SEO - are there any genuine experts ?
Discussion
RegMolehusband said:
Henry - you seem to know what you're doing and I'd carry on doing the same and don't go to an SEO "expert".
I too was stung by an SEO company creating thousands of spammy links when I didn't appreciate how black hat this was. When Penguin came along my very highly ranked website disappeared off the rankings altogether. It ranked very well before this SEO company came along due to the great content and my own basic SEO efforts. It stopped the growth of my company for two financial years.
I had a local web design company create a new e-commerce website using Magento on the same domain name. Despite creating some great landing pages I still couldn't any of them to rank. Then one day, it was as though somebody at Google let go of a restrained elastic band and the landing pages began appearing one-by-one within days of each other.
It was as though Google was holding a grudge for two years for the spammy stuff. That's pretty mean IMHO when I had spent a lot of time disavowing the crap and spent a lot of money on a new website.
So I think the same will happen to you if you carry on what you're doing.
I know there are lots of tools available but I've found Fruition.net to be very useful as it will show you how Google updates might have affected your website. Here's the result for mine.
Thanks for that. It's encouraging to hear. I have wondered if I should have just dumped the site and started afresh with a new domain name but we never thought for one minute it would take so long to resolve.I too was stung by an SEO company creating thousands of spammy links when I didn't appreciate how black hat this was. When Penguin came along my very highly ranked website disappeared off the rankings altogether. It ranked very well before this SEO company came along due to the great content and my own basic SEO efforts. It stopped the growth of my company for two financial years.
I had a local web design company create a new e-commerce website using Magento on the same domain name. Despite creating some great landing pages I still couldn't any of them to rank. Then one day, it was as though somebody at Google let go of a restrained elastic band and the landing pages began appearing one-by-one within days of each other.
It was as though Google was holding a grudge for two years for the spammy stuff. That's pretty mean IMHO when I had spent a lot of time disavowing the crap and spent a lot of money on a new website.
So I think the same will happen to you if you carry on what you're doing.
I know there are lots of tools available but I've found Fruition.net to be very useful as it will show you how Google updates might have affected your website. Here's the result for mine.
I absolutely know what you mean about the Google tap being turned off. No formal notification which means no way of asking for a manual review and removal but there is definitely a restriction somewhere. I'm going to work through the site to sort out things like Alt titles for images and see what happens in a couple of months.
Henry
I write SEO copy. I have done so for years. I've worked for a number of websites and have come to the conclusion that the 'trick' is to get a good content manager.
I frequently work for one who took over a company that was on page 17 after upsetting Google by buying-in links and other tricks that the owner was assured would get him ranked at the top. After a bit over a year it was on page 1 for at least two of the keywords and a couple of key phrases put it top.
Whilst I would be the first to admit that my occasional bit of copy had a massive effect on the rankings, the most notable thing is the way the content manager ran the site. She changed everything apart from the design. As people on here have mentioned, there was little movement at first, but once the material such as links, and its residue, were removed there was a steady increase in rankings. Then it seemed to go upwards every week.
She's good, very good, but she's expensive. Her point of view is that if you want the best, you have to pay for it. (She's not looking for any more work at the moment.)
She tells her clients what they should expect, most notably little movement in the first months if they have tried to cheat the algorithms. Google has a long memory.
One thing which she has noticed is that after a year or so of getting the company on page 1, they will baulk at her fees and then fail to renew her contract. They then start to drop, and the impetus gradually increases.
One odd thing: she occasionally requests an absence of any keyword/phrase. She won't say why. For one car-oriented website I had to do an article on Game of Thrones.
Pay for content management, not content. It's a dark art though.
I frequently work for one who took over a company that was on page 17 after upsetting Google by buying-in links and other tricks that the owner was assured would get him ranked at the top. After a bit over a year it was on page 1 for at least two of the keywords and a couple of key phrases put it top.
Whilst I would be the first to admit that my occasional bit of copy had a massive effect on the rankings, the most notable thing is the way the content manager ran the site. She changed everything apart from the design. As people on here have mentioned, there was little movement at first, but once the material such as links, and its residue, were removed there was a steady increase in rankings. Then it seemed to go upwards every week.
