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AddThis.com has a new sidebar. I put it on my site and its working great.
http://www.addthis.com/ (look on left side of their homepage)
Get a two week free trial.
I can't say that I recommend the AddThis "recommend" products. They look like a noob designer made them and do a crap job of grabbing images. But, I bet they have that solved soon.
Instead of linking out to these other companies on every page of your site, consider making one big bragging page on your own site and direct all of those links to that page.
That should leak a lot less pagerank, a lot less traffic, and allow you to tell the visitor what you want them to hear. You can then link to these other websites from this interior page.
I think that you are on the edge of enormous volume.
I would divorce myself from the word "culture" and focus on some element of culture and how it is experienced.
Sites like TripAdvisor and LonelyPlanet have made millions from these types of topics. If you can pull this off superbly with best-on-the-web content you might be able to blog for a few years and cash out for a seven digit paycheck.
I don't know this person... He has a blog here that you can read with google translate... http://faktor.biz/ban-lub-filtr-od-google/
I have gotten great work from people who live in non-English speaking countries. Fantastic work... and gotten really bad work from people who live in New Jersey. Stay away! lol
they did not believe me when I said I had nothing to do with those two links, but I can assure you that I am telling the truth.
I believe you. I have sites that have never received linkbuilding work and they have links from all kinds of spammy mash-up sites, computer-built directories, etc. Awful.
Google is incompetent and thinks that they ain't.
I think that you have received generous opinions from Jane and Andy.
I am looking to get as many opinions as possible on the questions I have asked.
So, when you get 50 opinions how are you going to decide what to do?
If I was in your situation, I would go straight to a person who has done a lot of successful reconsideration requests for Penguin, hire them to look at your links and give you copies of their communications with Google. I think that will be more efficient than listening to fifty people kibitzin' and then shooting into the dark.
Just saying what I believe and what I do. Not saying that it is "right".
I don't want to call images from another domain. I want google to see me as the source for all of my content.
I also don't want to rely on the manufacturer's server. My sites are on fast, dedicated servers on a host that has almost zero downtime... only moments of downtime in the past decade. Don't bet that delivery will be faster from the manufacturer. Bet on yourself.
Manufacturers often have idiots running their websites. They can put HUGE image files out there that download slowly. Manufacturer's web team might move images around their server and not notify you. They might also upload new images without telling you. It can take you a while to realize that the images are missing or switched and in the meantime their idiots are making your website look like crap. After they change or move images try to sort out that mess. You will waste a lot more time than it would have taken to download the images and put them on your own server.
I think that we can produce better images here. I want BIG images that are often not available from the manufacturers, I want multiple or different views that are not available from the manufacturer. I want optimized images that download quickly and look nice.
So, in short, if I have a choice between betting on me or betting on the manufacturer, I am putting my money on me.
**We're thinking of consolidating the smaller sites into our most successful site (www.product1.com) in order to save management time and money, even though I hate to lose the product-specific URLs in search results. Is this a wise move? **
As a general answer, I would say that it is a wise move. I my opinion, in most instances the only time that you should have two sites competing with one another is when you have one site that is a total dominant in its business niche and you have the time to build unique content on a second site. Even then, it might be more profitable to spend that same effort adding additional products on your main site or launching a new site in a new niche. Keep in mind that is a general answer and detailed study should be done to determine if closing some of your sites is a smart move.
If we proceed, all of the products will be available on both our company site and our most successful site (www.company.com & www.product1.com). This would unfortunately give us two sites of duplicate content, since the products will have the same pictures, descriptions, etc. The only difference would be the URL. Would we face penalties from Google, even though it would make sense to continue to carry our products on our company site?
If this was my company, I would be investigating the closing of four sites and doing 301 redirects to the one that remains (assuming that detailed study supports that and all of the sites are in superb health with great link profiles).
