I would not do any of 1, 2 or 3.
I would pick one of those domains and put all of my efforts into it. Which one to pick? I would avoid hyphens and go with something easy to remember.
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I would not do any of 1, 2 or 3.
I would pick one of those domains and put all of my efforts into it. Which one to pick? I would avoid hyphens and go with something easy to remember.
I think that google is smart enough to tell nav code from content.
Most people who do this are probably wasting their time.
I put the nav code at the top... it contains some of my most important links.
Think about it.... If you think that Google can't identify nav code then this is like putting the links to your most important category pages in the footer. Do you really want to do that?
Google is doing this to lots of sites. They do it in the organic SERPs and also in Adwords.
My sites have this problem too.
I believe that it is a service to some webmasters who have a nice domain but write crappy title tags but it also hides brilliant marketing.
So how can it rank number one on Google?
Sit down with a spreadsheet program and tabulate all of the costs incurred to complete a sale. That includes merchandise cost, shipping containers, labor, postage, labels, etc. etc. To make a profit on the sale your CPA must be greater than Revenue minus Costs. To stay in business you must generate enough sales to cover your fixed costs such as rent, insurance, etc.
I suggest seeing an accountant if you don't have a good handle on your costs.
If I was producing content that is a "big hit"... I would be posting it on my own site (and nowhere else) and building links into it there.
Forget this....
" What should I do to increase my PA & DA and to have top 10 positions by other keywords?"
Do a lot more of this....
"Now I`m adding new pages with unique content."
There is a very good chance that some of these pages will be filtered from the search results.
So, your current content has some risk of being filtered. It might not happen but it could.
It is always best to produce unique content.
Worry if your traffic has fallen.
Otherwise, its only a number.
...it doesn't really fit the design of the page...
I would be changing the design.
lol... I understand what you are saying.
My ideas on this subject are different from most.
I am really stingy with my content and not ready to part with it for a few links. I want my site to be the only location on the web where the article exists and then any links that it collects will be directly to my site.
If you have links to 100 category pages on your homepage and each of those category pages links to links to 100 subcategory pages, each linking to 100 products then that should give you 1 million products, none deeper than three clicks from home.
I like the answer given by Alex.
Every time that I have needed help with SEO or website development I have always found a great person in the forums that I follow. This method enables me to see their competence, generosity and personality in advance of hiring them. If they do a great job of guiding people for free, I imagine what I will get if I pay them.
I have never been disappointed using this method.
(I second Alex's recommendation of Ryan Kent. He is very competent, extremely generous, explains clearly and has a personality that any reasonable person should get along with. I would hire him to work on my own sites. I don't do SEO for hire because I am underwater running my own sites.)
I get a few links from people who manually grab my content and repost it. But most of the links that I get this way are from sites that I suspect are built from robots crawling the web, grabbing content and mashing it up into a website.
I would honestly don't like getting links this way because the content that they grab and republish is more valuable than the links that I get back.
If your site is less powerful than the sites that are republishing your content then they could outrank you in the search engines and then they would receive the links earned by your content. Also, if those sites have more traffic than your site they could get links from visitors that you would prefer to see going to your own website.
No opinions here... just facts....
PDF files show in your Google backlinks
PDF files can contain anchor text backlinks
PDF files accumulate pagerank
PDF files pass pagerank
If you place obvious links in PDF files people will click them and land onto your .html pages
Other people sometimes grab your PDF files and place them on their own website giving you backlinks from their domain if you were smart enough to embed links within them
PDF files can be optimized, rank high in the search engines and pull in a LOT of traffic
Some types of content displays and prints much better in a PDF file than it does on a webpage
PDF files allow you to control the "look" of printed documents
A huge report is often better posted as a PDF than as html documents
You can lock PDF documents to keep others from monkeying with your content (determined people will get around this).
Contrary to popular belief, PDF documents can be monetized... just toss in a shopping link or links to pages where money can be made. I have not heard of anyone paying for ad space in a PDF but there is no reason why that could not be done.
