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Over the weekend (spillover from last week I assume) there was some more changes in regards to exact match domain names. From what I have heard, it is impacting lower quality exact match domain names as well as redirects from those domain names.
I have seen a significant dip on one of my sites that has a redirect from cheap-productname.biz, and think that is the reason why. I am going to give it some time for the dust to settle before doing anything about it.
Are you sure it's the seomoz toolbar? Do you use any others? In the past, Firefox has been a bit of a memory hog, maybe it's still the case? It could be happening with 20 tabs open regardless of what toolbars you have installed.
I do a combination of things.
First, I mask my affiliate urls. I do domain.com/purchase34.php which redirects to the affiliate URL. This might also help your click rate, as the purchase or buy or book.php URL looks better than a lot of affiliate URLs out there.
Then I block that /purchase with robots.txt.
Finally I still no-follow the links.
This works pretty well for me, none of the purchase URLs show up in Google and I don't believe any of them are passing link juice.
Cheers,
Vinnie
I don't see why this is getting downvoted. Traditionally Google does make corrections after a significant update. The website in question is still receiving traffic and isn't completely out of the index, and could very well see the rankings go back in a week or two.
If you panic and start making site changes immediately, you may not know what the cause of the problem was. If you go and change title tags, remove some spammy looking links, change the anchor text and a handful of other things you would not know which was effective and which wasn't.
It's like pulling your goalie in hockey after going down 2-0 in the first 5 minutes. Let the updates play themselves out for a week or two and go from there.
Something to note is that the problem could fix itself. Out of that 3-5% of the queries impacted, some sites are gonna get hit incidentally. Google seems to be decent at spotting these over time and fixing it. Sometimes people get the short end of the stick though.
There is one thing I always do in the week or two following an update: nothing at all
Let the fallout happen, and see what other people are saying. While we know they did the update, we don't have a ton of metrics yet on what bigger sites got hit. Once you do you will be better equipped to assess the situation.
I see a lot of people panic when they drop. They want to build links, change the title tags, tweak the KW density and change their menu structure all at once. Even if these were all practical, how could you know which one was the most effective if you did them all within a few weeks of each other?
Cheers,
Vinnie
Looks like we posted this at about the same time! I will just close mine and discuss it in yours.
A few references:
http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-update-targeting-webspam-in-search-results-119295
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html
Cheers,
Vinnie
Edit: Someone beat me to the punch, here is the thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-webspam-algo-update-24-4-12
Let's just discuss it there.
So Google has said they are doing another wave of algorithm updates that could impact anywhere from 3-5% of SERPs. I saw it here:
http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-update-targeting-webspam-in-search-results-119295
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html
Has anyone seen any changes? I've heard from a few friends that their sites are bouncing all over the place, which seems to happy a lot during these updates. We might not actually know the fallout for a few days/weeks/months.
I saw a few of my smaller sites take a hit, but most of mine have stayed the same.
Anyway what do you guys think? Sometimes an update like this can be a wake-up call to people who think they are doing white hat stuff but may be pushing the envelope a bit too much.
Thoughts?
Perfectly said. I did this, as well as create redirects for all my affiliate links (to mask the URLs). So now visitors will click site.com/order55.php which redirects to the affiliate link. So I can check all of the traffic to the order.php pages, but also see events/goals in my analytics.
This is a great answer and a great post. Lots of affiliates run into this problem and have no idea what a good bounce rate might be in their industry, so could possibly assume something in the 70's is good.
Cheers,
Vinnie
I can't get into specifics with the URLs, but one of my coworkers did 2 of the niche plus packages (ran around $300) and had good results. He jumped from 13th to 7th and I think 12th to 5th for phrases that averaged around 3500 monthly searches at $5-6/click. That was the only change he made during the 6 weeks he ordered the package, and has sustained the rankings for 5+ months with minimal changes ever since.
Another person had a site go from 25 to 15 for a phrase that gets 9000 searches at $5.40 a click.
Granted these are only three cases and I can't show you the on page or strength of the other links they have had, or even the competitors. But I think it shows that it could help in some cases.
Thought I'd just post a reply to see if anyone else is interested. It looks like we have about 8 people going to discuss Joomla and SEO, and probably 10-15+ to discuss blogging, so it should be a good turnout for the first meetup.
Vinnie
Great insight! I agree about your free lunch metaphor. That's why I am looking for a company/builder that I might have to pay a little extra, but will stay out of the bad neighborhoods and avoid using the junk link networks.
