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Hi all,

Just wanted to get a modern-day perspective on this tactic as a method of obtaining back links. We've recently (legitimately) polled our customer base both on social media and through our email database (40,000+ people) to rank a bunch of different locations / attractions and put together Top 10 lists based on the results. I was intending to put together "awards" badges and provide them to the operators who won along with a back link from the badge to the main article page with the finalists.

I thought I'd ask here though to see what public opinion is on this as a link building tactic in 2014 as all the resources I could find were a couple of years old. Bear in mind we aren't paying them anything at all, but it is still an obvious attempt to both give them their recognition as well as add to our link profile.

Do you think in this day and age that this kind of action would invoke any Google penalties? And if not, is there any indication why they wouldn't pass as much juice as regular text links?

Thanks for any and all feedback.

Hey all,

We run a large eCommerce site in Australia and are preparing to launch to the Chinese market. Our site has been fully converted to Chinese and displays the version of the site detected as default in the user's browser unless they manually select otherwise. This is done by appending the parameter "?la=zh" onto the end of the URL, so for example the Chinese version would be:

**www.example.com/australia?la=zh **

This then forces the product catalogue to display the relevant language version.

My question is, for SEO purposes and back links in particular, since they aren't really a "true URL" (i.e: strictly speaking they aren't different "pages", just the same page being populated with different characters), would getting links from Chinese websites to the URL "www.example.com/australia?la=zh" really be viewed as any different from just "www.example.com/australia"? Do they pass the same amount of juice and is the difference detected by the engines (thinking mainly about Baidu in particular but of course Google as well)?

Feedback from anyone with experience in SEO for multi-lingual sites would be much appreciated, thanks.

Hi Peter,

Yes you are correct, with the exact match query it drops down to around 6,000. Still, being the top position for a 6k/month search would seem to be more likely to produce more than the 2-3 visits we are getting so far, right?

Thanks for the help.

Hi Brad,

The query is for broad matches, not exact matches.

Thanks.

Hi guys,

As it says in the title, we've recently reached the absolute #1 position for a certain key phrase in the travel industry which the Google Keyword Tool tells me averages 110,000 local (165,000 global) searches a month... however we have received barely any traffic at all over the past TWO months for it and I'm trying my best to determine why.

We've checked on multiple different devices with all forms of personalisation off, different browsers, 3G connections as opposed to office Wi-FI etc. and it still returns us as the #1 rank. Meta descriptions and title tags are pretty much pristine if I don't say so myself, however what should be a very lucrative key phrase is currently returning little to no traffic results.

Has anyone had experience in a similar situation to this? Any possible causes that I might be missing?

Would greatly appreciate any help.

Thanks.

Thanks for the suggestions Dana, very helpful.

First of all I just want to say that I love SEOMoz, it's by far the best no-BS resource for SEO and online marketing information in general on the entire Internet, and well worth the money. HOWEVER, one beef I am starting to have with it recently is...

Most of the content being generated is becoming about "how to market to marketers" or "selling SEO" rather than actual advice or focus selling general products or services. By this I mean that all the new trends towards pumping out content based on research, making fancy infographics etc. etc. are all well and good for those who are trying to market their marketing or SEO talents in general but not THAT applicable to traditional online storefronts.

I work for a fairly large company that sells tickets for theme parks/attractions/tours etc. and SEOMoz was a huge help initially for a recent site redesign, but now every time I log on to check for fresh content it's seemingly a repeat similar advice on how to get links or traffic for an SEO business.

I don't mean this to come off as a whine because as I said SEOMoz is wonderful, but I've conducted endless site searches for (recent) information on traditional online marketing etc. and the ratio just seems to be...off. Anyone else feeling this way?

I agree Michael, it's a stereotype sure but most of the stuff churned out for the sake of being churned out as "fresh content" that is written in poor English simply doesn't have a use or practical function on the Internet other than a desperate attempt to soak up whatever meagre traffic they can. It's especially glaring considering their continued mantra has been "write for the user instead of the search engines" when these pages/posts are doing exactly the opposite...

