Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you Phil.  You are the man!  

If someone asked me to work on the basis of results I would decline.   Why?  Because I don't have any control over new companies entering your business niche.  That is market risk that belongs to the business owner, not a service provider.

Even if you offered me a percentage of sales I would not take the deal because sales are determined by factors that you control such as retail price level, shipping charged, quality of staff serving the customer and more.

SEOs have a base line value on their time that is determined by how much they can earn by doing other things.  If you want the time you gotta pay the price.

Perhaps SEOs who are new to the market or those who will do "anything required" to get your site ranked and collect the fee will be interested.  But they might not be able to hold those results once Google figures out that they have spammed.

I have not seen anyone have this type of success with YouTube videos -  being able to quickly throw a mass of them up and hit #1 in the SERPs for large numbers of keywords in major markets that are high value terms, normally highly contested.  They captured topSERPs for a service area of millions of people.

These videos for queries like "Tampa (Orlando, Sarasota, etc.) Personal Injury Lawyer" are very similar and if placed on a website in the form of text and images, they would be cookie cutter pages that google would likely filter from the search results.  But, since they are videos they are handled differently by the algo.

I don't know how they pulled this off.  Since the videos are cookie cutter, mainly chest-thumping ads, they really are not contributing a lot of value to the search results.   Is it spam?  That's an "opinion" call.  I'd say yes, when done in large quantities like this.  I am quite certain that if lots of people start doing this Google will find away to put a throttle on it.  They might see us talking here and put a throttle on it.

I wonder if this happened by luck or by design?   The website of this company is ineffective in the SERPs for the queries targeted by the videos.  So, I am not going to say that they are kickingass everywhere.  It could have been a lucky shot.   If I owned that company I would be hesitant to go out and hire a lot of new staff.  I will be surprised if these videos stick at #1.

Their youtube videos are doing great... but their website is ineffective for these queries.

If he can do this he is worth at least a seven-figure number.

ahhh hahahaha.... ROGER is there!  LMFAO

Kidnap him and find out how they did this!

Awesome work by those guys.  They are out there at the top of the SERPs for a lot of cities, putting up a huge attack with nearly 300 videos.

I see them at #1 in the SERPS... KILLING THE LOCAL RESULTS... for   "Tampa personal injury lawyer"..... orlando sarasota many other cities.

I would like to hear what Phil Nottingham thinks of how they are doing this.

http://moz.com/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo

Yes, a semantic plan makes more sense if google is not automatically determining synonyms.

Could this be the cause of our falling Domain Authority and will it affect our keyword rankings.

I believe that it could have a slight positive impact on domain authority...

Google might not like links like that - especially if it is a sitewide and if it has a money term as anchor text.   However, I don't think that one site linking to you like this will tank your rankings.    If you are concerned about it you can get in touch with the webmaster and ask him to remove the link.

** While this type of content would undoubtedly drive traffic, many users would not convert into customers as there is no service nearby. **

I agree.  My sites have lots of this type of content and I work very hard to get this traffic.   If you use Google's DFP you can target your house ads to display a geographically relevant creative for certain locations (for example... sports massage in Bentham, or Birkenhead, or Accrington) and show adsense for any other location.    This enables you to promote your own services where you have them and adsense to all other visitors.  You can also sell this geographically targeted ad serving to specific clients.

I like the idea of a side menu but do you think this would be enough to allow the pages to rank?

If you have a kickass article that gets a lot of links it will start to pull traffic for these geographic terms.  If competition is not strong or your pages develops significant link strength, then you could rank for these terms.   I get lots of geographic term traffic from these types of pages.  Lots.   If you have one of these pages with 30 great links it is going to compete.

Our SEO has never been better with 65% of our keywords ranking in the top 3 and 86% ranking in the top 10.

Nice work.  Celebrate then get back to work!

However our Domain Authority has dropped again and this time it is in complete isolation, none of our rivals have suffered anything like a 3 point drop.

Im wondering what is causing this rapid drop in Domain Authority and what affect, if any, it was have on our future keyword rankings.

In my opinion, these numbers are highly volatile and are not part of the google algo for determining your rankings.

Use them to chart your long-term progress.   Instead of focusing on them spend your time improving your website and doing great SEO.  Spend your 100% of your mental energy there.

I think that blog posts that explain the generic (without location) topics that you do bookings for they could be a fine informative library for the site.

If an author knows what he is writing about and produces a highly informative about the different types of sports massage and the reasons that an athlete might benefit them it would be a great way to attract attention to the site.

Imagine an article like that hitting the subjects... what is a sports massage, are their different types, how can they be beneficial to the athlete, how are they done, how much might they cost.   Don't you think that an article like that might be very valuable for a site like yours.  Imagine your blog article ranking at the top of SERPs for topics like "benefits of sports massage" .... "types of sports massage"...  People who are searching for those topics are ONE STEP AWAY from booking the service.   And you have house ads or a search box on that page that helps them find where they can get this service.

