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Thank you all for your assistance on this. I was never looking for a guarantee of placement, more for a guarantee of a growth in organic traffic that could be traced to something they did.
I realize that placement these days varies by user so a promise of #1 ranking really is suspicious.
After having bad experiences with a few seo and ppc companies, I would like to find a company that operates on the premise that they should get paid for producing results instead just for signing a contract.
I'm not thinking that any payment is contingent results but that a large portion of the billing is. I also know that it can take several months to get to an seo goal so I'm not taking a "you have one month to fix our site or we don't pay" approach.
Is there a company out there that has enough confidence in their white-hat processes that they actually back their services with some sort of guarantee?
Thank you for the suggestions. It looks like we may have taken a hit from Panda 21 at the beginning of November but we were moving the site to a new server so the days right before the update don't have any analytics data.
The last couple of days saw a spike last year because Advent started this weekend instead of next weekend this year so that's why some of the numbers for this weekend look off.
Overall though, it looks like we hit a peak for most keywords in January and then saw a major decline in February when we received our manual penalty and even though the penalty has been officially revoked, we've never recovered fully.
Thanks for the panguin suggestion. We use chartelligence which actually overlays within GA on any chart which is very nice.
I guess I'll go back and manually disavow those bad links even though I've already submitted them and see what happens.
Back in August we got a manual penalty lifted by Google for spammy links that we never created. This had been affecting us for almost a year. For about six weeks our traffic bounced back up to pre-penalty levels - between 60 and 120% greater a day from Google search traffic.
Since then, our Google organic traffic has decayed to the point where yesterday we were back below our penalty level and we don't have a new penalty.
Can anyone give me some advice about what may have caused this? Link to our site.
Well, if you're in business and trying to make a profit it is actually a more important stat than traffic. I'd rather have 15% conversion on 2000 visitors than 2% on 15,000. Even though they are the same, you have much more room to grow profitably.
I went through OSE a few months ago and got together a list of about 40 domains that we had never asked for links from and were just spam.
I wrote to all that I could asking for removal and then put everything in a spreadsheet and sent it to Google. Two weeks later I was informed that a manual penalty had been removed.
Our organic Google traffic is now up over 150% from last year.
For us it was worth it.
Is there documentation somewhere that says that alerts work differently when you also use webmaster tools?
Well, if you're in business and trying to make a profit it is actually a more important stat than traffic. I'd rather have 15% conversion on 2000 visitors than 2% on 15,000. Even though they are the same, you have much more room to grow profitably.
There isn't a distinction between upper and lower case on your pages but be sure that your URLs are all consistent because http://www.mywebsite.com/CheapHolidaystoEgypt is not the same url as http://www.mywebsite.com/cheapholidaystoegypt.
The section for buying your dvd training lists the price for everyone at $119 and the special price for pro members at - $119.
Then the text says that the special price will be shown when the item is added to the cart where the special price is - $119.
Am I missing something here?
Since these parts of the site aren't anything a spider would be seeing anyway, it really doesn't matter how you get people to the next page.
I typically tell spiders not to even go to folders for things like accounts and checkout.
Strange. I can't tell what you are doing as a redirect. Usually firebug in Firefox gives that information. I would have your tech person make sure that you have a 301 redirect to your main domain if you don't already.
We've been trying to get a dmoz link for 9 years.
You need to replace ##caturl## with whatever the actual url is for each page.
You mentioned seeing links from the non www domain. Where are you seeing these links?
I just wanted to say thank you all for the advice you've given on this board. When I first joined we had been stomped by Panda three times and our traffic was down about 40% from last year.
Since then, we've followed recommendations here and while we aren't quite back to where we were before, our traffic for the last three days from Google is higher than any time since May and trending higher. We are also up in Google rank for 70% of our tracked keywords and showing up for 15% that we weren't even on the radar for in August.
We still have a lot of work to do but know that we are on the right track. We can now do the same on a site that survived the initial hit but got slapped in July.
I just want to reiterate what others have said:
This forum was well worth the subscription.
We've seen a competitor that has used spammy practices for years that no matter what continues to sit at the top of the rankings.
As Ian said, it's maddening as can be but you can't fix Google so you just have to work on improving your own site. (Still working on taking this advice)
SurveyGizmo.com has a very robust feature set but the logic that you want is not something I've seen any survey engine provide that can be built into your site.