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I work for a non-profit association. We currently use a .com as our primary, but also own the .org. Should we switch to the .org address? What would the benefits be?
You own them both. That's the important thing.
I would carry on as you are doing and 301 the .org to the .com.
Am I doing something wrong perhaps?
Maybe the thing that you are doing wrong is fearing competition.
I don't fear competition because where there is a lot of competition there is usually a lot of money changing hands.... and where there is a lot of competition there is usually a lot of long tail traffic to grab.
So, if you can generate really good content that is very high quality, substantive, and keyword diverse then take your best shot at a keyword where you have expertise. You might get some long tail traffic.
(The above is the approach that I usually take... however, I would not take that approach for keywords where there is a lot of extremely aggressive and hardcore competition - such as "payday loans" for example. Those guys can have that turf.
For the keywords that you mention... I would difinitely attack them with informative articles - if you can make best on the web content without infringing upon their brands then you can probably attract traffic.)
Do not use the .info.
Lots of people who know his domain is somelawfirm.info will type in somelawfirm.com
I make this type of mistake when I am going to .gov sites. I type .com and I should know better. It is habit.
The harder you work to make his site popular the more people will go to somelawfirm.info by mistake. He does not want them going to a spammy site. Important clients, partners and potential contacts will go there and say WTF?
Look, this guy is an attorney and somelawfirm.com is a fantastic domain if this is the type of work that he does. He should get in touch with the owner and buy it. Just pay for it.
I would pay at least $10,000 for that domain if I was an attorney in that line of business. I would probably pay more.
Cheap, cheap, cheap compared to the cost of telephone directory, or billboard, or TV or radio advertising.
Don't be cheap, buy the domain.
(you might want to edit the domain out of your post... you don't want people going there and generating traffic for this person if you are thinking about buying the domain. .. or maybe someone who sees this post will run to buy it and then sell it to you for an even higher price.)
PDF documents will be indexed.
If you edit the "properties" they can have a title tag that works as well as <title>. </p> <p>They can rank in the SERPs like any other document. </p> <p>You can put links in them pointing back at your site and these links will pass pagerank. </p> <p>They accumulate pagerank and show greenbar. </p> <p>You can put "add to cart" and "view cart" buttons in them. </p> <p>You can give them rel=canonical or redirect them with htaccess if needed.</p> <p>You can give them the same template as your site if you want to put that work into them.</p> <p>There is no reason to avoid PDFs if they are the best choice for presenting your information. You just need to get a mindset about using them creatively.</p></title>
This site is built in DreamWeaver.
I don't use CMS for my most important pages - because I want them to be finely craft arrows... also building LONG content pages with lots of images in Dreamweaver is much easier for me than building them in the tiny window of a CMS.
Great! Glad to hear that you have the fever!
I believe that mentions are valuable. if you are a manufacturer who has products listed and described on lots of sites these mentions will pile up to huge numbers.
Seeing weak manufacturers outranking heavyweight sites makes be believe that mentions are driving rankings.
My category pages show a thumbnail of each item and a unique block of text for that item. This text block is usually 50 to 100 words per item.
So, if I have category pages with 20 items, they are going to have 1000 to 2000 words. These seem to rank really well and they pull in lots of long tail queries.
Im the owner of a mens underwear company start up...... but honestly on a start up who has time for that?
Sir,
There are many underwear sellers out there. I can name at least a dozen and I can't even tell you what kind I am wearing right now.
If you hope to compete with these other companies you will challenge them by using your voice to clearly explain why their product is half ass and yours is not. If you don't have anything to say about that then why are you in this business?
If you can make your case and present your products clearly with enthusiasm, verve, humor and common sense then you have a chance to succeed on the web and I will bet my money on you. If you can't then I am willing to bet a month's pay that you will fail.
I have inserted text related to the category i try to keep my ratio below 7% and under 120 words. but is that enough?
People buying underwear don't give a damn about this. Google doesn't care either. Forget the numbers and do a fantastic job describing your product. If you don't care enough about it then let the underwear selling to somebody else. Why should anybody anywhere buy from you?
Show people that you know your stuff. Explain why your product is the one that they should buy.
I have seen sites ranking #1 under mens underwear with way less content or almost non existent.