Guest blogging is one of my favorite link building methods, but at the end of the day I am looking for some diversity. I realize that some of these link build services won't necessarily provide that, but they can get me a wider range of linking root domains.
Of course with services like these, I am usually ultra conservative with the anchor text as well. I will almost always do brand name or full URL for 80% of the anchors from these networks, so it looks pretty organic. For the other 20% I will scatter in some phrases I want to rank for, and occasionally even get some "click here" anchor texts.
I will shoot you a PM about some link builders.
Cheers,
Vinnie
I was looking more at their higher end packages. I've heard good things about their link niche plus package (or whatever they have renamed it). I agree some of their article stuff looks like rubbish, and a lot of their really basic SEO stuff looks bad. Anything related to blogs I'd rather try and arrange myself via guest blogging.
I actually did a Hoth package last year when I met the guys at a convention. It gave us a boost for a month or two, but then we dropped. I wouldn't wanna order 5 Hoth packages a year, but I think when the peak season hits for my industries I will consider doing some sort of extra push. It would look organic to get more links during that time as well, since there is more buzz/traffic at that time than any other.
With the recent deindexing of blog/link networks, I was hoping to get the Q&A's take on what defines a link network. Are all link building services using link networks?
Would you consider something like:
To use link networks? They generate links for you, but most of the time they will do it with "decent" content, on sites like Wordpress, Blogger, Squidoo and other similar sites. I don't think that most of their link sources are owned internally, but I could be wrong. Some of them use profile links to send links to their articles, which is garbage.
Would you suggest staying away from services like this all together? I'd say that 90% of the services offered on submitedge might be junk, but a few look useful. I've seen a few people at my company have success with them, but fully understand that it could be short term, and potentially inevitable that those links get deindexed.
I'd like to potentially find a good link building service that could bridge the gaps between when I have time to write content and do link building, as I know the engines like to see a steady stream of both.
Any thoughts? Any other services you guys have used with some success? I am not looking for sites like fiverr or anything quick/cheap. I'd be willing to spend the appropriate money occasionally when I think I could use a few extra links, but don't think I need a regular link builder (as that's something I like to do). I also don't want to go the route of outright buying links from other websites.
Cheers,
Vinnie
I like to use other tools for KW research. SEMrush has some great data for keyword volume and CPC. That can be effective for both SEM and SEO. I like SEOmoz's index, on page tool, rank tracker and a few other things (in addition to the community). Sometimes I prefer Majestic for link tracking but both have great indexes.
Serpiq uses SEMrush data and gives you some additional metrics and analysis. I think it's like $20-30 a month for a starter package.
You could definitely make due with just SEOmoz and some free tools out there on the web. As you grow, you can start spending a little more time/money on experimenting with new/different tools.
Cheers,
Vinnie
I don't think a lot of visitors are gonna look into that stuff as much as SEOs would. They might see the plugin on the homepage that has a like button, and see that it shows 500+ or whatever and say "hmm I guess they have some loyal customers". Granted some may check the actual facebook page (as opposed to the website likes) to see about coupons and specials.
Some people may be dubious. I don't know what my official stance would be on doing the likes or not, but I think the numbers would still be more of a benefit than a detriment.
I see only one real benefit to ordering 1000 facebook likes. They won't be targeted, and won't generate any leads.
What they can lead to is more people liking your facebook page, or making it look like you have more credibility. Would you be more inclined to buy from or like a site that has 12 facebook likes, or 1012? Google may crawl those likes and see they are rubbish, but the average consumer or visitor wouldn't. You may not get a boost in the rankings with fake social signals, but it could lead to more genuine social signals.
Cheers,
Vinnie
So I realize it's a bit of a short notice, but April 24 (next Tuesday), I will be hosting a Joomla users meetup in conjunction with Blogsvertise. The first get together is going to be more of a social meetup, with not much specifically planned. Topics that will be discussed:
Joomla - everything from basics to advanced questions
SEO - open discussion, Q+A, networking
Bloggers - Bloggers will be there, and can connect with other bloggers/companies.
Anything else web related as well.
The event is going to be hosted at the Blogsvertise office in East Brunswick NJ.
There is going to be some free pizza and snacks, and should be a good networking event. In the future we aim to get more organized, and have guest speakers and presentations, but for the first one we want to gauge people's interest, and see what they would want to hear presentations on.
If you are interested you can reply here, or shoot me an email at vforvinnie at gmail dot com. My cell is 848.992.3171 but I won't be able to talk until after 5pm during the week. It is going to start at 6:30 and will probably run for a few hours.
