Welcome to the Q&A Forum

About ten years ago I spent lots of time building satellite sites.   They made a little money.  Then I built a big website that kicked all of their asses.

Decided back then that I would hunt elephants instead of toads.  The decision has paid off.

Today, Google is much harder on thin affiliate, spammy websites on cheap hosting with little splashes of content.   Next year it is going to be even worse.   People are tired of finding spammy affiliate sites in the SERPs.

Go buy an elephant gun is my advice.  Toads are becoming extinct.

When I start a PPC campaign I include keywords that I hope will target the right people, I write multiple ads that I hope will attract clicks, and I make landing pages that I hope will convert.

As the campaign runs I am able to eliminate keywords that do not convert, eliminate ads that don't attract clicks and eliminate or modify landing pages that do not convert.  Every time you eliminate something the performance of your campaign should improve - if you made a wise decision.  Your profit should improve and your quality score should improve and that can bring your bid prices down - if you know what you are doing.

It is something like sighting-in a gun.  You shoot, see where you hit, adjust the sights, shoot again, and keep at it until the gun is zeroed in.

If your campaign is targeting a niche with vigorous activity you will get lots of data quickly.  But if your campaign targets a sleepy little niche with very few searchers, it can take weeks or months to accumulate enough data to eliminate poorly performing keywords, ads, landing pages, etc.

Making money on PPC can be very difficult.  You can be competing with people who can obtain product at cut rate prices, ship their packages at a discount and have highly efficient fulfillment teams and very smart ad managers.  If you are not tracking your conversion rate and keeping a close eye on your profits and costs you can loose more money than you make at PPC.  I am willing to bet that a lot of my competitors are loosing money at PPC and don't know it.

It is really hard for a small business to make money at PPC.  You have to be super smart and super efficent and get all of your expenses down to rock bottom.  Try it and find out.  I bet you are surprised at how easy it is to blow a lot of money.

Thanks.

About ten years ago I sold a lot of stuff on Amazon.  Things were going well.  I was the only person selling a nice selection of items.  Then they started to sell the same items - and sold them at such a low price there was no way for me to make a profit.  Impossible. That was just like working really really hard for someone who would become almost an impossible to beat competitor and dominate your SERPs for the next decade.

However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too.

• spits coffee *

Whoa!  I would not do that.  I would remove or replace those descriptions on Amazon if at all possible.

When you sell on Amazon, any content, any image, any anything that you put on their site will be used against you.  And, if you strike gold there then Amazon will quickly become your competitor.

This is exactly why I don't sell on amazon.  They solicit me a couple times a year to sell my stuff on their site.  No way.  I did that in the past and my work benefited Amazon more than it benefited me and benefited my competitors too.

I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content.

This is not true.  I don't care who says this is true, I am going to argue.  No way.  I'll argue with anybody about this.  Even the big names at Google.  They do a horrible job at attributing first publisher.  Horrible.  Horrible.

I have published a lot of content given to me by others.  Other people have stolen my content.  I can tell you with assurance that the powerful often wins... and if a LOT of people have grabbed your content you can lose to a ton of weak sites.

Google does not honor first publisher.   They honor powerful publishers - like Amazon.   Giving content to Amazon that you are going to publish on your website is feeding the snake!

So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings?

If your content is on Amazon, they are probably taking your traffic.  Go out and look at the SERPs.

If you can improve the article - especially the content - then you should do it without any concerns.

I have been running a site for about 8 years.  In that time I have published a lot of content.  Now I am at the point where more of my time is spent on updating articles or improving articles than publishing new articles.   I am always adding additional photos, updates from the news, improved photos, sometimes complete rewrites.  A lot of my early content was fairly short articles.  Now I am replacing them with much more substantive articles with lots of images, photos, graphs, data.   Rankings very often jump up after a major improvement is done.

One of the pages on the website is #7 on the first page for a highly competetive keyword. Since I would like to improve rankings and the page is not optimized (e.g. keyword density is 0), is it SEO-wise to edit an article and create a good on-page optimization?