If you hire a person to write these who knows nothing about the subject then you will not have a very good article.  But if you hire experience and get photos, athlete and service provider interviews/quotes, then you have an article that might perform well.

Wouldn't that make their site a more credible booking engine?... and don't you think those pages would have a chance to rank well for generic high-traffic terms?

This type of content is not cheap.  Experienced authors, going to get photos, spending time on interviews is expensive - but from my experience it can pay off nicely.

These pages are way to valuable to redirect.  If you have some of your best locations in the side menu a powerful page like this might rank for some of the cities that you serve.

If you want the campaign domain to appear in the search results then you must remove the 301 redirect and allow it to appear in the SERPs.

Google really isn't "correcting" anything.  This company has sacrificed the brand of their campaign by allowing that domain to be  301ed to their primary website.  This happens on the server, not in Google.  Google is obediently following instructions.

This law firm wants to be know as SimpleToSpell.com but they don't want to give up SchwempleToSchpell.com

Just a thought... it is very possible that their new domain will have a lot of competition in the SERPs.  I bet it would be pretty hard to rank for something like "simple to spell".... and they will be pissed if they redirect to this new and simple domain and rank at #13 for their brand.   So, if they have future plans of using this domain they better get a website on it and start putting some work into it.  Get your feet onto the turf and see how it works.

1) What do you think of this practice?

If I was the boss at Google we would go after these sites and get rid of them.  They are huge huge time wasters.

I live in a small community and most of the physicians are either working at large practices or institutions.  They often  don't have a webpage for each staff member.  So these sites spew out optimized pages for [ physician's name ] + [ city, state ] just to slap your face with ads or sell the physican a place to advertise.  They rarely have the information that you need.

2) Does the quality of these types of landing pages factor into your assessment? In other words, if the pages aren't thin or duplicate, do they have value?

The quality usually sucks.  Think about it... if they are blasting out hundreds of thousands of pages for every city and state they are probably going to be cookie cutter pages or they are going to have $2/page writers blathering nonsense.

These pages waste my time.  Furthermore, the people who run these sites call on the phone and bug me because they are either: A) trying to get content for their website; or, B) they want to sell me my page on their website.     I don't want a page on their spammy site!   And, They want stoooopid amounts of money.

3) Is this a practice you would recommend to a national, virtual company? If not, what would you recommend?

For some people, professional spam is a business model.  I don't recommend it but I understand why they are doing it.  Still if I was the boss at Google we would be running physicians' names and toasting any sites that are trying to get traffic by republishing a page with every physician on the continent that is mashed up with a bunch of spam.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Professional Spammers of the worst level

Look here how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a well-known and otherwise respected newspaper is in the business of professional spam.     They are using their domain authority to fill the SERPs with crap.  Type in the name of a biz near you and they probably have a spam page about it.  They just have the name, address and phone of the biz.. and maybe, maybe not, have a few details scraped from their website.

Thanks for looking into this IrvCo,

I am using clicky.com

Thank you, Daniel.

I just checked and mine looks like IOS too. Glad you figured it out.

Most of my traffic from Google is now [not provided].

Another problem is that lots of Safari browser versions are passing very little information.  No query terms and no referrer - so they look like direct traffic.  In my opinion, about 1/2 of my Safari traffic is without query terms and referrers.   (Go look at your analytics for safari and you will see same thing I think.... * I don't use Google Analytics so you might see something slightly different *)

I am also suspicious that some Google traffic is appearing as direct.

If you want people to visit your Google+ page then post it there.  If you want people visiting your website then post it on your blog.

Personally, I would be posting it on my website.  Then any visitor, links, likes, tweets will contribute to my site rather than to a Google+ page that I don't control.

Thanks!   Very interesting.... too bad we are reading it.

The upside of this for me is that a couple .gov sites are big competitors of mine.  So, I am getting their bounced visitors.

From what I have seen google does a pretty good job of recognizing "synonyms" and making content appear in the SERPs even if the synonym does not appear on the page.

For example... photo, photograph, picture, pic....  I have a site that ranks for lots of "image" keywords and I get traffic for photo, picture and pic - even though those words do not appear on my pages.  Google is smart enough to do that.  Seeing this I added the word "photo" to my pages and didn't see much of a traffic lift.   Google was giving me that traffic automatically.

I think that this type of "knowledge" would vary wildly for various words.  Your swimming pools example might not work as well as pic, photo, etc. because it is less commonly used.

The more common the word the better job done by google.  The less common the more you need to optimize.  Experience in an industry would be really important for this.

Lots of people ask why they are not getting into Google News.

