not personalize it for anyone.

Personalization is the key to making a sale.

Your opening statement might be one paragraph, two paragraphs, a paragraph and a bullet list.  I don't know.  But, don't think of it in terms of words on containers.  Think of it in what you want people to do.

What do you want people to do when they land on your homepage?   Your opening statements have the opportunity to appeal to the many types of people who enter the site, sort them into candidates for buying your several types of products, and send them to a new location where they can see the wonders of a product that is designed specifically for them.  This is very difficult work.

My honest opinion is that your homepage is far from ready.

How much time do you think I spend composing answers here in Q&A.  They might be read once, by someone in a hurry, who I do not know?  How much time should you spend to capture the attention of potentially thousands of people per month, for the next many years, selling products that you have spent countless hours creating?

Don't be in a hurry.  You should actually be making three or four different versions of your homepage, placing each of them in CrazyEgg, and seeing how people behave when they arrive.  Are they doing what you want them to do?

People at Scribendi can help you with your writing.  People at SiteTuners can help you get people to do what you want them to do.  I am just blathering to open your eyes.

It isn't ready.  It isn't close.  That's my opinion.  Two hours minimum.  Done in multiple versions, critiqued by smart people, tested on lots of visitors.

Good luck.

Nice work!

Great news.

Using the combination of Hemingway, Grammarly and then sending the piece out to Scribendi can add two or more hours to the time required for me to produce an article plus $30, $50 or $70 to Scribendi, but my articles are so much better.

If you publish on a site where the visitors are picky or erudite this is a good investment.  On a retail site, your most important sales pages should have a very low reading level with all problems chased out.

**.... is it a waste of time to share my content on Social Media? **

This is the real crux of the question.

If people see your postings on social media and click through to your website then that is a sign that you have something worth sharing.  But, it also could be a sign that you are dropping clickbaity shares.  You can check Google Analytics or Clicky or whatever you are using to monitor your incoming traffic.

If your shares are productive then you have to value your time compared to the amount of traffic and possible revenue or visibility that you are receiving from social sources.   I don't share my content on social media because I am not a social media participant with a large number of people who interact with me.  It is not a productive use of my time.  It is more important for me to write content with that time.

However, all of the pages of my site have buttons that make it easy for my visitors to share in obvious ways and many visitors do that.  I get traffic every day from social but occasionally I get enormous traffic from it.  The best thing is that my visitors are doing the sharing for me.

Cultivating a tribe of people who like your website is the most effective way to take advantage of social media.  For this to happen you must have strong sharable assets on your website.

Another thing that you can do to facilitate social sharing is to be sure that you are showing your best, most highly sharable content with all of your visitors.  Obvious links to your most popular content, your most often shared content, what's hot today content can trigger content consumption and sharing.

Learn what content is winning for you and then play your strengths.

Great.  Glad you are interested.

Everyday is copywriting day here.

btw... if you are using Chrome, Grammarly will monitor your email, moz posts, wordpress, etc for improvements and you can accept them with a click.

I have been using Hemingwayapp.com and Grammarly to improve my writing.  They have free and paid versions.   I also get professional editing from a human at Scribendi.  Worth every minute and every penny.

Probably more valuable than this link is to proof-read your first paragraph.

There are spelling errors, missing punctuation, incorrect punctuation, incorrect verb tense, missing verbs, mixed topic sentences, capitalization problems and more.    I was going to simply post a corrected paragraph here but I ran into a sentence that starts out talking about hearing protection, and then changes channels to keeping water out, then changes again to buying in bulk.  I don't know the product well enough to pitch the different benefits clearly.

I think that putting two hours of work into this opening single paragraph could help you rank better in the search engines because I do believe that Google demotes poor copy.   It might also increase your sales because some of your visitors will start reading the current copy and quickly question the product.

The content below the products is also in need of work.

If you have an article on your site and that article is then published verbatim on another site or multiple sites, then there is a good chance that one of the following will happen.

**  If one of the other sites is stronger than your site, the stronger site has a good chance of outranking you in the Google search results.  It does not matter if you published first, the other site, if stronger, still has a good chance of outranking you.  Googlers will tell you "we are usually good at recognizing the original source of the content".  I will be generous and say that they are wildly overestimating their abilities.

**  If your article is published on lots of other sites - even weak sites - it is possible that your site will be filtered from the search results.  You can see what sites are being filtered by going to the last page of the search results for a querry.  There, if any pages are being filtered you will see

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 100 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

If your site is the strongest for that query then, if you are lucky, the other sites will simply rank below you for the same query.

It is best not to share your content.  If you want to share it and have a really good chance of it being credited to you, then the site publishing it should add an rel=canonical to the page like this...

That will credit the article to your site and instruct google that this page should not appear in the search results.

Set the line item "Type" to "Sponsorship".

Then set "Goal" to "100%".

The test will be to see if google will index these pages, if they will rank high enough for anything to pull traffic, and if Google sees them as a Panda problem.  I think these definition pages are risky.  Go out and look at what the dictionary sites (that rank for anything) have done on their definition pages.  There is a lot more content.

================================

On this page, Google sees a one sentence definition and one sentence that uses the word.  There is also a lot of characters that Google will not understand.

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/dictionary/word/haboob/

I copied some of the definitions and searched for them in text on Google.  The definitions that I checked were found verbatim on over 1000 websites.

The example sentences that use these pages are also not unique.  They are found on other websites.

These pages are risky for another reason.

Keyword stuffed?

I am referring to the page below.

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/word-lists/words-that-start-with/letter/h/

It is nothing more than a big list of keywords.  The links that take you to definition pages.   That page is stuffed full of keywords.

the only other text on that page is the title.

That is the second problem with this page.  if you run it through a spider simulator you will see that google might not be able to see those words.   If you "view source" for those pages you will not see those words.

I would call the page that you linked to "keyword stuffed".

I would call the page with the definition and the example sentence to be thin.

Most of the dictionary sites that are able to persist in the SERPs have more content per page.