I often spend one, two or three days on improving an article like this and have someone helping me with images, photos, research.  Make content on this page that will blow everyone else away.  Go out there to make their content look puny.

Only with their permission.

They should have stopped yesterday.

Shoot the linkbuilder immediately.

Keep in mind that DA is closer to logarithmic than linear.

It takes 10x as much work to move the needle from 40 to 50 as it did to move the needle from 30 to 40.

So, you said things seem to have "levelled out"..... Sir, the pitch has become awfully steeper and when you hit 60 the pitch becomes desperate and overhanging.

Most universities are going to list the scholarship on a page of their website that contains information about the scholarship and other related scholarships.  They might say that the scholarship is funded by a specific company but if you think that you are getting a link out of it that is being presumptuous.  They are probably NOT going to link to you.  Look at their scholarship pages.  My bet is they are NOT linking out.

So, if you want the scholarship to get big buzz it better be a really big prize and your website needs to be the exclusive source of the full details about who is qualified to receive it, how to apply, and if it is awarded on the basis of competition or merit, how the winner of the scholarship will be determined.

How much should the prize be?  Before I answer, I will say that you should be in this for helping people more than for SEO.  I'd start at $5,000 or more.  With a new prize awarded each year.  You can get a bit buzz with a scholarship of that size.   You will get zero buzz with a $500 scholarship.

If you just slap up a tumblr page with links to your website, I don't think that it will do you much good.  Why?  Because those links from your tumblr page are not going to carry any juice unless they have links into them from other sites that are indexed by google.

So, if these guys are outranking you only on the basis of their tumblr pages you will be in less trouble than if they pointed the links that go to their tumblr pages directly to their website.

.... I also think its pretty dumb to put up pages and pages on Tumblr, each with 15 links pointed to your website.  I think that is like painting a target on your own ass.

Thanks for the report, Jesse.

Thanks for the analysis.   Your description makes a lot of sense.  Maybe that is what Google is doing.  Assessing to see if all of the boxes are checked.

The keywords that the articles target have a Moz KW Difficulty of about 50%.   All of this is being done without any linkbuilding or other promotion.  Just the ranking power of unique, substantive content on an authority domain.

A year ago these pages would have gone to the first page of Google within 24 hours.  Now they still go to the first page but it might take 24 weeks.

Nice work on getting those quick rankings.

These types of results are becoming hard to get.

...in the past you'd see them have a big jump quickly and then start to fade back down...

Right... in the past a good page on a strong site would bust right to the top and Google would play "whack a mole".   Now the good pages on a strong site will start deep in the SERPs and without promotion, they will climb slowly to the spot that you would have initially expected them to rank.

Instead of "whack a mole" google is saying... "prove the you deserve it".   At least, that's what it looks like to me.

All of the links out of my site are followed.

The word "all" is a bit of an overstatement.  However, when I am writing and need to reference something, I usually link to the site with the information.  For that reason the site is superior to mine in some way.  So, I am always "linking up"... never "linking down".

And, I post news items, each time the site that I link to has content that I don't have, thus again superior to mine in some way.

As a result I am almost always linking to sites that rank above mine for some keyword or another.  I don't sweat it.  I'll get 'em.

I agree with Takeshi.  Just look at it.

Also, these sites are in my own industry and I know them very well.

Lower DA Back link will hurt your side?

I link to all of the sites in my niche that are better than mine.  It hasn't hurt any of them yet.  

Maybe instead of creating a package insert to offer a "free product" you can hold contest (a random drawing) that awards a nice gift box of your products to one or a few people a month.  Or you could offer a kickass price on a sampler package of your products.

Another alternative (the one that I would use) would be to create a huge library of information that would be useful to people who might use your products.  How to select them. How to use them. How to get the best results.  Give people a huge incentive to visit your site.

You seem to be focused on getting people's email address.    It is better to attract people with value than hit them repeatedly with marketing offers.