But you ask about duplicate content. If you have that, then one site could be dropped from the SERPs. If the two sites have links that connect them it is a very high probability that google will kill one. Google started being able to detect that and kill one of the sites about ten years ago.
Disclaimer: What I wrote here is generalized opinion. Detailed information could change my mind... and I don't have time to do that type of evaluation even if the data was presented here. Very time consuming. If these were my sites I would make up my mind about this type of move over a period of months and not in a few moments.
You will probably have better success just working to improve the website and its content.
....it mentioned never to externally link in the footer. Is this an all around statement?
If you go to Amazon.com you can see that it is not an all around statement. They have 30+ links to external domains in the footer. They are Amazon properties and linked with branded anchor.... but if those links are passing any juice then I think that they should be whacked for it.
Almost all the web design companies I work with do the same thing. Is this going to help me or hurt me?
If that is required of all clients then there will be some clients who will not hire you because they don't want links to external sites in their footer. Some don't want them because they worry that google might not like them and some just don't want advertising in their footer.
If it is an exact copy of your article then it is possible that it could cause a problem with Google.
If you decide to contact them find out in advance if they are a real Benjamin Moore company. If they are then your chances of success are greater, in my opinion. If they are not I think it would be hard to get cooperation.
Decide what you want to accomplish. Do you want it removed, do you want a link, do you want an rel=canonical?
I would want the rel=canonical AND have my company name listed as the author and copyright holder in the article.
I would offer them a choice.... A) remove the article..... B) display it with attribution and rel=canonical (and give instructions for how that should be done)
If they choose B then their web dev could get in touch if there are questions about how to do what you want.
The site that has a copy of your work is in Polish. It is on a .pl domain.
So, is it an offical Benjamin Moore site?
Another question is.... What copyright law applies when a USA author is infringed upon by a Polish company? Do you have any status there?
So, Robert's advice to "be nice" might be more important here than it would be if you are contacting a US company. If you have no status they can rip your work and use it as they please.
I also see that the site was built by a third party company. Lots of web developers in the USA infringe out of ignorance and that is what might have happened on the Polish Benjamin Moore domain. They might have told the developer.. ."build us a site" and he outsourced to a person who works even below the Polish wage base.
I think that you have to understand why these people deleted your links.
A) Are they reading Matt Cutts and worrked that he is going to slap them for linking to you?
B) Are you posting things on your site that they don't like?
C) Did you competitor contact them and say something that made them take down your links.
D) Do they think that their site looks better without links to other websites.
E) Are they afraid of losing traffic to you or leaking linkjuice.
F) Some other crazy idea in their head.
So, maybe the first action would be to get in touch with them to find out why the links were taken down... This would be a hard message to write but maybe you could ask if you did something to offend them and were writing to see if that was the reason.
I personally get phone calls/emails claiming to be Google and to "confirm" business information for rankings. [...] Likewise, if they receive a call/email from "Google" and choose not to respond because they are used to spammers, they would be unfairly dropped lower in rankings even if they have great CS.
I get calls like this all of the time. They make me angry because I believe that they are spammers calling. But could they be from Google?
** If there was an official setup like that, the two could get confused and people taken advantage of.**
Yes, how can Google discover who takes care of their customers and who does not? The small company selling nationally often can't afford the feedback and ratings systems that google can monitor, or support for their website and Google Plus.
I can't put myself out there to do tech support for all of the third party sellers on Amazon, WalMart, Sears, ebay and dozens of other big brand sites that sell my product.
Maybe Google should invent a robot that calls or sends a question to customer service?.
No Results!
Google loves brands.
You can have more content than all of your competitors combined, greater selection than anyone, have intelligent people who answer the phone and give free advice, respond immediately to email enquiries with generous advice......
A third party seller on a big brand website posts one crappy page with one low-quality item that is such a piece of trash that we refuse to sell it and they are above you in the SERPs...