Cheers,
Vinnie
Shane,
Thanks again for the response. I agree those pages aren't the strongest, and don't have a ton of great content. A few of my other sites have more than 2-3 articles, and the content is rich with media.
I guess time and content will tell. If after a few weeks of adding some new content and building a few links nothing has improved, I will start to worry. It just seems shocking that one of my sites that has been holding the 6th position for it's exact match phrase (and has some links/social) dropped completely out of the top 50.
The sites and pages are still indexed, but only come up when you search the exact URL.
Vinnie
Shane,
Thanks for the input. I agree about securing down the site first. I have checked webmaster tools, and no messages are coming up. No suggestions at all are coming up.
I looked into it a bit more, and it seems like 90% of my sites on that one host were hit, but none of my other sites on different hosts were affected at all. I am gonna try to add a piece of fresh content to each site this week, and maybe get a few social signals. I am not panicking yet, but when I see that 10 sites have all lost all of their rankings (and aren't even showing up for their title tags), it's slightly concerning to me.
I use a justhost.com reseller account to host about 15-20 of my own websites. None of the sites are related, nor do I interlink or do anything blackhat with any of them. All of the sites have unique content. Some of it isn't great, but I didn't use a writing service on any of then, it was all written by myself.
Recently I found a list of my sites (as well as about 200 others hosted by justhost) on a hacker website that listed the cpanel usernames. I alerted the host and the issue is being fixed. I am changing all of my usernames and passwords for all of the sites.
Anyway, I recently took a look at some analytics and rankings and noticed that I lost a lot of my rankings on a handful of those sites recently. I know there was the big de-indexing of junk blogs recently, but I don't think that is the case. I can still find all of my sites in Google, they are just out of the first 50 results, when a majority of them were ranked from 5-20 in the SERPs.
Here are three of the sites and their phrases:
http://nintendoconsoles.com/ "nintendo consoles" - This domain I bought from someone so there could be some sort of sandbox period for it.
http://webhostingfordrupal.com/ "web hosting for drupal" - This was a new register.
http://seotirical.com "seotirical" - we don't show up, but all of the tweets and links to us do. - This was a new register.
I realize these sites aren't perfect, and might not have been ready for the first page. The Nintendo site is about 3 months old, but the Drupal site has been around for 8+ months. I might try adding a fresh piece of content tonight to see if that helps, but I thought it was curious that it happened across the board with about 5-6 sites on my one reseller account. I don't even know if the top portion of this post has anything to do with the problems, but I thought I'd see if anyone has insight.
Cheers,
Vinnie
I think there are several benefits to outbound linking. Some may not apply to every type of site. They are:
One thing I like to do is link to other sites in my niche, but not competitors. I run a lens comparison site, so instead of linking to 1800 Contacts, I will link to Acuvue.com, or the FDA in regards to safe wearing practices.. They don't actually sell lenses, and it makes sense and benefits my visitors when I link to the manufacturers of the products I list.
If you want to go conservative you can always no-follow the links. I've seen a few sites in the insurance industry that do this, and rank very well.
Vinnie
Hi,
I think you might be able to find an affordable SEO company, but I would suggest changing your goal. Visits are a nice metric to look at, but leads and sales keep you in business.
You could get 100,000 visitors tomorrow, but if none of them buy a printer what's the point? At the end of the day there is no difference between 100 visits and 2 sales and 15 visits and 2 sales. Some of those 100,000 may remember your brand, but there is no guarantee they come back.
A good SEO company will talk to you about that, and help you focus on specific keywords that convert well, and will also help optimize the site and content to generate more sales or whatever your specific goal is.
Good luck finding a company.
Vinnie
Well Nikolaas,
This isn't a book, but a pretty relevant blog post from two days ago: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-future-of-effective-content-marketing-long-term-personas
This could get you on the right track.
I would also see if there is a way to search for EGOL's responses on the Q and A forum. He lives and breathes content marketing.
Vinnie
Thanks Shane - us Thomas's gotta stick together. I agree with you that my situation is not ideal, but I'd rather take some course of action rather than just let the pages sit there. I think it sends a message to Google that I am not intentionally trying to rank duplicate content, and that the pages serve a benefit to visitors regardless of it being duplicate.
Vinnie
SEMRush has some good data. I think it's more accurate and realistic compared to the Google Keyword tool.
A lot of the other tools with just aggregate data (including SEMRush). Serpiq.com is another one I like.
Vinnie
I have a series of websites that all feature a library of the same content. These pages don't make up the majority of the sites content, maybe 10-15% of the total pages. Most of our clients won't take the time to rewrite the content, but it's valuable to their site.