It seems to me that Google is slower to trust (and rank) new pages today than in the past.

I used to be able to put up a new page and it would go right to the top of a competitive SERP.

For about the past year when I launch a new page it starts deep in the SERPs, sits there for a few weeks, then starts slowly moving up.    These pages still eventually rank on the first page of Google - often at #1 or #2 after wikipedia or another strong site - but it can take a few months to get there, several months in a competitive SERP.

These are not "hot news" topics where freshness is an important factor.  Instead they are product pages or general information articles.

Anybody else seeing this?

[ Just stabbing in the dark here... I am wondering if Google is relying more on visitor behavior these days and the delay is while they collect data?... Just stabbing in the dark.]

This is a very complex situation with roots way beyond SEO.

The company is about 7 years old and been online for only 2 years.

Your franchisees have probably been online a lot longer.  You have arrived late the the fight and should not expect them to step aside to give you top rankings.

Income comes from 90% from wholesales/retail stores ( owned by franchisees ) .

For this you should give thanks.

the wholesales work with a discount tactic to sell products in the store

For this you should give thanks.  Most businesses on this planet try to give their customers a sweet deal.  They are willing to take a lower profit to make your merchandise fly off of their shelves.  If you don't like this institute a MAP policy or raise the wholesale price.  If you do that you might not like the results.

And yes we have our website address on the boxes and products

Smart.  This gives you an enormous opportunity.

Are your products any good?  If the customer has a poor or lackluster experience with what they purchased they will not be visiting your website.

But we convert customers at a measly 3.5%

How much landing page testing have you done to improve your conversion rate.  Are the products on your website easy to find and properly described.  Does your checkout work smoothly.   I bet that 3.5% would increase if you got some consulting from someone who knows how to convert visitors into buyers.

I had thought about putting a little tag on the products or a little booklet inside the packaged boxes

This is a good idea... but I would make it an enticement for visitors to come to your site.  I would not offer a free product because you will probably be swamped with people wanting it.  Have you heard about the huge "free stuff" culture that is out there?  Huge.  You might be really sorry if they get the word out on your free offer.

i wanted help by asking some of the communities creative mind.

The normal advice given here is to work on increasing your visibility through improved rankings and greater keyword reach.  We might also advise you to get moving on social media.   Your situation seems to have problems (or perceptions of problems) that are outside of SEO.

I am a retailer and my advice to you would be to do everything that you can to help the retailer.  You said that they  are driving 90% of your sales.  Instead you are trying to figure out ways to eat his lunch.  My suppliers generally bend over backwards to help me because they know I am doing the job that they either can't do or are not willing to do.  If these people stop selling your product, you will be out of business.

(providing you are the first to be crawled and indexed/noted with this content)

I am quite certain that first to be crawled/indexed does not determine who gets the rankings - or even who will appear in the SERPs without being hit by filters or Panda problems.  The more powerful sites who are publishing the content often get the rankings or survive the filters and Panada.

If you want to avoid this problem put that essential content on an image.  Then add enough additional content to make a substantive page.  Require your resellers to use that image if you don't want them to have Panda problems or be filtered on duplicate content.

Then add enough additional content to the pages to make it substantive enough for Google to index and rank.

The previous version of the site and the new version both have approximately 450 pages. My website developer was careful to implement 301 redirects.

Two comments.

1. If the 301s were done correctly and this site does not have a lot of links then it might take weeks for google to find the 450 new pages, get them indexed and forget the 450 old URLs.

2. Maintaining the rankings requires more than redirects.  If the onpage optimization elements (title, h1, etc.) were not maintained or if they were changed then rankings could tank.  I have seen lots of cases where developer puts the same title tag on every page and rankings tank, or developer puts site in frames, or uses javascript links because he thinks they are cool.

One of my competitors had a redesign done and developer noindexed all the the pages.  It took them a couple weeks to figure it out after the site disappeared - but rankings came back immediately after the fix.  So, technical glitch can cause problems too.