Then the customer who bought that piece of crap from the third party seller on the big brand website (who offer zero support - you can't even find a phone number or an email on their site or in their packaging) are calling and emailing us wanting to know why they can't get that piece of crap to work... and ask us to send them a replacement!... and then get pissed because we tell them to "contact the vendor where you purchased it".
Has anybody used it?
Yes!
Any experiences or results you can share?
No!
CloudFlare has been a frequent topic here. Check these search results.
When considering on page / on site seo what process do you use / take to evaluate how much content is needed to be competitive and rank well?
I go out to the SERPs where I want to rank and look at the quality of their content. Then I make a page that is better, a page that blows them out of the water.
The answer is not in the number of pages. Instead it is the quality of the single page for that search term. It usually requires a very substantive page to defeat what is at the top of the SERPs. Lots of easy-to-understand text, photos, tables of data, graphs, mabye a video. You can beat tough competition for difficult keywords with one page like that.
A nice gem is more interesting to people than a ton of crap.
There's another thread asking for this feature, and we're discussing internally if anything around this is feasible, but any implementation would be a ways out right now.
I think that moz should spend their first effort (a big one) making documentation that explains what DA is, what it ain't, how you should use it, and how you shouldn't. (I know that there is a bit written about it already but people are not reading it and people don't "get it".)
DA/PA is the most misunderstood thing in Moz. No kidding.
Look how many times people come to Q&A complaining why they have higher DA than the people who are outranking them. They don't understand it.
Lots of people are worshipin' these numbers, selling increases as a service, crying because their DA dropped a point, using them for their base performance indicators, thinkin' it is connected to Google... etc.
IMO this stuff is a decoy away from productive work.
Just my opinion. Give me thumbs down if you disagree.
This is just my personal opinion. Others might disagree.....
I took a quick look at your site and saw content with titles such as...
"The Top Ten Reasons to Go Mobile with Brickweb"
"Need an Upgrade? – The Top 5 Reasons to Work with Brickweb"
OPINION #1: Don't shill or chest-thump
In my opinion these are not articles and are not very linkable. Why? They are marketing pieces in which you promote your own services. I link to eight to ten pages on other websites several days per week and have been doing this for about ten years and paying attention to what my visitors click and write to me about. Based upon that experience I don't link to marketing messages. I link to information. I link to content that teaches basic concepts.
If I linked and sent my visitors to pages that are full of chest-thumping and people shilling their own products I would lose my readers. Honest.
OPINION #2: Share Expertise
If you want to earn links then blog about topics that help people understand the basics of how a responsive website works. Do you make separate pages? Do you use CSS? Do you have a program that reformats? Explain the choices and how they work. Don't promote yourself. Just explain it.
OPINION #3: LOOK AT THE MOZ BLOG
The Moz blog is a pretty good model. Take a look at how the authors have filled it full of diagrams, photos, images, data tables, screenshots. That makes the content 10X more interesting than a page full of text. A well illustrated article is kickass for attracting links.
OPINION #4: YIANNIS IS RIGHT!
Yiannis says... "1) Your content is not optimised for searches thus it is not ranking for anything"... I agree. What keywords are the two posts that I copy/pasted in bold above targeting? They are not going to rank for anything that anybody in your biz niche is searching for. "Go mobile?".... "Top Ten Reasons" .... "Need an Upgrade". They are not going to rank for any of those and the traffic there is not relevant.
Thank you Gordon. I enjoyed reading your reply and can relate to it.
Since Google has changed so many things about the way that they rank websites, a lot of the advice for improving your rankings that was given just two years ago is now deadly to the health of your website. And, there are some SEO forums today where an awful lot of the advice that is given is really bad in general and often inappropriate for the question being asked. (Moz Q&A is generally pretty high quality IMO and part of that is because the Moz staff keeps an eye on it, participates in some threads that are jumping the track and uses endorsements to highlight good information. There are a lot of forums where bad stuff persists and grows.)