Success on the web does not fall to the lazy man or to the sloppy. it goes to the person who does a fantastic job. Since these guys are doing such a crappy job that should motivate you to show them up. When I see crap like that above me it gets my blood pumping to outdo them.
You arrived at this battle about ten years too late. They have a huge head start on you and you must play catch-up if you want to unseat them. They grabbed the high ground when the time was right. Its just like getting the best location on Main Street or at the Mall. You must fight uphill to make up for being tardy. They are not going to step aside for you.
.. plus we are not shedding money to hire a full time employee to take care of that.
II think that this is a job that you should trust to nobody but yourself. Certainly you should know an awful lot more about underwear than they ever did or ever will. Why would you hire a cheap noob to explain your valuable product and try to sell your hard work on your most important marketing place?
Tomorrow get out of bed and decide to make your website the best place on this planet to purchase underwear. Write articles that help people learn to judge quality. Write articles to help them select the right style, the right fabric and the proper fit. Certainly you must know a lot about these things. You probably don't see that type of information on the cheap ass underwear sites. Yours can be different if you get it into your head that building a great website is one of your most important jobs. Make yours the best-on-the-web where people can learn and buy with confidence.
That's how you win on the web.
Maybe your problem is that your ingredients list, images and nutritional information seem to be taken from other websites?
So, you might have a panda problem and you might a copyright problem.
So... did the forum traffic drop... or did the website traffic drop.... and if the website traffic dropped was it traffic from the forum that disappeared.
You have access to the analytics. Study your analytics to see what traffic dropped (referrer and landing pages), what did not drop (referrer and landing pages), and if engagement (average number of views per visitor) changed.
We can only guess from here.
Note that I used the word "study" instead of "look at". Spend some time with the analytics until you understand the changes in traffic patterns. You will not have a good answer to your question without this information.
Tell us the story.
You need completely different AND substantive AND engaging.
Most of my content attacking similar keywords has 500 to 2000 words and 2 to 8 images. Some have a short video.
These pages hold visitors.
Google has become very stingy about giving two positions on the first page of the SERPs. Two years ago I had three and four positions on the first page of the SERPs for lots of my good keywords. Now, it is hard to get more than three unless you are after keywords with very little competition or keywords that are very similar to your brand name. However, I have a product page and an article page at the top of the SERPs for lots of keywords.
I view the three keyword examples that you gave as being very distinct. I would not expect those three articles to be in competition with one another. Maybe "automotive advertising agency" sneaking in the the SERPs for "advertising agency". However, if you are going after this in the USA market the competition for "advertising agency" is not especially easy. I think it would be hard to get two listings on the first page of that SERP.
One of my sites sells a retail product line where big brands hold the top positions. My site ranks at about #5 for the primary keyword; however, I have bombed ALL of the secondary keywords with substantive articles, each featuring a product group that they can purchase from my site. I have video, photos, how to select it, how to fix it, how to use it..... I am still putting up content for every other keyword that I think might pull traffic and some that will not pull much traffic but are interesting to the visitor.
Each of these articles takes a while to develop and I don't get fast pay-back on them, but I know that they will be up there producing for years.... one of these days Google will realize that the big brands don't have shit for content and that I should be number one simply by brute force authorship.
I actually think that the keywords in your file names could each be developed into substantive kickass articles that are absolutely unique.
Advertising agency is a general topic about the wide variety of business that help their clients with advertising. How the business works, where ads are placed, how effective ads are developed and tested. (People write lots and lots of articles about SEO.... the same could be done here).
Automobile advertising agency is a specific type of advertising agency and a person with great expertise could tell most people more than they ever wanted to know about that topic and be distinct from the generic "advertising agency".
Automotive advertising is very different from an agency and articles on that could trace the history of this business, feature many different types of advertising for new and used cars, luxury and economy cars. This article would include web ads, print ads, metal signs, swag, premiums, road maps, road signs. This would be a fun article to write (if you are the right person who really knows this stuff) and the topic could actually be broken down into numerous sub articles with galleries of vintage signs, road signs, print, etc. Amazing content if you have the right person writing and that person knows where to get the info. I bet you could get the guys from that History Channel pickers program and they could do five articles on signs alone.
You see, a person with expertise could develop enormous unique content about these topics. Is this the type of content you are interested in? Maybe, maybe not, but if done well it will be the absolute opposite of spam.