Considering Google seem to be on a great crusade with all their algorithm updates to raise the overall "quality" of content on the Internet, i'm a bit concerned with their seeming lack of action towards penalising sites that contain terrible English. I'm sure you've all noticed this when you attempt to do some proper research via Google and come across an article that "looks" to be what you're after, then you click through and realise it's obviously been either put together in a rush by someone not paying attention or putting much effort in, or been outsourced for cheap labour to another country whose workers aren't (close to being) native speakers.

It's getting really old trying to make sense of articles that have completely incorrect grammar, entirely missing words, verb tenses that don't make any sense, randomly over-extravagant adjectives thrown in just as padding, etc. etc.

No offense to all those from non-native speaking countries who are attempting to make a few bucks online, but this for me is becoming by far more of an issue in terms of "quality" of information online as opposed to some of the other search issues that are being given higher priority, and it just seems strange that Google have been so blasé about it up to this point - especially given so many of these articles and pages are nothing more than outsourced filler for cheap traffic. I understand it's probably hard to code in something so advanced, but it would go a long way towards making the web a better place in my opinion.

Anyone else feeling the same way? Thoughts?

Hey all,

We've seen quite a large recent increase in traffic on our site (we sell travel experiences such as tours, tickets to theme parks etc.) but not much in the way of increased conversions as a result, so we are looking into further ways to optimise conversions. I'd like to know what thoughts people have on making product descriptions either bullet points or paragraphs, or some combination of both.

We currently have paragraphs of information not just to explain the product but for on-page SEO purposes as well which seems to work well for drawing people to the site, and we have information further down the page on inclusions/exclusions etc. but it is well "below the fold". Do you think it's worth moving at least the "highlights" of the product up to the top of the page so that customers can instantly see what's on offer "at a glance"?

Any answers or research people can direct me to would be greatly appreciated, cheers.

Hi all,

Just wanted to get a modern-day perspective on this tactic as a method of obtaining back links. We've recently (legitimately) polled our customer base both on social media and through our email database (40,000+ people) to rank a bunch of different locations / attractions and put together Top 10 lists based on the results. I was intending to put together "awards" badges and provide them to the operators who won along with a back link from the badge to the main article page with the finalists.

I thought I'd ask here though to see what public opinion is on this as a link building tactic in 2014 as all the resources I could find were a couple of years old. Bear in mind we aren't paying them anything at all, but it is still an obvious attempt to both give them their recognition as well as add to our link profile.

Do you think in this day and age that this kind of action would invoke any Google penalties? And if not, is there any indication why they wouldn't pass as much juice as regular text links?

Thanks for any and all feedback.

Considering Google seem to be on a great crusade with all their algorithm updates to raise the overall "quality" of content on the Internet, i'm a bit concerned with their seeming lack of action towards penalising sites that contain terrible English. I'm sure you've all noticed this when you attempt to do some proper research via Google and come across an article that "looks" to be what you're after, then you click through and realise it's obviously been either put together in a rush by someone not paying attention or putting much effort in, or been outsourced for cheap labour to another country whose workers aren't (close to being) native speakers.

It's getting really old trying to make sense of articles that have completely incorrect grammar, entirely missing words, verb tenses that don't make any sense, randomly over-extravagant adjectives thrown in just as padding, etc. etc.

No offense to all those from non-native speaking countries who are attempting to make a few bucks online, but this for me is becoming by far more of an issue in terms of "quality" of information online as opposed to some of the other search issues that are being given higher priority, and it just seems strange that Google have been so blasé about it up to this point - especially given so many of these articles and pages are nothing more than outsourced filler for cheap traffic. I understand it's probably hard to code in something so advanced, but it would go a long way towards making the web a better place in my opinion.

Anyone else feeling the same way? Thoughts?