I am sure that I have given a lot of bad advice simply because of my beliefs and understandings are different from how google works - or I might not understand the person's question. And, that is where a forum works well. Since nobody knows many things about Google we answer questions that start an argument and many times being wrong advances ultimately advances your knowledge and understanding.
For years I have read most of the questions that have a title like.... "Wah! My traffic dropped".... or "Wah! My site fell out of Google". Those are the most valuable to understand and when my traffic dropped from a Panda problem, I had a really good idea why and how to fix it. If I was not watching those threads I would have been wondering "What happened?" and not realize that something can be done about it.
Q&A is where you can keep your ear to the ground. And if you are helpful here, people will really be extra helpful to you when you ask a question. Thanks to all who have answered questions for me.
You can learn a lot from Moz Q&A without asking any questions.
The way to do that is to watch for topics that you are uncertain about, then subscribe to that question by clicking the "Email Updates" button. Then, when people reply to that topic, you will be able to read what they have to say and will likely learn many things (and see a few entertaining arguments 
Give it a try. You might subscribe to more questions than you think and learn many things that will improve your skills and expertise.
I use clicky for the numbers... if I really want to see exactly where people are clicking and how long they were on the page before they made the click... I use crazyegg.com.
Clicky has a feature that allows you to see where clicks occur on a page but I like CE better.
I agree. Since I don't know for sure what google uses, these metrics are my personal measure of visitor satisfaction. When I make changes to my site I see how the metrics change on those pages for both people who "land" on the page and people who simply "view" the page.
I use bounce rate, pages viewed and time-on-site as reported by Clicky.com to assess visitor engagement on my sites.
Most bounce rates simply count one-page visitors, but Clicky has a new method to measure the amount of time they remain on your site. Clicky believes that a single-page visit of 30 seconds means that the visitor has had some engagement.
http://clicky.com/blog/214/why-clickys-new-bounce-rate-is-the-best-in-the-biz
If Google is looking at people who land on your site and then bounce back to the SERPs they can use the time between clickthrough and return as a measure of engagement. This is especially important for "reference" sites where visitors might want just a definition or a batting average or some outer quick-to-get data.
Your comment in #4 about time on page and bookmarking is something I think should be taken into account by Google for search page ranking, but I've never heard before that they do. [...] Are those significant factors used by Google?
In my opinion, google has every ability to measure visitor actions. They own the Chrome browser and could measure the engagement of visitors with a page, they have access to what gets bookmarked in Chrome, they know when a visitor clicks in the SERPs and when that same visitor reappears in the SERPs, they don't have to have links because they can read when people mention your site in a forum, they know if people navigate to your site by typeing the name of your site into search... I believe that all of these things are important for rankings but how important I can't say.
I have lots of really good content that when I published it the page ranked at #150 or deeper in the SERPs. Then, I built zero links and did zero promotion and slowly that page rises in the SERPs and is now in the top three - over a year later. I have hundreds of pages that have done that. You gotta have a LOT of patience to do things that way but you spend zero effort on promotion and 100% effort producing assets for your website. That is what I have done since about 2006. Virtually zero linkbuilding. My visitors are my linkbuilders.
One view is that as long as your site pages have relevant content and are easy for the user, Google will rank you fairly.
The other view is that Google has 'rules' you must follow and even if the site is relevant and user-friendly if you don't play by the rules your site may never rank well.
Which is closer to the truth?
They are both a small piece of the truth. To rank on google your PAGE must be:
relevant to the search term and presented to google with proper title, crawability, and text visibility
have substantive content about the search term
be validated by other websites by being linked from them or mentioned by them (these are just a few validations)
be validated by visitors because they have queried it by name, stayed on it, bookmarked it, mentioned it by name in web readable content (these are just a few validations)
Any idiot can do #1. A good author can do #2. But, #3 and #4 are really difficult to accomplish by people who are not related to you or paid by you.