It is hard to get into Google News.   I would like to be in Google News but I don't meet their strict and numerous guidelines.   You can find them here.  There are journalistic, technical, content and other types of requirements.

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en

what are your thoughts on this?

At the risk of sounding really dumb to everybody who reads this....     I am going to say that I have heard people talking about this "semantics" stuff for a few years and I just don't "get it".   I can't see how I should be doing anything any differently.

I have no idea about how google is using semantic information - even if I did, I could be completely wrong or be absolutely inept in pulling it off.  To me it is like going out to fight Goliath with a club and spending that morning trying to decide if I should take a red club or a blue one.

I feel the same way about blogs.  Lots of people view them as some "magic weapon" and publish stuff there in the hope that it will transform their business.

I think that the core value of your message (and how it is pitched) is much much much more important than the platform that it is published on or how you think that Google is going to determine the relationship between words.  So, that is how I decide to spend my time.

So, if anybody understand this stuff and can explain it to me...  I am ready for my "transformational moment".    If you think I am full of beans, just give me a thumbs down.

Maybe my real answer here is... "A lot of people don't "get" this stuff.  So if you know how this stuff works and you have a great way of presenting it and making it stick in people's minds then you need to start selling it."

It is supposed to be used on exact match duplicates.  However, I know that it works on less than exact match.  How far it can be stretched, I have no idea.

Our product descriptions are pretty much all unique but i have noticed that when typing a portion of text from these pages into google search using quotation marks, shopping affiliate sites which we use are being displayed first and our page no where to be seen or last in the results.

I saw the same thing.  There is your problem.

This leads me to believe that Google thinks we have scraped the content from these sites when in actual fact they have from us. We also have G+ authorship setup.

Although google says that they are "pretty good" at attributing content to the creator the truth is that the suck at it.

Lots of people have this problem.  Guard your content so it doesn't get out to affiliates and shopping engines.  This means strongly enforced rules for your affiliates and blocking crawlers from your site - but allowing google in.

rel=canonical   (if you started with original content and can get everyone everywhere to use it and none of it gets stolen)

If you ask my staff, they will tell you that we redo lots of work every month.  

That sounds like it wastes lots of money and employee time, but in the long run I am confident that we are making more money because we learned something from our bad guesses.

Bob,

I don't think that mimicking your competitors is a good strategy for winning.  Instead you should be doing something that is superior.  Keep that in mind.

The value of images on a webpage varies depending upon the subject.   If I am talking about how to install crown molding then images of how it is done are extremely valuable to my article.  They might even be more important than text.   So, if these guys are writing about topics for which images can play a critical role then they should have their heads examined if they are not using lots of images.

Lots of other topics might not lend themselves to an article with a lot of images.  However, images can be used for other things.   They can be used to reinforce points, pretty up a page (which is important in my opinion - landing on an article with no images is horrible for engagement in my opinon).

We take a lot of our own photos, we license a lot of photos, and we use websites like istockphoto to obtain access to a library of photos that can be licensed for minimal cost.

So, I would use photos and art and tables and graphs no matter what I am writing about.  I think that it makes for a classy website and those photos can be used as primary, secondary or "did you know?" content.

In short, I pay very little attention to my competitors, other than to take a quick look at their content and decide if I can beat it.   For me images are a major way for me to beat my competitors in richness of content and aesthetic appeal

arghh...  I just tried to get updates for my daily blog posts and three of the .gov sites that I use are all down.

Those weasels in Congress should be fired.

If you go into the auction with a low bid and appear at the bottom of the adwords list your CTR will be very low.  That will damage your quality score.   It can be very difficult to raise your quality score if your CTR has been very low for a long time.

I start out with a bid that will make my ad very visible immediately.  That gives my ad a better chance to be clicked and that higher CTR helps me start out immediately with a better quality score than if I started out bidding low with an ad that is not clicked as often.

From what I have seen, these types of website are only successful when competition is really easy.  So working to boost the strength of your site will usually get you above these bottom fishers.

Basically, what we'd like to know is: how we can best set-up our product ads to reduce our Cost Per Conversion (I guess everyone would like to do that!), as it is barely worth us using it currently.

Just some quick things to consider....

A) There is much more to this than "ads".  The conversion rate of your landing page could be more important than your ads.  Spend some time improving it.  I got help from SiteTuners.com and they helped me understand landing pages.

B) I write LOTS of ads (ten for a keyword is not unusual) and allow them to compete.  I drop those with low conversion rate.  Experiment. Try crazy stuff.  It might pull traffic and get sales.

C) I download a spreadsheet of keywords and find those that are not converting.  I drop those.  I also use negative keywords to block unproductive and irrelevant.  You can boost your quality score by eliminating unproductive keywords.

D) Find out what your competitors are charging for the products and for shipping.  If you are a high-price seller competing against discounters you are going to blow a load of money on adwords.