She's good, very good, but she's expensive. Her point of view is that if you want the best, you have to pay for it. (She's not looking for any more work at the moment.)
She tells her clients what they should expect, most notably little movement in the first months if they have tried to cheat the algorithms. Google has a long memory.
One thing which she has noticed is that after a year or so of getting the company on page 1, they will baulk at her fees and then fail to renew her contract. They then start to drop, and the impetus gradually increases.
One odd thing: she occasionally requests an absence of any keyword/phrase. She won't say why. For one car-oriented website I had to do an article on Game of Thrones.
Pay for content management, not content. It's a dark art though.
Henry I have emailed you, based on my own poor experience in ecommerce I have got together with a talented chap and we are setting up a site analysis company, we dont do SEO, sites, paid etc we just analyse your total ecommerce sales and report back monthly on whats good, whats bad and whats urgent. If that involves SEO we do a brief for an agency and you are free to choose the agency, we will then check the work is done correctly as part of our service and monitor hard sales results over longer term. All the things that someone running a business just doesn't have time for.
Tonsko said:
Hey Tim,
This is totally unrelated, but I'd be interested in your thoughts: I usually come at a site from a security perspective, and we recommend people simply to have 'Disallow: /'. Clearly that's bad news for crawlers, but the converse is if you explicitly disallow certain folders, you may immediately give away your admin interface, reducing malicious effort significantly.
The robots.txt file is _not_ security mechanism, selling it as such is security snake oil. This is totally unrelated, but I'd be interested in your thoughts: I usually come at a site from a security perspective, and we recommend people simply to have 'Disallow: /'. Clearly that's bad news for crawlers, but the converse is if you explicitly disallow certain folders, you may immediately give away your admin interface, reducing malicious effort significantly.
The robots.txt (& sites maps) are 'hints' to crawler to aid its efficiency in find site content that is appropriate for crawling. The disallow' is not a prohibition but to identify content that can be safely ignored or should not be indexed; nothing more.
Instead of disallow all, put a honey pot / intrusion detection system on the first/early disallow link.
Edited by 4x4Tyke on Thursday 3rd December 11:06
OT but...
The Distance Selling Regulations no longer apply. They were replaced by the Consumer Contracts Regulations in June 2014. To be frank if you read up on them it's a load of crap, obviously invented by an idiot who has never run a business. So you change your mind & want a refund? Why should the seller refund the outbound postage to you? It's not their fault you've changed your mind is it?! Thankfully we get maybe 2 returns a year, I feel for those who get hundreds back...
The Distance Selling Regulations no longer apply. They were replaced by the Consumer Contracts Regulations in June 2014. To be frank if you read up on them it's a load of crap, obviously invented by an idiot who has never run a business. So you change your mind & want a refund? Why should the seller refund the outbound postage to you? It's not their fault you've changed your mind is it?! Thankfully we get maybe 2 returns a year, I feel for those who get hundreds back...
4x4Tyke said:
The robots.txt file is _not_ security mechanism, selling it as such is security snake oil.
The robots.txt (& sites maps) are 'hints' to crawler to aid its efficiency in find site content that is appropriate for crawling. The disallow' is not a prohibition but to identify content that can be safely ignored or should not be indexed; nothing more.
Instead of disallow all, put a honey pot / intrusion detection system on the first/early disallow link.
Yeh, sure, it's one of a suite of recommendations.The robots.txt (& sites maps) are 'hints' to crawler to aid its efficiency in find site content that is appropriate for crawling. The disallow' is not a prohibition but to identify content that can be safely ignored or should not be indexed; nothing more.
Instead of disallow all, put a honey pot / intrusion detection system on the first/early disallow link.
Edited by 4x4Tyke on Thursday 3rd December 11:06
I agree with you saying about the honeypot idea, but realistically, what company is going to do that? It's hard enough to get them to accept the more serious findings and invest money in that, let alone put in additional systems that will cost more in time and resource! IPS/IDS may be worht a punt, will take it under advice, but again, the devil is in the details. Too often a solution will be purchased and installed without any configuration and customers think, 'That's it then, we're protected!' - effectively suffering more snake oil from solution sellers without the proper support. Again, more time/money/resource. It's the eternal hapless struggle!
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