In low competion #1 and #2 can be enough to get your ranked. The higher the competition for a query the more you need #3 and #4 to rank. For some queries it can be almost impossible for a newcomer to rank on the first page of google without investing $xxx,xxx or more in website assets and promotion.... AND... having a plan in place to present the site in a way that google will be able to read it and interpret it in a way that will maximize the #3 and #4 assets.
I would not bet five cents on any of this. I am confident that you can find rankings that will show the opposite.
There are many routes. I am not saying which one is best or which one will work. Some might work, some might be a disaster. I suggest hiring an SEO who has experience in recovering site moves that have gone bad.
Two routes that come to my mid are...
A) Go back to Homestead and have them restore an exact copy of your site from back up. This would have been a good choice if done immediately after your move. Now a couple months have gone by and this might be a bad move. You need advice from someone who has experience in this problem.
B) If you have a list of the Homestead URLs. You might be able to find someone who knows how to do 301 redirects on BigCommerce. I saw lots of old URLs of your site at Archive.org and they were hitting 404 pages on your new domain, some were doing 302 redirects, some were producing an empty page. This might recover some of your loss. How much, I can't say. You need an experienced person.
So there you have Door A and Door B. Each has its problems. There could be Door C and Door D that an experience person would know about.
If this was my site I would be hiring experience as soon as possible.
I believe our old, previous store has been taken down by Homestead.
So, if you left Homestead and they have shut down the service that you had there... then you will need to have an htaccess file on your current host that lists all of the Homestead URLs and 301 redirects every one of them to equivalent URLs on your BigCommerce site. Without that the traffic flow from Homestead will be cut off and the powerflow will evaporate.
You mentioned that you changed your URLs. Did you do 301 redirects to the new URLs to preserve the rankings and power?
If I grab old URLs of your site from archive.org and copy/paste them into a browser most of them are hitting 404 pages.
Also seeing duplicate content on the mybigcommerce
You have these choices......
-- Place the bags in logical groups and display them all on the same page. That reduces the number of pages. For example if you have a certain type of bag in five different colors, put all of those colors on the same page, each with its own "add to cart" button. Or if the same bag is produced in several different sizes or materials or cuts put all of them on the same page with separate "add to cart" buttons.
-- Your other choice is to start writing, get creative, keep writing until you are done.
Recently it seems Google has started tweaking page titles with one apparent intention: to promote branding.
That article makes a really strong point. It seems that google does like the brand in the title tag. They are doing it to a lot of my title tags and I have to say I don't really like it.
I think that this makes the point that google "knows" who is a brand without reading it in their title tag.. but google wants the brand in the title tag badly enough that they are willing to overwrite the carefully crafted marketing message in my title tag to get it there.
In some cases, google might improve the message, but if they are using a one-size-fits all algo they are not going to improve things every time. If google thinks that I deserve my brand in the title I am flattered, but I'd rather bet on my marketing message than on how their algo will slap a brand name over it in the SERPs.
I have always felt that having your brand name in every title tag though-out your website when your URL is your brand name is a waste.
I agree.
The space your brand name takes up could be used for more valuable non-branded keywords. If your brand name is unique,
I agree.
If your brand name is unique, the URL (and content optimized with your brand name) should be enough to have you rank #1 across the board in search results.
If it doesn't you are in some type of trouble with Google... or you really have a weak site.
Though I beleive this I still think it is valuable placing your brand name in the back of your homepage title tag.
Here's what I think... with a few example title tags...
<tltle>MyBigAssCompany: Golden Widgets - Over 500 Varieties (these guys think that their ass weighs a ton... their company name is more important than their message)</tltle>
<tltle>Golden Widgets - Over 500 Varieties | MyBigAssCompany (OK... at least they are not stinking up the message with their brand name)</tltle>
<tltle>Golden Widgets - Over 500 Varieties (BAM! This nails it in my opinion. Short. Sweet. Really, people don't give a damn about MyBigAssCompany... and if they think that the company is really important they are going to see my URL in the SERPs, right below the title)</tltle>
If my company had enormous recognition then I might use the name in the title tag... but I would rather add "free shipping" or some other value proposition than add my brand name to the title.
