Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Good comments, nice to get some banter going...however.....

Nobody has disputed the fact that paid ads are dominating the above-the-fold advertising space in Google Search so even if you are the best SEO expert in the world, in the hard-to-get keywords and phrases eg "Computer Repairs and Services" the best SEO will only ever get you to #3 on the page.

I run two business,a group of international job boards (webjobz.com) and a small IT Repair business that is very localised and has a lot of competition.

Last year I spent over $10,000 on SEO services for the job boards and didn't see any Google increased traffic for my money. In face due to Panda and Penguin our traffic to the job boards has actually gone down by 50% despite throwing all that money into SEO.

The Computer Repair business would not survive without Google Adwords, I can choose to receive 3/10/20 clicks a day and vary it as I choose and and rarely spend more that $10 per day ... but at least I have customers walking through the door. If I had to reply on great SEO, link-building etc that business would have gone broke by now.

I have two other friends involved in a) "Engineering/Manufturing" and b) a charity. They have both spent hundreds/thousands of dollars this last year on SEO "experts" and you can still find neither site before page 6 of a google search on their preferred keywords.

I didnt expect you all to agree that the whole SEO industry was self-fulfilling and full of snake-oil salesmen but when I regularly wake up to an inbox full of “spammy” emails such as:

from: johnjexon.seo@gmail.com      subject: Website Designing & Development from: refurbishmentproperty@gmail.com      subject: Ethical Practice to Increase Revenue – SEO

from: seospdier@gmail.com      subject: Get Higher Ranked on Google during CHRISTMAS

from: indaseoservies@gmail.com       subject: SEO Proposal*****

from: sitepromotingseo@gmail.com     subject: Organic SEO for miningjob.net

You have to agree that "your" industry has a perception problem. Are there any SEO experts out there who will stick their neck out and make their fee based on increased traffic or ROI?

google-paid-ads.png

SEO is dead and the winner is ….. Google Adwords

Do you agree???

Shares in Google inc on October 24th were trading well over $1,000 per share, joining an elite club of super-shares having risen 42% since the start of 2013.

And the reason is in one word ….. “Adwords”

If your email inbox is anything like mine, you will have noticed a change in your “junk” emails that get past your filters. The spammers have given up on targeting “penial-enlargement” products (because every spam filter in the world is blocking them) to so-called-legitimate-business activities like SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or “How to Get your company to #1 on Google”

The truth is all those thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours “we”, “you” and your company spent on increasing your Google “organic” rankings over the last five years have been a total waste of money…… and Google are totally to blame … and are making a total gain

Once-upon-a-time you could get #1 ranking on google by using clever and current SEO techniques such as link-building, elimination of duplicate content, keyword density etc etc … terms many of you in business will have heard so-called-SEO-experts spruiking too many times and persuading you to part with $$$$ in cash to fix.

How many of those so-called-SEO-experts told you you could save thousands of dollars by adopting a simple a cost effective Google adwords campaign??? Not many, the SEO industry is self-promoting and full of smoke-and-mirror (snake-oil) salesman promises.

In recent times Google have…..

a) Increased the number of paid ads at the top of the page from 1 to 3
b) increased the number of lines their paid adverts take up
c) increased the % of the “above-the-fold” advertising space to paid adverts
d) reduced the distinguishment between paid and organic ads to such an extent that around 50% of us cannot determine what is a paid or organic ad anymore.

Being #1 “organically” (un-paid) in Google will NOW only get you 9% of the clicks on that page. 42% of all clicks goes to the top three “paid” listings (Adwords)

If you want to get traffic to your site so that people purchase your products, move your marketing budget AWAY from SEO and web design and invest in Google Adwords as soon as possible. It is very easy to setup and administer yourself

[staff removed links to copy of blog post]

The Moz crawl warns me many of my pages have too many links, like this page

http://www.webjobz.com/jobs/industry/Accounting    ...... has 269 links

but many of the links are like this /jobs/jobtitles/Accounting?k=&w=3&hiddenLocationID=463170&depth=2 and are used to refine search criteria.... when you click on those links they all have a canonical link back to http://www.webjobz.com/jobs/industry/Accounting

Is my page being punished for this? Do I have to put "no follow" tags on every link I do not want the bots to follow and if I do so is Roger (moz bot) not going to count this as a link?