Ten years ago lots of people had lots of sites competing for the same keywords.  The shortcut that they usually took was to use the same content on all of those sites.  That approach is dead now... and the approach of using slightly modified text is dead too.

Google doesn't care if you have two websites on the SERPs for the same keywords as long as those two websites are absolutely unique and offers value to visitors.   I have info sites and retail sites in the same SERPs.  No problem  --  at least none yet.

Complain to overblog.  Complain to them.

I am not kidding.  Let them know that you are not happy.  Look to see if others are complaining.

Don't ask us.

Look at your analytics.  Look at your income.  Look at your visitor counts. Look at your links, likes and social shares.

One problem with big news sites is that they have waaaayyyy too much content and that makes it hard to manage.  Many of them use category pages to keep the old content available.  They have category pages for just about every city and person and organization that has ever been mentioned on their site.  Then when that topic is mentioned in a story it gets a hyperlink to the proper category page.

The category pages can be enormously valuable and rank in the SERPs, pull in traffic, acquire links, likes tweets more.

lol...  I made that word up this morning...

Do you know what it means?

I couldn't decide if it should be fidiot or f'idiot or F'indiot

That was a great answer.  Thanks.  I didn't know that.

Bah! I swear 80% of my job is convincing site owners that they're thinking is backwards and having to essentially "argue" (for lack of a better word) with them about it.

lol... thanks for the laugh...  Sometimes I feel that exact same way responding to questions here in Q&A.  And sometimes they do ARGUE! and call me a fidiot.

I think that depends who you ask and how they build their blog into their website.

To me, a blog post is a way to publish quick content.... communicate in a couple of sentences or write a short article that can be done in a hour or two.

Real content (at least to me) is something more substantive - 500 to 5000 words accompanied by photos, charts, data.

If you do a little work to integrate your blog posts into your website then blog posts can be a lot more.  They can be incorporated into FAQs,  used in "related content" boxes that display across your site, be integrated with images and snippets into your category pages, and linked to for "more information" on your product pages... then you have more than a blog, you are using it like valuable content.

Here is how blogging works for me...

On a retail site I have a blog where I post on topics such as"how to use the product"... "how to select the product"... "how to fix the product"..  "show what was made with the product"... "history of the product"....  "answers to the most common questions we get about the product":.. "off-the-wall stuff about the product and trivia".

Then we have a big FAQ page that helps people find the blog post they need to answer their question.

For SEO, this blog generates content for non-transactional queries.  In some niches there is more search for non-transactional queries than their is for transactional queries.  When someone lands on one of these blog pages we have house ads and links to pages where they can purchase the product that they read about or the supplies that they need or a book.

These blog post attract traffic that was non-transactional but we get transactions out of them.  They also get us into the SERPs that our competitors have not even thought about - because they are so focused on transactional queries and are too damn lazy to write helpful stuff for their customers.  As a result, we have more informative content than all of our competitors combined.  Then when people land on our site they say.. "WOW"... and many tell us that they purchased from our site because we have so much information.

On an information site I have a blog that tracks industry news and gets up to 30 very short posts  per week.  I post a couple sentences about a news story and link to it.  It has an RSS feed and an email feed that people can subscribe to.  About 20,000 people subscribe because three times a week they get an email message with 8 to 10 links to news links (on other websites) about the industry that the work in.

The news posts are noindexed because they are so short and would cause panda problems.  However, each news posts goes into at least two categories (topic and geographic location).  We have 150 categories and they bring in tens of thousands of visitors per month.  Some people subscribe  to the feed for some of the category pages instead of the general feed.   Lots of industry websites link to this blog, some republish the feed in a widget - a few on their homepages.

When we have a new article on this site we give it prime position in the blog and the feed and that immediately shows new content to thousands of interested people, some of them share it right away, other email it... so it gives new content on our site a great lunge out of the gate.  Occasionally we include a sales item as a post and that pulls in a few immediate sales.