This is a subject where you are going to get a lot of disagreement and I think that the guy who insists on having HisBigAssCompany on the front end of the title tag will argue a lot louder and longer than I do.
There are no boring industries. None.
If you have someone who knows a lot about an industry and is an enthusiastic person they can usually identify the topics that people ask questions about.. and what they ask questions about is what they "think" is important... but they are usually not asking the questions about what they "need to know". And the enthusiastic industry expert knows the step-by-step guide for getting the job done.
These industries are thought to be boring because the average person knows very little about them.
I know a little about concrete.... If I had that concrete site I would be publishin' the "Concrete Bible".
----- Tell them why and when they should be using concrete and when and why they should be using asphalt
---- Tell people how to prepare the base (use lots of photos, use lots of video), tell them how deep they need to dig, tell them how different types of soil and water conditions require different methods of base preparation, lots of jobs go bad because drainage was not done right
----- Tell them what type of stone to lay down for the base layer (show photos), if they have a choice between limestone, sandstone, river stone, granite and traprock which one they should pick, what size that stone should be, tips for spreading the stone evenly to minimize hand work. what happens if you don't do it right,
---- Tell them the mistakes idiots make and what mistakes cheapskates make. It's easy to screw up a concrete job. Cheapskates screw up more concrete jobs than any other type of person and most of the professional jobs that don't go well were done by a cheapskate contractor. .
----- Tell them how to calculate how many cubic yards they will need.... make an online calculator... give a few ideas for using overage that might arrive on the jobsite
---- Tell them how to build the forms, what type of lumber to use, how to stake the project, how high they need to be, again tell them the mistakes that people made and show photos and videos....
---- Tell them how to finish the surface, what type of float works well, how much time you got, mistakes and videos....
---- Tell them about curing, how long it takes, what about covering it, how long to stay off, when you need moisture, tell them about care,
--- Tell them that the price of the material is only half the cost... if they live rural they will have to pay by the yard-mile for delivery and how much that might cost.
You put all of that stuff on the site and you will have a second class site. I didn't have time to type it all and don't know everything that goes into it..... but if you do a better job than anyone else you will have a great site that people will be using for their Bible. Does not matter if they tell some secrets, the average guy is still going to hire them for this job, you tell them enough so that they know that an expert needs to do it or it will be screwed up. A lot of people just want to know what is involved and how to spot a cheapskate contractor who is trying to give him a low quote and deliver shabby work.
The more you know about something the easier it is to write about it and the better job you will do. That is why it is best to have the industry expert do the content if possible and if that isn't possible why you need them helping alot.
If the industry expert isn't going to write the content author needs to get out to the job site with boots, gloves and a camera and see the entire process done three or four times. That is really expensive, you will pay them for at least four days of work.... but it is a good idea to do it unless you want crap work.
You know what I said above about cheap contractors screwing up a concrete job... the same applies to content jobs.
ADDED:: I always preach about the content expert doing all the writing. But sometimes that can't be done.... and in this situation here... it is probably going to be easier to make a concrete expert out of the gal who writes the content than it will be to make a first class writer out of the concrete guy.
This is a difficult question to answer.
The answer depends upon 1) how much knowledge you have, 2) what type of subject you are writing about, 3) how picky your client is, and, 4) if you are writing just to get keywords on a page or if you are writing to attract links and earn high rankings.
There are many different types of topics. Here are just a few....
A) thoughts and opinions (should the USA sell natural gas to Ukraine?)... You have to know a lot about many subjects to write that type of content, and then you must analyze it and explain it. It is really easy to be wrong and look like an idiot. It is really hard to write this without doing a lot of research and knowing what and where to research requires experience.
