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The benefit of rank tracker is the speed with which I can quickly check on a keyword idea that I have for client who we have not yet signed up or just an idea that comes into my head. The benefits to being able to process my idea quickly by jumping onto Rank Tracker without the need to laboriously go through a campaign has been enormous. The convenience of quickly checking a keyword position to get that information is superb. I dont always want to have a campaign running in order to get ranking data. We reularly check something quickly and it tended to be one off situations. We are more than happy with the tracking within a full blown campaign but removing this is not helpful because i dont see this functionality elsewhere.

We also use this as a quick tool to get us data for a meeting or discussing with prospective new clients when short of time. Sometimes even in real time while talking on the phone. They are always impressed. Sadly missed!!!

Hi everyone and thank you in advance for your helpful comments.

We have a client who is concerned about copying of content from their site because it has happened a few times in the last few years. We have explained that the content is essentially publicly available and that using the CSS selector user-select to prevent selection of text will really only prevent the technically limited users from working out how to get the text. He is happy that it will at least stop some people. So the question is would there be any way that this would have an affect on SEO? We would make an assumption that it doesnt but putting it out there for some feedback.

Cheers

Eddie

Yeah...I agree. It is sad that people feel the need to contribute in this manner. It really doesnt help anyone in the long term. Good quality content (and the reputation to go with it) is always the way forward but can often be a longer game and people are not very patient.

Thanks for your response. I suppose this is a common issue. It is much easier to sell a magical quick fix instead of long term vision. Unfortunatley uneducated people desire that short term, minimal effort apporach and dont care until they find out it doesnt work or makes things worse. This is especially true when sold to them by an uneducated sales person (usually following a script)

One of our clients has recently been approached by a competitor regarding a Link building service and SEO and as part of this they have supplied example sites that they "contact" to post articles that contain a link or links back to our client site. When we researched these sites we found that the sites did in fact have a good Domain Authority but the content was extremley dubious and the links were often forced into the articles in unnatural context. We also found that the Author page of these sites often had a similar URLs but the display names were changed. On the face of it these article sites look like a good idea and to an untrained eye they could appear good value. In fact they could be passing good value and may in fact work. I have found around 150 sites that i think share simialr traits but i gave up and I am sure there are many more.

My opinion is that this looks like a large farm of blogs that are utilising similar templates and author set up. I am just looking for any experience/thoughts on how to look at this. My feeling is that i dont want to be in anyway recommending this as a service yet my client may think that this is good value. Any experiences shared would be great.

thanks in advance for any comments.

/bump

We'd love the ability to track more than three competitors too

Hi Jon, Just filled in the request form and you say we will be added in the next batch. Will we receive an email when we are added or will we need to keep checking. If you could let me know that would be appreciated.....save me checking all the time.

Are the activities/methods deigned for marketing or branding?

Branding is a difficult thing to measure....those "annoying" jingles can be very strong for a brand.

If you have specific marketing agenda then trying to measure them might be worth a try. For example you could have a different phone number on specific campaigns and use phone number tracking to try and calculate return on the investment. Obviously this is just one example. Trying to completely apply online techniques to offline will not always be possible.

You could try specific landing pages or offer codes that can be tracked back to specific billboards. Again you may have an issue with people passing these around to friends or coupon code sites etc so perhaps use single-use codes.

There is also the issue that offline brand reinforcement (jingles etc) often results in an online interaction where the person may even search for the jingle name in order to come to check out the website.

certainly a big task for one person....i hope you have help

Certainly seems like the wrong thing to do. A good test is that if you think it may be dodgy it probably is. I certainly wouldn't recommend it as a tactic. There are potentially multiple issues with this....duplicate content as you mentioned but also dilution of real links. Good quality legitimate links could link to the Ghost site and therefore not count for the real site.

I have seen issues where it is a legitimate attempt to have a .com and .co.uk on the same shop and ended up with both versions online due to incompetent development but I didn't have to deal with cleaning it up.

Un-picking that could be messy. A good example of quick fix SEO for a fast buck I suspect.

Thanks for the responses. It was my opinion that technically it should not affect anything but with the current direction of SEO and the potential affects of Engagement as ranking factors I thought it might be interesting to discuss.

Appreciate your comments....thanks

Hi Jeff

I would rather not identify the specific business.

The reason for removing the phone number is because it is a mobile number and the nature of the business means that they may get calls from other countries. This means the phone is ringing at any time of the day.

I agree it is not ideal but they do not have a landline number and a business phone cannot be manned all of the time. It is a strange set up but they are quite a small business and certainly not a typical client.

thanks for you comments

We have had an interesting question from a client. They have asked if removing their phone number from their website would have an affect on their rankings. Our immediate answer was 'No' but it may affect the Brand, Usability and Customer experience by restricting the methods of contact. This then made us think that perhaps then it could have an effect in the long term. This situation is also complicated by the fact that they do not have a Google Local Plus account for operational, sensitivity reasons (they don't want to openly publicise their address)

We believe that there shouldn't be any negative affect but thought we would open a discussion. Thanks in advance for any comments/ideas.

Often we have web platforms that have a default URL structure that looks something like this www.widgetcompany.co.uk/widget-gallery/coloured-widgets/red-widgets

This format is quite well structured but would it just be more effective to be www.widgetcompany.co.uk/red-widgets?

I realise that it may depend on a lot of factors but generally is it better to have the shorter URL if targeting the key phrase "red widgets"

One thing, it certainly looks a bit keyword stuffy with all those "widgets"