A lot of information outside of SEO should be considered before redirecting a domain.
These are common reasons why sites disappear from the SERPs.
I didn't look at the site. Looking at a site for these types of problems is risky takes a large amount of time.
It could be... malware... hidden text... infringing content... Panda.... a variety of other things... but most likely it is devalued links.
If I had a client who built hand-made kites and he enjoyed sharing information about them. I would encourage him to start his own blog rather than tell him to go out commenting on blogs owned by other people.
The last thing that I would do is to go out myself commenting about kites and trying to get links for him. I don't know a damn thing about kites and my comments would make him look like an idiot.
You didn't mention that most blogs have nofollow on the links.
I think that most people who own blogs or read them often can spot blog comments left for the purpose of acquiring links. It really makes the client look lame.
Submit a description of your article to sites such as reddit, stumbleupon, slashdot, digg... there you keep the article on your site and the visitors to reddit or these other sites rate its popularity.
Also, you can contact other websites or bloggers who already link out to great content in your topic area. If your content is really good then they will want to share your site with their visitors.
I am a published author and researcher.
Yo! If this is true, do not give your articles away. They are far to valuable. Post them on your own site only.
That sounds like a great approach.
The effectiveness is going to be impacted by "how you do it"..... Big newspaper sites make their living from getting visitors to read more pages so visit some like NYTimes, LATimes, CNN, etc to get ideas on how they present.... Recommended, most read, most emailed, popular, etc links.
I believe that the problem is.... people are spending too much time worrying about the value of a link and not enough time producing something worth linking to.
Nobody knows but Google... but I think that advertising links and reference links (usually) have very different formats.
Rather than use numbers I would use qualitative measure....
- How relevant is the site?
- Where is the link on the page? (in footer?... in contextual paragraph?.... in sidebar?... above the fold?.... in reference citation?
- Is the link on a kickass domain or a dog?
I think that these are much more important than numbers.
Keep in mind that since 2009 that google has many new initiatives- especially universal search. They have gotten much more aggressive with product search, brand suggestions, video, image search. They have become better webmasters and now keep a lot more traffic on their own site. Also in the past two years more and more people are using Adwords and they are getting much smarter.
So, it is possible that your drop in traffic is because of google's improved webmastering..... or, it could be a drop in your rankings... or both.
A #1 position in the SERPs brings less traffic now than it did in 2009... and a #4 position brings a lot less.
Some linkbuilding jobs require a magician. Maybe this is a job to decline?
We never give content away. Never have, and never will.
If you have great content promote it heavily on your own site. Submit it to sites such as slashdot, stumble, digg, reddit as appropriate. Make it very easy for visitors to tweet, like and share. Other than that I don't market my content, instead I spend that time to produce more.
Links accumulate slowly at first but then once you start getting a little traffic the links arrive a bit faster.
That's my experience.
I myself would be more inclined to spend a few days creating 4-5 nice articles and offer them up for guest blogging with anchor text links.
Consider spending 8 to 10 days making these articles best-on-the-web and posting them on your own site where people will link to them because of their merit.
Consider posting excellent content in a dedicated area of the merchants site..... great articles such as...
"How to select a mountain bike tire for sand, mud, rocky, road or leaf litter surfaces"
"How to change a mountain bike tire in 60 seconds"
A sporting goods site could have hundreds of these articles that answer common customer questions and demonstrate expertise and credibility. They also sell products such as the tools needed to change that tire.
Mountain bike blogs will link to these articles individually or as a collection if you have done a great job. Ask them to write one for you and they will link to it bragging (and you get free content).
These will be articles with lots of photos, quotes from experienced riders, short video and more. They can attract links from mountain bike clubs, manufacturers, bloggers and more.
Your entire site is probably considered to be "cookie cutter".