B) simple reporting (like news reports)... This usually isn't difficult writing as long as you have all of the facts
C) technical and factual (like explaining atomic absorption flame spectrophotometry). If you try to write this without a very good knowledge of chemistry and physics and familiarity with the language of those disciplines you will sound like a complete idiot starting in the first sentence. Any knowledgeable reader will know that you are not prepared to write that content.
I spend most of my time writing content in areas like A and C above. I am not writing just to get keywords onto a page. I am writing to produce pages that are best-on-the-web for their topic area.
I earned several college degrees in my subject area and have about 30 years of experience working and teaching in the subject area. With all of that background I still have to do a lot of research before writing. Sometimes accurate information is very hard to find and then explaining it clearly is still difficult. Knowing what people want to know is easy but knowing what they really need to know requires experience. Being able to speak like an educated person about these subjects requires immersion in an industry or academic community.
Now, I want to spend my time writing about a topic that is very close to my education and work experience. But, because I want to write competitive content, some of the best that is on the web for the subject areas, I am going back to school for a few years to learn more, to become conversant in the language of a new subject, and to understand what people need to know instead of just what they want to know. That is the valuable information.
All of this is not needed if you are writing about common events that do not require great background knowledge and communication to expert or technical audiences. There are a lot of websites that don't need such background. But there are many who must have it.
Don't try to bullshit the readers. The important readers will smell it immediately.
If you feel that you are not qualified to write the content for certain clients, I would not hesitate to decline the work and instead spend time writing for clients where your knowledge and background are strong - you will be more productive there and produce a better product.
I think that the decision to use a search bar depends upon the size of your site and the type of information / products that you offer.
I have a small retail site (under 100 pages) and nobody used the search box even though I had it big and obvious in the upper right corner of the design. When I say "nobody" that is not an exaggeration. NOBODY. I removed the search box.
I have a large information site (thousands of pages) that has a well-used search box at the top right of every page. This is a google search box and adsense displays on the search results page. Here is some data....
* Site-wide about 4% of the people who arrive at the site use the search.
* About 6% of the people who view the homepage use search.
* About 4% of my Adsense revenue comes from the search page.
* Using CrazyEgg's "Time to Click" feature I can tell that a lot of people who use search on our homepage immediately click the search box - in under five seconds. This suggests that these people are using the search box to navigate the site.
* The most valuable thing about the search box is the query data. I use Clicky analytics and it captures the query strings. If I look at them I see lots of people searching for topics that I do not have on my site and topics that I do not address with a dedicated page (hundreds of searches per month for some queries - this is on a site that gets 100K visitor per day and has thousands of content pages). I am using this query data to inform content development. Very valuable.
* In addition to the search box at the top of every page, we also have a second search box that appears at the bottom of every article. It is used by about 1% of visitors. When they finish reading an article the search for something.
So, although I removed search from the small retail site I am keeping it on the information site because it is used by some visitors to navigate, I find the query data to be valuable and we derive 4% of our ad revenue from search.
Finally... if somebody is on my site. I don't want them leaving to search somewhere else. I want them to use my site search where the content of MY site is the only thing that they will see in the search results.
lol... I get mad and delete them... but maybe I could get some giggles here instead.
Yes, since he made that video the number of requests that I receive has dropped.
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. 
I have encountered a few guest bloggers that I really respect. I occasionally receive offers of free articles from people who simply have a story to tell and they know that my website gets a lot of traffic related to their story's topic. These people are generally content area experts who produce wonderful work and they often have great photos or graphics to accompany the article. And they are not asking for links, trying to shill a business, or even seeking payment.
I have several of these articles on my site and have felt so good about them that I have given the author payment for hundreds of dollars simply to create a transaction that I have paid them for the right of publication. Once I started paying, a few of them have written several articles - on topics that I don't have the expertise to write about. I have gotten some of my best content from a couple of these people.