Most websites are on shared hosting and Google knows that. (My guess is that at least 95% of websites are on shared hosting.)
So, I don't think that Google is going to discriminate against sites on shared hosting.
I think that the greater danger of shared hosting is the hosting company cramming too many websites on a server and damaging the performance. And, some hosts promise "unlimited bandwidth" and then throttle your success in other ways.
Most of my sites are on shared hosting. If you have a good host I would not worry about it.
If the blog posts have true value and if there has not been a big investment in offpage SEO, I would simply move them to the primary domain.
That will be a big increase in benefit over what you currently are getting.
If you can figure out a way to canonical or redirect that will be a huge bonus as long as you have not built spammy links.
opinion, if this is keyword stuffing ?...
The copy is written more for SEO than it is for the visitor. I have seen a lot worse. I don't think that it is too risky. A few years ago lots of website content was written this way and lots of it is still out there producing visitors.
opinion, if this could it get penalized by panda?
I doubt it. I think that panda is after thin content and duplicate.
Really this site is dangerous for you if you are his competitor. If they fix the title tags, improve h1, paragraph text and linkage their performance will go up.
A more important projection is....
... How much will the client need to spend each month to become competitive.
You must have the ability to answer that question before you can estimate organic traffic - because you must first be able to make the site rank before public traffic data - by keyword - can be used to make a reasonable traffic estimate.
This is the most difficult question for many SEOs. They will ask the client his budget and have no idea if that is enough money to compete in his niche. And sending 200 troops out to a fight where 20,000 is needed is a waste of 200 troops.
So, average traffic growth data is meaningless because it varies by niche, it varies depending upon spend and most importantly it varies by the skill of the SEO.
Search=43%, Direct=25%, Referral=32%
This site has a tribe of people.
So, it must have some content that is highly appealing to some people. I would break out the analytics to see what type of content is being referred and direct... and what is from search.
I would be sure that I made this content very easy to share.
Does this site have a feed that people can subscribe to? I use feedburner on one of my sites and have about 20,000 subscribers. When I post something new it gets immediate action. This site could do the same thing.
Right.... I have a site that gets low monthly traffic per page. The way for me to get more traffic is to get more pages up. Since it is in a low competition niche the new pages immediately rank really well - so I don't have to worry much about increasing my power. Instead I focus on getting keyword reach with more pages.
This site seems to be successful if it is generating 500,000 pageviews per month.... however, that really boils down to an average of just 50 pageviews per month for the average page.
So, in my mind, some of their content is successful and some of it isn't.
If I was the owner of that site I would want information on what type of content is bringing in the visitors and what kind of content isn't. Then, using the successful content as a guide I would try to produce more of that kind of stuff.
Also, where is this content coming from. Search? Return visitors? Does this site have a feed that has a big tribe of subscribers who account for most of the pageviews. If most of the pageviews are coming from the tribe then a plan to enlarge the tribe or get then to evangelize might yield great results.
I would also look at the content that is not bringing in much traffic from search. Why not? Are the title tags clever instead of keyword targeted? What can be done about that?
There are lots of questions when you have a site like this. Some of the answers will yield payback and some will not.
Toss up a lot of keyword links into those directories. I bet you get hit with Penguin.
A big list of directories on SEOmoz will mean "go here" to lots of people.
Are you on a host that offers "unlimited bandwidth" but then has some hidden throttles to limit your resource use?
...all that I see is pr releases, article submissions and predominately directory listings.
I see the same thing. I don't go after those types of links. I just use that as a sign that the competition is easy.
So I write lots of content for my products... how they are used, how to maintain them, ideas of things to try. These articles get my site out there for lots of keywords, they attract a few links and in this type of competition just a few genuine links are move valuable than a ton of PR, directories and syndicated articles.
Did you know that some shopping cart buttons can be embedded in pdf documents?
You can also place links in your pdf documents to direct traffic to product pages.
Or you can extract the info from pdf documents and publish it on the bottom of your product pages.
Why not just forget about the link and trade these great articles?
That would be a content gift for the visitors, OK with Google and you get a little diversity in content for your blog.
For attribution you can say... "Philip Crothers is an expert on wedding day hairstyles and is the owner of WeddingDayHair.com"
Now you have a brand mention that can still drive traffic and might be a small signal for Google.
