Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I don't have a percentage but I read somewhere that nearly 1/2 of the "buyers" on Google look at shopping results.

I think that shopping is important.... and becoming even more important over time.

The down site for me is that to get good sales from that channel you have to be very competitive on price.

This is a REALLY good answer.  I wish I could give more than one thumbs up.

I have two concerns....

Are you getting a lot of robot visitors instead of human visitors?  If you are getting lots of robots then those visits will not be valuable to your advertisers and they will eventually stop paying to appear on your site.  The best advertisers are really smart about this.

Are these sports teaser posts accompanied by links to other websites.  If that is happening I would cut them off right away because they are probably making you a linkfarm for spammy websites.

Wow.... if you can buy Keyword.com I would grab it and redirect my current site to it.  The only reason I would not do that is if my current site had enormous branding value or was much broader in products and services than that keyword.

Keyword domains rank a little easier for exact match queries and my experience says that they have a slightly better conversion rate than most other domains.

Your original question... if you buy and redirect would it help?.... Yes, the link value of the site would transfer to the page that was the target of the redirect.

If I owned your site I would rewrite the text from scratch.  The more different you make it from the original the more traffic you will receive.  Also the more substance and length that you can include the more long tail traffic will be received.

Syndicating your content creates competitors and now that you are not ranking the damage is obvious.  So you can spin the articles and stay in the doghouse or redo them properly and have a chance at recovery.

I would be creating content that puts the syndicated copy to shame - higher quality, more substantive, broader coverage.

Rewrite them.

I have seen a few situations like yours...

I introduced those folks to the Adwords keyword tool and once they could experiment with it and see search volumes for themselves then they gave up the hard line about using their language.

Some people are empowered by information.

.... that could backfire on you.. lol

a little off-topic, but relevant

A post made by link trader Maluk nearly ten years ago but still relevant today... (today you would add "nofollow" and scripted links to his complaint....

http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/warning-ref-link-partners-5513.html

dex?

I don't think it seems wise to leave them up as "SOLD"

Don't make them dead links.  Instead, create a portfolio of past work.   These pieces might attract links, they might inspire sales, they will showcase craftsmanship and style.

Remove the price and any sales yada yada... and then add when the piece was made and a little more information about it.

You might not need a separate page for each one... maybe a gallery of emerald earrings or diamond pendants?... a big long page of beautiful work... Lots of visitor will scroll down that page and decide... "I want one like this but with a ruby"

I don't envy your situation.

I think that I might try another phone call to the client advising that a two week (or whatever) delay is in the best interest of his business.....

.... I would be willing to risk his temper than do something that I don't recommend.  Lots of clients would cuss you now but thank you down the road.

... just saying what I would do.. not trying to argue.

Thanks... that is nice traffic...

So, if this was my site I would tell the dev guys that we need the version conflicts solved ASAP.

I would not move the directory or the marketing pages.

I would put pressure on the dev guys and not allow impatience to compromise the long-term success of the site.

Is the directory getting any traffic from any search engine?

Has the directory gotten any valuable links that were not created by you?

If the answer to those questions is "no" or "very little" then I'd say that it has very little SEO value and could be a weight on the rest of the site.

I have used SiteTuners for landing page optimization.

Highly recommended.  Great people!  Smart too!

author meta - no

footer link - yes

Lots of people who have kickass traffic from sources outside of Google are getting that traffic from subscriptions.  If you have a blog that has, say 20,000 email and RSS subscribers and you post every day, then you could easily get x00,000 visitors per month from your subscribers.

You could also get a lot of traffic by having your blog feed posted out to your facebook and twitter accounts.  If you have a lot of friends and followers it will get passed along.

The key to getting big traffic outside of search is developing an Audience.

I was wondering if the amount of traffic for long-term queries or the diversity of long term queries fell.

Rankings might still be at #1 for the primary terms but with drop off occurring on the many secondary terms.

Google and competitors are constantly changing... could be one of these....

- Product search with big images newly appearing in your SERPs

- More aggressive adwords appearing in your SERPs (google getting more aggressive with the display or a competitor of yours gunning for  all of your sales)

- A competitor in your SERPs shouting a kickass price or free shipping in his title tags

- There could be many other things that google or competitors might have done

- Google now showing links to branded SERPs above position #1

But... my bet is that your title tags were changed and now you are poorly optimized for SERP position competition or poorly optimized for eliciting clicks.

If I was doing the SEO I would be hesitant to accept a % of sales agreement if the term were only 18 months.  The big work is up front and the gravy is down the road.

My concerns are:

- the size of the site

- the amount of content that is trivial or duplicate

- the level of competition in the niche

- are your products overpriced?... I do my job but you still don't sell

- is your site optimized for conversions?... I get traffic but nobody buys

===========

Affiliates work for a % of sales... but they work on their website, not yours.

Instead of working on your site, I would instead work on my own because I can probably find an affiliate program that will pay me about 5% long term for referring sales to them.  By doing that I am a free agent who builds equity in his own property and can offer the sales to an office supply store in my own town or even one on the other side of the country.

There are a lot of really hard-working, extra smart affiliates out there who have the resources to put a new site into the money quickly.   You might consider that route?