...passing page rank from you to their client, something they are clearly doing for their own personal gain....
Right. I agree. And some of this crap is coming from people who call themselves "PR Services". In my opinion the PR services have been infiltrated by a lot of spammers who wear suits to work.
This response is my personal opinion. You will find lots of people who strongly disagree.
The opinions that people have about guest blogging can be strongly biased on whether they are the guest blogger or the blog owner. And the blog owner's opinions are based upon the care and pride that they put into their blog.
My experience is that almost every person who writes to me about "guest blogging" is looking to give me a low quality article to post on my site that is nothing more than a sign post with links out to one or more other businesses. The goal is to get a link for SEO purposes, maybe a little traffic, nothing more. And 99% of the time the quality of the content is far far below my standards. Most have been crap that I would never want to show to my visitors and would not publish if they gave me ten times as much money.
Another thing to keep in mind is that many of these people are hoping to use your site as a platform for link manipulation of search engine results. If google doesn't like paid links - and that is what you will be publishing. If you have a lot of them (or maybe even a few) on your site then google could decide to reduce your rankings because you are selling links.
The litmus test, in my opinion, is.... would this person still want to do guest blogging if the link was nofollowed or if there was no link to their website? If the answer is "yes" then you might have a great guest blogger who will produce great content - because they have a message to get out instead of a bunch of links that they want to get out.
Since a LOT of people want to do guest blogging I am expecting to receive a lot of thumbs down for this post. I have just given you my honest assessment of 99% of the pitches that are given to me.
If I look at the link profile of my own websites (which have never received linkbuilding services) I am shocked to see links from some awful looking sites. I don't get excited about them because they are links from black hats and spammers who build mashup websites by slapping together information scrapped from other websites, grabbed from business directories and stolen from other sources.
If I look at the link profile of almost any other site that has been on the web pulling reasonable traffic for at least a couple of years I will see the same thing. Even the best sites on the web attract tons of spammy links without doing anything to produce them.
So, I think that it is really hard to assess the links that you see pointing to other websites. If you see stuff that looks like manufactured links... they probably are manufactured links but they are on spam sites of a type that google is not going to penalize you for.
If I was in the lending space I would not be surprised by very many things. And if a website does have really spammy link.... they might have been disavowed a long time ago. Keep in mind that disavow has been around for a couple years or more and tons of people - especially in the lending industry - have disavowed an awful lot of links.
I would look at recent English major college grads. They have trouble getting jobs and the jobs that they compete for are not paying well. They communicate well and are good at following rules and researching information sources.
And, they are better at content development than most other people simply because they are great writers. You can find English majors who graduated with honors to high honors easily because they are abundant and not finding work.
I suggest you ask, what are they doing better than you? It will give you a lot more mileage in addressing what may be keeping you behind.
Wow... that is a great answer. I've seen this same question asked hundreds of times in forums over the past ten years and this response is golden.
Nice focus, Robert.
Great... And... if they are in your office they are not going to find the honey pot and then call all of your competitors to sell them the same service that you just paid big bucks to research... then... in three months all competitors will outrank you again and you will be back in the market.
When you outsource you do not have proprietary data.
But I want to be VERY careful.
I would hire someone to work at the office part time. Then you can keep 'em on a short chain, peek over their shoulders, get status reports, and put on the brakes if things are jumping the track.
One of the best ways to get into an argument is to talk about "legitimate building"....Lots of companies would swear on stacks of Bibles (or other relevant literature) that they do only "legitimate building".... and things collapse as they outsource your work to somebody who outsources your work and the "legitimate building" message and interpretation really gets skewed.
Maybe you should explain in more detail?
On a tangent..... You know that "Philadelphia Lawyer" is an ancient term with very different meaning that "Philadelphia Attorney"?
I thought that you got a really good answer, and if you do those two searches and compare side by site... the answer is pretty clear.