You have a lot of cookie cutter content..... the major content on the pages below is identical except that the city name is switched out.
http://www.akinsplumbing.net/plumber-service/alpharetta.html
http://www.akinsplumbing.net/plumber-service/braselton.html
Pages like these have failed in the google search engine since about 2004.
They get indexed, get ranked and then google drops all of them on your site except one or two.
If you want to compete for all of these cities you will need to invest in unique, original, substantive content for each city. Hopefully if you do that your site will recover but it might take a long time to get back.
Many people call these "doorway pages".
A quote from Google Webmaster Guidelines.... "Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content."
"Nobody will be able to diagnose this without a lot of guessing unless you provide a lot of information about your level of content duplication, link sources, are you being scraped, link destinations and more."
What keywords you used to rank for and what recent work has been done on the site are also very important.
OK... so you are not banned or whacked for malware.
Nobody will be able to diagnose this without a lot of guessing unless you provide a lot of information about your level of content duplication, link sources, are you being scraped, link destinations and more.
So, if you want to get deeper analysis the best thing to do would be to hire someone or post your URL so that people can look at the site. Still you will get mostly guesses as this type of problem is difficult to diagnose and requires more time than Q&A posters are able/willing to spend.
Do you rank for your company name ?
Are you gettting SOME traffic or ZERO traffic from Google.
Yes! By all means. Do it!
Yes, your competitor might do it.
If it is a KW.com it might rank easily for KW queries.
You are building a business on poorly defined turf.
I have been seeing this since mid-2010.
It does not need to be a branded search. We have #1 through #4 for two and three word queries - not branded at all.
OK... 12 monthly local searches... not a lot.
Our number was 1000 and that justified paying the ransom. However, a few years ago we would have been at 12 like you. The seller of the domain without the hyphen knew that our traffic was growing and he used that information to ask more.
If I was you, I would buy now if you are building a good site and if you want that domain.
If you have a website that people request by name then getting the domain without the hyphens is very important in my opinion.
Our domain was longer than yours. I don't know how many people type our domain in the address bar - that data is not possible to obtain. However, if you use the number of domain queries in google or see if your domain appears in the Adwords Keyword tool then you can get some idea of domain query volume. If google lists your domain in the Adwords keyword tool then you have at least the beginning of a brand and should consider getting rid of that hyphen. The same if your domain shows in the instant search menu.
We had a k-w.com that was getting over 1000 domain queries per month. The owner of kw.com wanted a ransom for the domain and knew that we were getting some nice traffic because he was getting some of it. We refused to pay for years but finally paid it because the harder we worked the more traffic we lost.
We justified paying for it on the basis of a few lost sales per week over the next several years. Plus getting a domain that was much easier to communicate.
If you want tweeted then place something on your site that is highly tweetable.
If you want shared them do something that people will want to tell their friends.
Funny content, free stuff, a great video, a news article are examples of things that people tweet about. What can you do?
Great websites link to other great websites all of the time so unintentional reciprocal linking occurs all of the time. So I don' t think that reciprocal linking is the sign of sometimg evil. It occurs naturally. If you are quality linking to relevant quality I would not be concerned - but I would no go out arranging these types of links with other websites.
It will mainly help the page that is being linked to but some benefit will be sent throughout your site.
I would have the link go to your homepage or to pages on your site that are specific for each supplier. The choice dpends upon what keywords these pages can be optimized for, your current rankings for those pages and what parts of your business that you want to emphasize. Think about exposure, profit margins, where you have capacity, what you enjoy doing.
The most probable consequence (not calling it a penalty)... is that the links will be ineffective.
They might help at first and then your rankings will fall when the devaluation occurs..
Consider posting detailed article pages that enthusiastically show how to use your products with lots of photos, graphics and maybe video. Create some showing the benefits of using your products. These should not be chest-thumping content, instead friendly and generously informative.
Promote them across the site with "Learn How To Use This Product" links or images.
These detailed pages might attract links. They can boost your credibility. People will use them as reference documents. Make them easily printable for use offline.