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

Not anything you asked but..... "we have a staff of 3 in the website dept - but with 10 active sites its alot of work." .... I would explore reducing the number of sites and putting more effort into each one.  When you attack which would be better?  Ten peashooters or two battleships?

...any other steps we can take to ensure neither site gets "dinged" by the search engines...

What you are doing will almost assure that one of the sites will be filtered from the search results.  And if you are going to have lots of links between these  sites I am willing to bet  one month's pay that one of them will be filtered from the SERPs in under six months.

other meta tags to let Google know that we are not scraping

Google doesn't really care if you scraped that content or if it was a gift from the Pope.  They don't like to show duplicate content in their SERPs and will work to filter as much of it as possible.  Adding meta tags will do nothing......

Your primary problem is cross-domain duplicate content... adding "our partner over at resources.site.com recently published the following report ... yada, yada....." sounds like more duplicate content WITHIN the domain.

There are no shortcuts.  If you want to ensure that both sites will perform well you will need to pay the price of unique content.

this isn't ideal but it's what I've got to work with

If you were my employee I would  hope that you would try to educate me.

The human nose works best for this job.

Yes, linkvalue from Website A will transfer to Website B.

This will work best if Website A and Website B are about the same topic.  If they are not about the same topic then this might not be a good idea.

Also, before you do this you should ask.... 1) do both of these sites have the same linksources? If they do then those duplicated links might not be worth much.... also, 2) will the webmasters who linked to Website A be pleased to see that they are now linking to Website B.  If not, you will probably lose some of your links.

Good luck!

Grab appropriate social sites to gain control of the real estate.

Post all valuable content on the main website.   If you believe that people will like for a doctor in the SERPs then that should be the focus of best content.  If you think that they will get a doc from social media then it might be worth doing.

If the physician has bought into social media and has a practice that would look engaged there then you might try it.  However if the Doc is an old fart like me he might look out of place on social.

That's right... don't try to beat someone by mimicking their methods - instead do something superior.

The problem in most cases is...  The content on each of these pages is identical except for the color of the product.  There might be 150 words describing the product and 149 of them are the same on every page.  The one word that changes is the color.

These pages very often are filtered from the search results.

The solution is to write entirely different content for every variation of every product.... or have one page for each different style of jeans where any of the colors can be purchased.

The choice between these can be made by determining the search volume for jeans of a specific color and how well your site already competes for the style.

Lots of people come to these forums looking for numbers and formulas.

If the link is going to be on what looks like a quality site then it doesn't matter what the page authority is...

.... and if the site has a high page authority but it looks like a crappy manipulative site then why would you want a link on it?

I think that if you have pages for

Grey Armani Jeans, Blue Armani Jeans, White Armani Jeans, Black Armani Jeans, Brown Armani Jeans, Green Armani Jeans, etc. etc......

... the title tags are the smallest part of your problem.

I am specifically referring to tools that evaluate the content of Blogs, etc and not the performance of the blog,

Content is evaluated, one-visitor-at-a-time.

What I think is gold you might think is crap.

Content that is successful for traffic stream "A"... might fail completely with traffic from source "B".

XXX means different things to different people.... in Appalachia it means "been through the still three times".  So, someone should register moonshine.xxx and build a site.

3. Should we sacrifice SEO for a good business idea?

Note that this is a relatively high profile project, where thousands of sites will be listing hundreds of our products

I think that you just answered your own question.

Also, what is to prevent you from writing your own content for these products or developing very generous "help" information that everyone everywhere will link to.

You are in the driver's seat both ways if you are willing to do some work and play your cards intelligently.

You are the gurus for this product, right?

We've spun out content from a single finance related news/analysis site (running for about 2 years) into several topic-specific sites on individual topics.  Anything to bear in mind when setting up a related 'family' of sites with linking between them?

Yes... the links between these sites will be nearly worthless.

Here is an alternative idea...

Keep track of what email questions and concerns you have coming in and develop a page that has a drill down menu for answering them.  Call that the "contact us" page... try to have questions answered by self service and those that can't be answered by self service should go to a staff member. Focus first on reducing email before sharing it.

Also, maybe one of the staff members is really good at email, working with customers and likes doing that job.  Instead of offloading to everyone (you know some people will not like that job) find out first if someone you know will be good wants to do that job.

If I was building from scratch I would build one single site.  It gives you the opportunity to cross-sell, it gives you the opportunity for a large impressive site, and the site will collect links from two different types of art collectors - instead of just one.

The site currently ranks reasonably well due to content, age and has some decent inbound links. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

You are winning.  Do not change this.  It would be a huge mistake to tear off 1/2 of the site and place it on a new domain with no links and no authority.

Your competitors are anyone who has a website in the same SERPs as your important keywords.  So, yes, Wikipedia is your competitor and they can really damage your traffic.

Also... keep in mind that your traffic is just one new page away from many other websites.  For example... if you start making a lot of money selling widget cases and widgets.com hears you are making big money.   They could place a new page about widget cases on their website and be at the top of your SERPs tomorrow.

The most dangerous competitor is usually the one who has not yet arrived.