So I decided to noindex, follow all of the pages. Outside of convincing them all to write their own versions of the content, is this the best method? I could also block the pages with robots.txt, but then I couldn't pass any link juice through the pages.
Any thoughts?
Hi,
Yes you can appear twice in the SERPs. Check out this query:
Brooklyn-Exterminator.net appears at the top and bottom of the rankings. That's a nice double hit. A lot of the stuff you do to optimize your places listing can also help your regular SEO efforts. A lot of local directories that give you citations will also give you links, so they can definitely go hand in hand.
Hope that helps,
Vinnie
If he put the image within the h1, and set the alt text to what he wanted the H1 would that help? It wouldn't be ideal but it could be a workaround that would yield some results.
I agree the design should encompass the proper tags, especially the H1 and H2.
One of the main reasons they stopped looking at them is because it was easy to spam and stuff the tags. Any site can easily stuff the meta tags, so it's an unreliable ranking factor.
A few years back it was beneficial for when directories/info sites would scrape your site. When they list your site they would use those keywords for categories, and possibly even anchor text. You don't see it as much anymore, especially since that scraped information is just junk content.
The way I see it, it can hurt your site to have the KWs. Your competitors can easily see what keywords you are going after (which they probably can anyway by looking at a given page). Giving them one spot to check on every page though will make it much easier for them to benefit from your keyword research.
Some people like to use meta tags as product tags on their site. So if you search for "black cats" on a cat website, anything with the meta tag black cats would come up first. It also works for when you want to make a black cat page that features every single black cat related item on your site. Of course, you can just do internal tagging for this, and don't need to use the meta tags.
Moral of the story: not much use for them.
I came here to mention the importance of fresh content, so I am glad you both brought it up. I run a comparison site that has about 240 products that don't see a lot of updates, but I run a blog alongside the site.
For a while I got complacent with it and wouldn't post for months on end, and my rankings were disappointing. The past two months I have been adding at least a page of well written content a week, and put deep links within the content to some of my more popular products. As soon as I started adding pages the rankings began trickling up across the entire site, but especially the blog and homepage.
That's why I'd say url.com/blog. You can put a feed on your homepage to show recent updates, so visitors can see you are updating regularly and the search engines will see fresh stuff on the homepage as well.
Does anyone else have anything to add? I'd love to see a few examples of pages that make use of the tags and how they are doing in the search engines. I certainly understand if you don't want to share your specific pages though.
Thanks for the input. I agree with you about the strength of the site, as well as the pages. I might give it a try on a small sample of pages and see if it helps conversions or impacts SEO at all.
Vinnie
I've been reading about the proper use for block quotes and citations lately, and wanted to see if I was interpreting it the right way. This is what I read:
http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/blockquote-cite-q-tags-seo
So basically my question is, if I wanted to reference Amazon or another stores product reviews, could I use the block quote and citation tags around their content so it doesn't look like duplicate content? I think it would be great for my visitors, but also to the source as I am giving them credit. It would also be a good source to link to on my products pages, as I am not competing with the manufacturer for sales. I could also do this for product information right from the manufacturer.
I want to do this for a contact lens site. I'd like to use Acuvue's reviews from their website, as well as some of their product descriptions. Of course I have my own user reviews and content for each product on my website, but I think some official copy could do well.
Would this be the best method? Is this how Rottentomatoes.com does it? On every movie page they have 2-3 sentences from 50 or so reviews, and not much unique content of their own.
Cheers,
Vinnie
Exactly. **Content is written for the visitors, not the search engines. **
If you are familiar with the subject and are writing naturally, the content will do just fine with all of the search engines, and more importantly your visitors.
For free guest blogging I would suggest:
Everyone I know who posts there absolutely loves the community and service, including myself. It's a good place to get a few high quality links, but also to connect with some other webmasters who also work in your niche. These contacts can lead to a lot more link opportunities.
Vinnie
I've been doing some local SEO lately and noticed something today. When I do a search for "State/town name Cat Toys", I see the title tag of the website in the local results as opposed to the business name.
I'm happy they are showing up above the normal results, but I wonder if having the brand name at the end of the site title impacts clicks. For example:
Site name: New Hampshire Cat Toys and Accessories | Cats R Us
But in the places results the title is cut short because they show the address, so all they see is: New Hampshire Cat Toys and....
Do you think branding is especially important in local results? Or less important? I could hear arguments for both sides. I realize the site URL is shown in green below the title, but it's not the same as having a brand in the title portion. It also looks like some of the competition has just their name show up as opposed to their website title. Is this something I can fix in Google Places, or is something Google does on its own?