Everybody wins. No worries.
If you have experimented with different copies of your ads, you probably know that CTR can vary significantly - in the same SERPs, for the same offer.
CTR can also vary depending upon your bid and where you will position in the ad auction.
You can also write ads with FREE BEER or some other fantastic come-on and that can shoot your CTR up and have no impact on your number of sales yet increase your spend enormously.
So, the answer to your question is "no".
I agree with Irving, "It's just a matter of time until they get penalized." - lots hope its not that long.
Yes, this is it.
I read many of your posts on here, and if I was to ask you if I should do what they a have done with a site, I would guess you would say no - you need to create great content, lots of really great content and post it directly to your own site etc etc - right?
That is what I am doing every day on each of my sites.
For information sites I am trying to make the best page on the web for that topic.
For retail sites I have product pages that are about like everyone else's page - maybe a bit more wordy... but then I have lots of information pages that I try to make the best-on-the-web for that topic.
I attack everything with that method... and pay very little attention to the tricks that others are doing. It takes my eye off of the ball.
Thank you, tfpa. I really appreciate that.
lol.... lots of people don't like my advice... and I have to say that it isn't good for everybody everytime.
Instead of advice, most of the time, these days, I try to say "what I do" and people can decide if they want to do the same.
This has served me beautifully in the past, but I have come to the conclusion that it is no longer a sustainable model and therefore I am in the process of creating one large, worldwide hotel reservations website.
I really agree with this concept.
I know that if it is only a few websites, that this strategy is perfectly acceptable, but since I am talking about 50 to 100 websites,
Like you, I have never seen it done on such a massive scale.
I hope someone who has done this will share their experience.
If you don't get a good response here, I would post the same question on a few other busy SEO forums.
If still no response, I might redirect a couple... see how it goes, redirect a couple more... take it gently and continue as long as desired result is obtained.
Yes, and too much tweaking can cause problems. IMO
I like Irving's answer... my initial impression is...
These are not EMDs. If you are not beating them then they have either earned their positions or you haven't.
I think it is that simple.
could doing all of this at once run us into problems with unnatural link growth?
The problem here could be one of "unnatural links" rather than "unnatural link growth".
Yep, all of my future URLs will be nice and tidy and have SEO value.
Just not changing them. Good thing I am the boss here.
In my opinion, the benefits of modifying a URL are really really low.
There are lots of factors in the algo and the URL is just one very tiny weak one.
The benefit that you get is an incentive to plan your URLs properly the next time.
I run a site that I purchased and I don't care for the URLs that the previous owner created, but I think that it is a waste to redirect pages that have lots of links and have the server repeatedly process a list of URLs in the htaccess file.
So, this isn't just a philosophy, it is what I do on my own sites.
I am lucky that I am not the webmaster for a boss who wants to have all of these tidy URLs... we would have arguments about it.
OK.... which matters to you more?
Helping your domain authority or helping your Google rankings?
Google? Yes?
So, do you think that it will help your Google rankings by putting up spammy blogs that are loaded with spammy links on every free service that you can find? If you have not heard about Penguin and unnatural links penalty, learn about them before answering.
To be successful at newsjacking you need one of two things....
A) a powerful site that can toss second-rate content high into the SERPs
B) a brilliant mind that can come up with fantastic perspectives that everyone who reads them will want to share
"B" is the better path if you can do it because it enables you to build a following.
If you have either of those you might be more successful at specializing in the type of content that really interests you and that you can plan for rather than getting up everyday like a hungry vulture who has to find something in the news to scavange.
Now, if you are like Jay Leno and have a great team of writers and a great ability to present, then maybe you can do a really good job at newsjacking.
There is no substitute for hard work, resources and talent.
Here are the things that rule my content development
Do not pay attention to length. Write enough to cover the subject well, completely and in a very interesting way. If you decide that I need 1000 words or 300 words or 5000 words - that is how you stink up a great article.
Publish lots of nice images with your content. Splurge your budget on them. Don't worry about the bandwidth. Those images will be great for your visitor.
Break up an article with lots of logical segments and communicate that with bold headings. Lots of people scan an article for the headings and read the parts that are interesging to them.
Don't break a nice article across many pages - especially if you have lots of great images. You want people who land on your article to say WOW! Look at thoseimages... look at all of the interesting subheadings. I am going to read this and share with my friendsd. People don't want too click through six pages to read your article. They don't.