E) Adwords is a battle of quality score.  If you start out trying to get cheap clicks your quality score is going to suck.  I go in bidding crazy high to help the quality score and then back off.

Actually, these articles are "posts" on a wordpress blog, but I am not using category pages or monthly pages or other things that would make them look like a blog.

Instead they are linked into my website through the homepage, through category page, and every product that they are about links to these article pages.

Really there is no difference between a blog post and an article. The difference is that a blog usually integrates its content into your site in a way that is both dumb for your visitors and for SEOs.  So, use the posting ability of wordpress for its convenience, but build those pages into a website using the traditional methods that serve visitors and SEO.

We do the same approach as Gregory.

Articles about how to do things, how to select things, comparison between products, history of products, etc.  These are substantive articles usually over 1000 words, always with several photos and maybe a video.  Time consuming to produce.

However, these article pages pull in lots of traffic and almost always outrank our ecommerce pages and category pages.

Gregory seems to be using text links to move traffic to higher value pages.  We have house ads in standard formats (300x250, 160x600, etc) to route the traffic to our sales pages.  We also run adsense on those pages.   We can tell from analytics that lots of people who make it through our shopping cart enter the site through these pages.

We use Google's DFP on these pages to compete Adsense and an ad netork against our house ads.  Our house ads are valued by determining the number of people sent to our sales pages, their conversion rate and average shopping cart value.  We also have multiple creatives running and DFP picks the one with the highest performance.

Gregory... think about putting a few eye-catching ads on these pages with value propositions.  I bet that a lot more of your visitors will convert.

I think that it depends upon the types of sites you are working on.

We work on one large info site and a couple very small niche retail sites.  Two people, full time, almost 100% content creation.

copyright infringement

downloads / malware

hidden text

duplicate content

noindex applied by dumb designer

bad robots.txt

Lots of things could cause this problem.

One of the "benefits" they cited was that they submit your information to local search/citation sites once a month, to keep it up-to-date.

I was on the phone with them recently and they started offering this... and I am thinking... "OMG... Please!  NOOO!    Then they told me the price and I was relieved that they were not going to do it for my site.

Does anyone still do this, or is NS just trying to make their product sound good?

Now I wonder how much they know about domain registration and hosting. 

Thanks, Marcus,

My numbers are rising rapidly right now... but hopefully the trend will reverse.

I'll let you know if I learn anything.

Hello Marcus,

Thank you for sharing your experience and finding those posts.  I appreciate it.

I think I am going to ignore these and assume that Google doesn't know what they are doing. 

It surprises me that the URL errors on spammer sites are being presented to me as something that should be fixed.

Thanks again!

I am suddenly seeing a ton of crawl errors in webmaster tools.

Almost all of them are URL links coming from scraper sites.that I do not own.

Do you see these in your Webmaster Tools account?

Do you mark them as "fixed" if they are on a scraper site?  There are waaaay too many of these to make redirects.

Thanks!

You will most likely defeat it with something that is completely creative and unique.

It is hard to beat something by using it as a pattern... and since I know very little about weight loss I am unable to advise.. on the other hand you believe that you have great qualifications... so tell people what they need to know in a way that they will understand and be able to follow.

(the link that you provided lands on the diet category page - but that is OK because I think that you will have greater success by building an awesome resource library than attacking with a single article)

One thing that come with the PLA ads, in my opinion, is an even high level of price competition.  So the same forces that make it difficult to succeed with Adwords are still in play.

I have not tried remarketing/retargeting.

My approach at present it to compete in the organic SERPs as an MSRP seller.  I have great organic visibility (especially long tail), a lot of traffic and sell a few items that my competitors ignore.  My site also gives great service to the visitor through content and video - no competitor is even close to matching.   So, we are still making lots of sales at MSRP.  This yields good profits on every sale.

I am also running Adsense across the site.  I don't think that it damages sales very much and it produces income with zero work.  So, I am happy not to be doing PPC and actually glad that my competitors are staying busy making lots of sales at very low profit margins.

the client and their previous seo agency were the one putting their own content on tons of websites which makes it even worse

Oh, that is bad.  I believe that rewriting will be a solution.  But, will be expensive.

Buy the easy books and tinker around.   Be ready to lose money.  But if you keep at it and keep doing your  math and eventually you will get better.

But, bottom line... Can you compete with the big boys on costs and expenses?  You can be a small biz genius but if you don't have the numbers you are not going to make money.

100% honesty here.  I love math. I know my numbers.  I have done LOTS of adwords training and even more self study.   I get killed at Adwords for most products.  Why?  I am up against people who have a 20% merchandise cost advantage and a 15% shipping cost advantage.

I could have Mahalanobis doing my math and would still get killed.  Because my competitors have a huge advantage on costs and expenses.