Cheers,
Vinnie
I agree with you about the value of links over time. I think an aged, older link from an older page is definitely stronger than the average link. I also think there is a temporal boost for a new link. So when you get a new link, it might be valued at a 7 on a scale of 1-10. After that initial window (whether it's weeks or months) it may drop to a 4 or 5, but then over time will work back up to a higher number. I think it's a bit more complex than that, but in general that's how I look at it.
I use the same criteria for looking at existing links as I do for new ones. Is the site relevant to yours? Does it have authority? Is it spammy? Does it link to bad neighborhoods? If not, I'd say it's always valuable.
Thanks for the quick reply. The pages aren't identical. I've managed to get 100-150 words of unique content for each but it's very dry and not great. I could certainly do better, but not on each page, only one or two.
I think I like the 301 idea. I 301 the pages, take the old ones down and bolster the content on the master page.
Hi,
Recently I've been trying to tackle an issue on one of my websites. I have a site with around 400 products and 550 pages total. I've been pruning some weaker pages and pages with shallow content, and it's been working really well.
My current issue is this: There are about 20 store brands of 6 products on my site that each have their own page. They are identical products just re-branded. Writing content for each of these pages has been difficult, as it's a fairly dry product too. So I have around 120 pages of dry content that is unique but not much different from one another. I want to consolidate but I am not sure how yet. Here is what I am thinking:
1. 301 - I pick one product page as the master, 301 all the other duplicate products to it and then make one page of great content that encompasses all of them. If the 301 juice gets diluted over time I might miss out on some long tails, but I could also gain a lot more from a great content page with 500+ words of really good content as opposed to pages with 150-250 words of just so so content.
2. Canonical - Similar to above. I pick a master page and canonical the other pages to it. Then I could use the great content on all the pages, and still have pages for the specific products. The pages might not show up in search engines but would still be searchable on my site.
3. Coded solution - In my CMS I could always make a workaround where the products still appear on the brands page (just their name with a link to the product page) but all the links direct to a master page.
I realize all the solutions are fairly similar, although I am not sure which is ideal. Option 3 is the most expensive/time consuming but it would drop my page total down to around 450 pages. For a while now (dating back to before Panda) I've been trying to get rid of the low quality and outdated product pages so I could focus on the more popular and active pages. Dropping my page total would also help in the SEO efforts as the sheer volume of pages that need links right now is high, and obviously the less pages I have the more time I can spend on each page (content and link building).
So what do you think? Should I do any of the 3, a combination of the 3 or something different?
Cheers,
Vinnie
In addition to directories that charge for editors reviews or an approval process deeper than "pay and get listed", I think there are a few others. Any group like the BBB that give members a page or a link on their site are legit too. You aren't paying them for the link, but to be a member of their organization. Some of these sites are very similar to directories but a lot aren't.
A lot of charities will also give a link to donors, although this starts to get a little fishy with abuse.
Today's Whiteboard Friday post addresses this situation: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday
Since you have identical content on each page and it's basically the same site you could rel=canonical the secondary sites to the original and you should see your original site gain the rankings, while keeping the old sites online for the time being.
Like the others said, just a small amount of link building should let the original site outrank the others.
Cheers,
Vinnie
That is the first thing that I tell every single client. It's usually the first or second sentence in my proposal. Setting expectations is important.
What I DO guarantee my client is that:
I will help them optimize their pages for conversions and clickthrough on SERPS
I will target a list of phrases/keywords that I feel are attainable
I tell them about white hat and black hat SEO, and where in that spectrum that I work.
I will show them how to and help them generate quality content that people will want to link to, that will help them generate sales from search engines.
I then document everything I do for them. Not only for itemized billing, but if in three months or whatever timeframe we agreed upon, there is not much improvement I can show them everything i've done. This will include all the links I've tried to get them, contacted sites about, content upgrades, and basically everything I do. I tell them that if they don't get great results they can take my worklog to any other SEO and see what they say about it.
I have never seen a definitive guide I have liked since so much changes all the time, so I usually get info from a bunch of different articles. I've included a few I reference occasionally.
I like SEOMoz's: http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics
That is a great reference if you are looking to prioritize sites or social networks.
I also like Dr. Pete's, although it's not really a full on how-to:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/build-your-social-media-embassies
There's a nice little part on the infographic here:
http://www.webgeekly.com/lessons/web-design/a-visual-guide-to-seo-social-media-marketing/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/7-new-tips-for-running-a-twitter-giveaway
I'm sure others will have more suggestions, possibly something a little more hands on.