If we have any problem with this it is that so many people bug us because they want us to feature their content or shout out their product or include information about promotions, obits, etc.   We have to say "no" to a lot of people because nobody wants to read their personnel announcements or follow  a link to their chest thumping blog post or land on their linkbuilder crap.  A few people are very helpful and send us great stuff and that reduces the work for us.

Should I be worried that Google may interpret the resultant user behavior as a bounce or pogo-stick?

Lots of people come to my site and go straight to search.  That is a very common thing.   Yesterday, on my site the search results page was the third most visited page - receiving 2768 views.

If you are using google custom search you can define a search page URL on your own domain and have the search results delivered there.  That has the advantage of keeping the visitor on your domain and then your analytics can detect the queries being used.

That is how my site is set up.  When I use google to make a custom search engine I get the code to create a search landing page on my own site.

If you have the form designed to deliver a "thank you" page then the visitor got a second pageview - as long as the thank you page has a unique URL that is able to be counted by the analytics.

I would deliver an interesting thank you page with lots of great options for the visitor to click.

I have used designcontest.com to get redesign images for a website.    That allows me to see design ideas from a lot of people and have the good ones tweaked before making a decision.  I have used it about four times so far. Each time I got a design better than what I could have made myself.

If you do this write a really detailed description of what you want and what you don't want.

I use this only for the "look" of the site.  We then write the code in-house because I don't want to trust that to anyone else.

I don't hesitate to link between one of my sites and another when the site that is being linked to has strong content that will provide further information of interest to the reader. I don't have a lot of these links. Just a few. I could count them on my fingers. I would hesitate to place footer links, blogroll links or other copious amounts of links between my own site. Those are not offering specific guidance to the visitor. I also have an information site where I run banner ads that click to a retail site that I own. These banner ads compete with Adsense on the basis of value using the DFP ad server. If you have any concerns about the links between your sites you can always add "nofollow".

Is this caboose that you propose adding to these pages relevant?

If yes, then add it to the main body of the page.  Why attach it down there where nobody will see it?

If no, then why are you slapping it to the bottom of the page.  Delete it.  If it is valuable content then publish on its own page.

I don't understand exactly what you are asking?  Are you asking us to disagree with Matt?  Or is your question more specific?

1. If I am allowing advertising on my blog and people advertising by placing Ads, Contextual links in Posts, Should I make them No-Follow? If Yes, then I might lose a good amount of income coming from Advertising. What is the best practice without loosing Organic rankings.

Google wants those links to be nofollowed and advertisers want them to be followed.  If you allow them to be followed then you will attract advertisers who are trying to manipulate google and run the risk that google will disapprove of what you are doing.

What I do is run genuine ads such as Adsense and banner ads such as TribalFusion.  The link text in articles and blog posts all deliver visitors to relevant pages on my own site.  This promotes the content that I have worked hard to produce and when someone clicks on of those ads I will earn impression money from the next page that they visit.  I you have a good site you can still make a lot of money by doing things this way.

Another way to earn income is to place a small store on your site and sell the same things that the people who want to advertise on your site are selling.  If they can make a profit by paying you for the ads then you should be able to make even more money because your advertising expense is zero.  I have stores on my sites and sell a lot of relevant items.

2. If I make all the External Links No-Follow (simple wordpress plugin can do), then I may not have anyone to advertise on my blog. What is the advantage that I am going to get?

Get adssense, get Tribal, open a small store.

3. Keeping the Do-Follow on all external links, how it will effect my blog? when there is no spam and all quality content on the blog.

All of the external links on my blog and in my articles are dofollow... but I am linking out to recommended content and not linking out to people who are payin' me.   Every link on my blog and my site goes to another website that is better than mine for the topic that I am linking to.  (These external links are not "anchor text links in articles" they are either links in a "reference" box or links that tell visitors where I obtained information.

I have the opposite opinion.