Thumbs up Anthony...  Valid post.  Everyone should give you thumbs up for such a generous (and accurate) assessment.

I do hand-write each one. I am a content man.   You look like a content man, yourself judging by the length and generous amount of time you put into this post.  

I agree with you that the content route isn't for everyone and that even with great content you still need traffic into it to generate links. However, I think that attracting the links can be easier than many people think.  For example... if you write a great article about science or tech it might be successful on slashdot and attract a lot of visitors and links from just a posting there.  For other topics stumbleupon, reddit, digg might work.

Or, as long as you have just a little traffic into your site, instead of spending the time to "market" just turn out another article.  I agree that links accumulate very slowly this way but they do accumulate and they are great links.  Articles might launch without much rankings at all but a year later they have reached visibility without promotional effort (as long as you do have high quality content).

I think that the concerns that you describe are valid and correctly point to my method as being slower to rank.  But at the same time it is building a more valuable site.

You have done a great job explaining your position and I agree with what you say.  I hope that you will link to this thread frequently when you think people need to see the alternative point of view.

I'll close with adding one more point in favor of your argument.... The type of content that succeeds with passive linkbuilding needs to be above and beyond what the typical author produces.  You need best-on-the-web writing with media such as great photos, data, references, and maybe some graphs.  A big investment and expensive to produce.  Most people don't have the resources or desire to produce it.  If you don't have that then this method isn't going to work at all.

Nice post.  Great debate is what makes a good forum.

I have done nothing for the websites no links, no updates.

This sounds like the problem.  Lots of sites have a team of people putting out blog posts, articles and new content every day.

Just an example....  tell people how to use your products for maximum enjoyment...

For example if you sell mountain bikes articles about.... how to select mountain bike tires.... how to change a mountain bike tire in under 60 seconds... recommended tools for off-road biking... how to true a bike wheel (rear)... how to true a bike wheel (front).... how to clean the mountain bike chain.... geeezz...  I could go on forever...

So... give everything that you need to make your customers experts at  buying... owning... riding... maintaining... racing their mountain bikes... and make your staff look like expert mountain bikers and all-round good guys.

PS... I am not talking about light weight trivial pedestrian articles... these would be substantive, complete and detailed articles with lots of big juicy photos.  And you need a video of me changing the mountain bike tire in 42 seconds.

I know a way to make linkbuilding happen with zero work.  ZERO.

Produce kickass content.  Links arrive like magic.... and we are talking about GREAT links... not the spammy links that most other methods produce.

One problem with "building" links is that the more of them you acquire the harder they are to get.

Lots and lots of people ask this question... but think about it....

If I answered... "Fifty links is too many.".....   and you listened.....

.... but all of the websites on the first page of Google for your keyword were naturally earning 200 per week.... you could work forever and never make first page.

You need information about relative link velocity and link quality.

It is possible that you and three other people working would never be able to create enough links.

Thomasnet is a large site with a nice, but not overwhelming number of links.

Also, a lot of their competition is in naive markets where they compete against much smaller sites.  Although Thomasnet is not a major "powerhouse" they do have a nice number of links and that gives them enough authority to be a strong competitor in the naive and smaller markets.

It's all in the execution....

If you add a brand new, unique, substantive, interesting and accurate article every few days I bet your website will grow very powerful over time.

But, if you change yada yada yada text to yaba yaba yaba text you might get a little tiny boost in the SERPs for a while but it's not going to be enough to make a difference in your wallet.

People who try to impress their visitors usually rank a lot better than people who try to impress Google.

I'm a developer with little SEO / Marketing skills.

Invest in yourself.  Spend that $1000 having a great SEO do a study and recommend on your site.  They study it, make a list of tasks that can be done to improve your site, then spend an hour on the phone with you to improve your SEO.

This improves your site immediately and gives you skills that you can use over time.

Consider a design that has flash elements and easily spiderable links.  Don't leave anything to chance.

What are good sources to buy traffic and video views?

If you want numbers then I don't think that there are any good sources.  However, if you are promoting to a specific audience then try Adwords.

Most SEOs don't recommend buying traffic... instead they recommend setting a goal of who you want to target and what you want them to do when they arrive at the site - then defining a traffic source to accomplish that goal.  Possible traffic sources might be Adwords, banner ads on specific sites, etc. or it could be as radical as buying a successful website.

Some term variants like this convert a lot better than others. My money is on "covers" - but I could be wrong.

So I would use the term where (traffic * conversion rate) will be highest.

If you don't have tracking to get a conversion rate you can get some data with Adwords testing.

Some term variants like this convert a lot better than others. My money is on "covers" - but I could be wrong.

So I would use the term where (traffic * conversion rate) will be highest.

If you don't have tracking to get a conversion rate you can get some data with Adwords testing.

This is a really good answer. Accurate, complete, very generous. Nice.

I would do in this order....

1. Make content rich service description pages for Town A, B, and C.

2. When they start ranking as well as your current homepage I would then reoptimize the homepage for the Portland metro area.

You were asking the wrong question.... but PeterM22 gave a great answer.

I'd do what he says and forget about Options 1 2 and 3.