There definitely seems to be a sea change whereby much of the focus now is to concentrate on providing good content and great user experience. By getting your audience to remain on your site for longer, sharing your content, and potentially returning to your site again is what should pay dividends....
heh... this is replacing linkjuice. The new rocket fuel for SEO is contentjuice.
For all of the past ten years, every person that I have hired to work on any of my websites has been a person that I have grown to know from their forum participation.
If you read a person's forum posts for a while you can get some idea of their competence for different types of jobs, their style, their communications ability and their generosity.
I have never been disappointed by any of them and have never met any of them face-to-face.
So, if you are looking for a certain type of work, search a forum for questions about the type of jobs you need to have done. Read those questions and see who consistently gives the clearest, most competent and thoughtful advice. That might be your person.
Lots of people who post on forums are available to work for hire. Some are not. If you read their profile page you can usually tell who is available for work and who isn't. Most who do work for hire have a link to their business website on their profile page.
Then create a main "hub" page (the "Complete Guide") that links out to each of these articles, as well as to your actual product page.
This is a very good idea.
It is actually like the category pages on an information site. These can be very competitive because they are optimized for the difficult term, they often have lots of content, and they link to much deeper content elsewhere on the same site - and those pages link back.
I have a blog with 150 category pages and they pull in kickass traffic. Lots of those pages bring in over 1000 visitors per month.
If you have long blog posts and display the first sentence or two on the category page that will not be duplicate content. It is no different than a category page for an ecommerce store. Category pages get out there and compete for serious traffic terms.
Lots of people say don't index them. That's not what I have found and if I noindexed them I would be walking away from a lot of income and more traffic than is received by the rest of the blog combined.
Lately my new content has been taking much longer than normal to start delivering traffic. This was concerning me so I decided to monitor some new pages. A year ago my site would throw new pages into competitive positions overnight. This is a long-established site.
For a keyword difficulty ot 45% I launched a new page on January 2. Here is the time scale for it moving up the SERPs with no linkbuilding.
January 3 - 150
January 17 - 113
January 31 - 82
February 10 - 37
February 20 - 29
March 2 - 29
March 15 - 18
March 29 - 12
April 6 - 10
April 18 - 8
So, I believe that google has become much slower to rank new pages - except those for keywords where accelerating search traffic creates urgency.
There might not have been a manual spam action taken against the site but it could be suffering from a Panda problem from the thin content.
See information about Panda in Marine Haynes post here...
Valuable information. Nice work!
I would look at the ratio of thin/duplicate content to rich/unique content.
Does your homepage and category pages have rich unique content right now? If they do then you might noindex the product pages and hope that the pages that are still in the index recover.
Then start authoring the content that has the best potential to bring in search traffic. Do that first and work your way down to the lower value pages.
If you have thin content everywhere.... I would reauthor my most valuable pages immediately, publish that then noindex the rest in priority of search traffic potential.
Before I put all of that work into a site, I would be sure that it doesn't have a Penguin or unnatural links problem.
This is a Panda problem.
The content is very thin. Less than a unique sentence on many product pages. Lots of misspellings.
There are duplicate content problems. Lots of the content is duplicated on other domains. Lots of the content is duplicated from page to page.
There could be lots of other problems.
If this was my website I would start a complete rewrite of the content. Every product would have at least three paragraphs of content that is absolutely unique, clear and written well. This will improve the site for shoppers and for search engines. It will solve the thin content problem, the duplicate content problem and add lots of keywords that will pull in more traffic.
Before I did that huge writing investment I would have the site checked out by someone who knows how to diagnose Penguin problems. Because you don't want to invest heavily and only fix have of what is killing this site.
Check out this YouMoz post by Marie Haynes...
A Website I manage has been hit hard by the Panda Update. I am really struggling to understand what is seen as a Spammy link.
ohhhh... Panda problems are usually caused by thin content and duplicate content. Penguin problems and unnatural link penanties result from spammy links.
You might want to read the new YouMoz article about these topics by Marie Haynes to get panda and penguin straight.... and also learn how to handle some spammy link problems.
Lots of people - even pro SEOs - don't understand the difference between Panda, Penguin and unnatural links.
Read the article so you don't do damage through improper actions.