If I have a great article they would have to pay me to publish it on their site.  But they probably would not be willing to do that because I would be asking a stoopid price for publishing rights.

I want that great article on my own site where my visitors can read it, where it will pull search traffic to me and where I will enjoy any likes, links tweets, shares, etc.

(Some might ask... "What if the article is crap?"... If it's crap then only a crap site will republish it.   That is a huge waste of time!)

Lots of people will disagree with me and maybe a few of those people can get their articles place on CNN or the NYT  or  the LAT.    If they can do that they have a good thing.  But if you are getting $4 articles and having them published on pissantdaily.com then I think you are wasting your time.

You will need an AdWords account but you should be able to sign up and never run a campaign but still have access to the Keyword Planner.

I hope that is true... but I tried using it yesterday and it was horrible.  Worthless.

Unfortunately, several of the sub domains are _extremely _large sites that require a lot of processing power on the server.  Nearly every single one of these sites has it's own dedicated server.

Holy smoke!

but I will see what we can do about moving some.

I run a site that gets a lot of traffic...  It is on a dedicated server and when I needed more capacity they have added drives, memory, new processors...  You can have multiple boxes running a single site.

Have you talked with any hosts who specialize in running really busy sites?

I've been pushing to take back the root domain, but have so far hit resistance.

I would say...  If we are BigCompany.com then why are we sending our traffic to outhouse.BigCompany.com?

I used to work at a place that did this (I was not on the web team)... they would move important stuff all of the time, abandon URLs without redirects... it was really rude to the institutions who linked to them.  All of these moves were done on whim... Without thinking of how it impacted visitors, partners and the bottom line.

I assume we want all three under the same domain to consolidate domain authority.

I agree with this - 100%.

What if I told you that we have dozens of sub domains of the companies main domain? We probably have close to 100 sub domains that are used regularly.?

I'd say that you guys ran wild with subdomains. 

Then what if I told you that the company doesn't hardly even use the root domain (other than a handful of old pages)?  Even the root domain redirects to a sub domain.

• slaps forehead *

OK....  Here's what I can say from experience.

I had a site with a few subdomains.  One of them was much more powerful than the root domain.  I 301 redirected them to folders in the root domain.  The results were kickass.  Kickass.  Rankings were up everywhere because the strength of the subdomains seemed to be united into the root after the merger.

Now... the guys who did your site created an obscene number of subdomains.  If you had ten I would say merge them with confidence.  But, this is a wild ass site.. so I am not betting on anything. 

If you want to experiment, get rid of the redirect that sends the root into a subdomain.  When that gets into the index and stable then start redirecting other subdomains into folders of the root.  I would do it a few at a time to see what happens.

On a side note, we use Magento as an eCommerce platform, and it's rampant with duplicate content, duplicate page titles....

Are you sure that you want to work at this place?  

If I install google Analytics, that can affect my SEO.?

I don't know.   I've never installed it.   * tin foil hat *

One of them have removed it and trying to get other removed as well. Google Webmaster listed like 2500 links pointing to home page from those 2 domains.

I agree, these links could be a problem.

Also, I'm trying to get the link removed from sites that scrapped contents, but those sites don't have any contact info to reach a real person.

Getting rid of these links can be next to impossible.  I don't think that they are as bad as a site-wide footer link.

You are in a better position than anyone to answer this question.  Anyone who answers here is guessing.

Take the quiz at this website and be very honest with yourself when you answer.  If you don't know an answer because someone else did the work then get them to give you a straight answer.

http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/

Buy a basic textbook or how-to-do-it guide for the topic that you are working.

Don't read it.  Study it.

Look for topics that most people don't know ... but they should know...  topics that have high search volume.... topics that have huge longtail ...  topics that are interesting... look for opportunities for great images and photos.. video... data sharing.

Rand recently made a Whiteboard Friday video about this...

http://moz.com/blog/why-you-might-be-losing-rankings-to-pages-with-fewer-links-worse-targeting-and-poor-content