I found this ...is this true? ..................................

Matthew BarbySEO and Social Media Strategist at Wow Internet

• Oct 03, 2012

Hi Guys,

I just wanted to add to what I have previously said as when I have dug a bit deeper into this, I have found some info that could go against what I have previously said.

You can use the rel=publisher tag alongside the rel=author tag on a webpage. With this in mind it would be a good idea to have the rel=publisher present on every page in your website to enable you to be eligible for Google's Direct Connect feature.

I found this out when looking through a Google forum and one of the Google Trend Analysts confirmed this by saying:

Hi guys

_just a few short comments: it's fine to have both a link rel=publisher and author-markup on the same page. The rel=publisher confirms that your website is the publisher of that Google+ Page; the authorship markup confirms that you (your personal profile) is the author of the content on that page. This markup can be used independently, since  the meanings are slightly different. The issue with the Rich Snippets testing tool flagging this as an error is a bug on our side and should be resolved soon (sorry about the confusion caused by that!). _ Cheers John

Just thought I would share this with you all as it might help.

Matt.

When using the Google Structured Data testing tool I get a message saying.......

**Authorship Testing Result - **Authorship is not working for this webpage.

Here are the results of the data for the page http://www.webjobz.com/jobs/

Authorship Email Verification

Please enter a Google+ profile to see if the author has successfully verified an email address on the domain www.webjobz.com to establish authorship for this webpage. Learn more

<form id="email-verification-form" action="http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets" method="GET" data-ved="0CBMQrh8">Verify Authorship</form>

Email verification has not established authorship for this webpage.Email address on the webjobz.com domain has been verified on this profile: YesPublic contributor-to link from Google+ profile to webjobz.com: YesAutomatically detected author name on webpage: Not Found.Publisher

| Publisher markup is verified for this page. |
| Linked Google+ page: | https://plus.google.com/106894524985345373271 |

Question - Can this company Google plus account "Webjobz" be both the publisher AND the author?

Can I use https://plus.google.com/106894524985345373271 as  the author of this and all other pages on our site?

98emVv7

Good comments, nice to get some banter going...however.....

Nobody has disputed the fact that paid ads are dominating the above-the-fold advertising space in Google Search so even if you are the best SEO expert in the world, in the hard-to-get keywords and phrases eg "Computer Repairs and Services" the best SEO will only ever get you to #3 on the page.

I run two business,a group of international job boards (webjobz.com) and a small IT Repair business that is very localised and has a lot of competition.

Last year I spent over $10,000 on SEO services for the job boards and didn't see any Google increased traffic for my money. In face due to Panda and Penguin our traffic to the job boards has actually gone down by 50% despite throwing all that money into SEO.

The Computer Repair business would not survive without Google Adwords, I can choose to receive 3/10/20 clicks a day and vary it as I choose and and rarely spend more that $10 per day ... but at least I have customers walking through the door. If I had to reply on great SEO, link-building etc that business would have gone broke by now.

I have two other friends involved in a) "Engineering/Manufturing" and b) a charity. They have both spent hundreds/thousands of dollars this last year on SEO "experts" and you can still find neither site before page 6 of a google search on their preferred keywords.

I didnt expect you all to agree that the whole SEO industry was self-fulfilling and full of snake-oil salesmen but when I regularly wake up to an inbox full of “spammy” emails such as:

from: johnjexon.seo@gmail.com      subject: Website Designing & Development from: refurbishmentproperty@gmail.com      subject: Ethical Practice to Increase Revenue – SEO

from: seospdier@gmail.com      subject: Get Higher Ranked on Google during CHRISTMAS

from: indaseoservies@gmail.com       subject: SEO Proposal*****

from: sitepromotingseo@gmail.com     subject: Organic SEO for miningjob.net

You have to agree that "your" industry has a perception problem. Are there any SEO experts out there who will stick their neck out and make their fee based on increased traffic or ROI?

google-paid-ads.png