SEO - are there any genuine experts ?

[Henry-F]

We have used 2 SEO companies. The first one got us first page listings on Google over a period of time, talked a good game, used words like "White hat" and seemed pleasant enough. The main man there was a bit scatty but you kind of thought that was a good thing, genius and madness are close bedfellows.

Then came Penguin. We saw a sharp drop off in traffic. I raised concerns, was told don't be stupid and it all went a bit sour. 3 months later because we had done nothing to correct what Google probably saw as spammy back links it was as though they bolted the lid on us. No formal notification but we saw a further drop off and parted company from the SEO company. In reality we probably should have taken legal action on their lack of response but life's a bit too short for all that nonsense.

We moved to another, seemingly more professional SEO company. Certainly they were more expensive

Lots of back link removal, disavows and other tickles to the site to the point where 2 years and a lot of money later we had a supposedly squeaky clean website. The problem though was we were nowhere on the face of Google. Bing - no problem at all. Top of page one for a lot of stuff, page 1 and 2 for most terms you might use.

Sadly the second SEO company were having issues unbeknownst to us. In the end they didn't actually have any SEO staff so we pulled the plug.

We have a site with loads of unique content, lots of products and it's a very in depth site, not just a couple of pages. Images, videos it's all there. Everyone who gets in touch starts off by complimenting us on the site. I hope I'm not just being the proud parent.

Having worked with SEO people now for probably 5 or 6 years everything seems a bit vague and mystical. You never really get answers and in our case over the past 2 or 3 years we haven't seen results but you don't want to jump ship knowing these things can take time.

I realise the Google has changed, it's results seem weighted very much in favour of the big nationals even if they aren't that relevant to the search, I'm not sure Halfords or Tescos would be my first port of call for home CCTV, but does that mean all hope is lost and SEO is finished ?

So my question is simple. Are there genuinely good SEO people out there or not?

Just to preempt some replies I know in certain fields it's easy to clamber up Google and so there will be happy SEO customers regardless of actual ability. I'm no expert but one of my sites is on page 1 largely through lack of competition and us having a decent web presence. I'm interested in competitive markets.

Henry

[AndrewEH1]

There are experts, you just need to find someone who actually knows what they are talking about.

I can recommend someone.

[timlongs]

Hey Henry, I've asked your exact same question, but from the other side of the coin.

I've been applying for graduate level jobs in SEO companies. And one thing I've struggled with is finding a company who I think are trustworthy, there certainly are a lot of cowboys in the SEO game. I've spent the past month doing a lot of research on SEO and companies, and doing a little bit of SEO myself on a friends Wordpres site.

One thing I will say is SEO can be a slow process, the often quoted figure is 6 months to start ranking well, especially if you've been penalised. The newest update to pengiun is due to come out shortly, take a look at this: http://searchengineland.com/preparing-penguin-make...

Have you ran your own website through an auditor online to see what problems it throws up? If you've been stung for having spammy/bad links in your site, to recover you're gonna want to have some good authority links coming into your site. I'm sure there is someone on here way more knowledgeable than me about SEO - but if you have any questions, let me know.

I start work next week for an agency so looking forward to getting stuck in.

[Henry-F]

AndrewEH1 said:

There are experts, you just need to find someone who actually knows what they are talking about.

I can recommend someone.

I'm all ears !

Henry

[dmsims]

Henry

these are examples of the existing backlinks to your site and I am not even going to look

http://www.nigerianelitesforum.com/ng/science-powe...

http://www.linkresell.com/index.php?s=H&c=86

[megaphone]

FYI. I've just googled CCTV and you don't show up in the first 4 pages I checked.

[AndrewEH1]

Henry-F said:

I'm all ears !

Henry

Tried to PM you, but PH is typically broken.

Google 'Fifty6' they have a few free online tools, if you give them a call they might be able to help you with what you need done. (Only know of them through a friend!)

[dmsims]

Henry

this is another site written by you and Matt ??

it has a load of hardcore spam links on this page http://www.i-on-u.com/about-us/

[Henry-F]

timlongs said:

Hey Henry, I've asked your exact same question, but from the other side of the coin.

I've been applying for graduate level jobs in SEO companies. And one thing I've struggled with is finding a company who I think are trustworthy, there certainly are a lot of cowboys in the SEO game. I've spent the past month doing a lot of research on SEO and companies, and doing a little bit of SEO myself on a friends Wordpres site.

One thing I will say is SEO can be a slow process, the often quoted figure is 6 months to start ranking well, especially if you've been penalised. The newest update to pengiun is due to come out shortly, take a look at this: http://searchengineland.com/preparing-penguin-make...

Have you ran your own website through an auditor online to see what problems it throws up? If you've been stung for having spammy/bad links in your site, to recover you're gonna want to have some good authority links coming into your site. I'm sure there is someone on here way more knowledgeable than me about SEO - but if you have any questions, let me know.

I start work next week for an agency so looking forward to getting stuck in.

Hi there Tim

Thanks for the reply. As you say, an interesting perspective from the other side of the fence. The scary thing is if you struggle to find good guys with a bit of knowledge how on earth do the rest of us manage !

I have left the monitoring of the site to the SEO companies, it is after all what I pay them for, so my knowledge is limited.

We recently - within the last 6 months re-built the website from scratch and one worrying aspect for me is the fact that I think the search engines are still looking at the old site for a lot of the pages. Please forgive my lack of knowledge but I think we use 301 redirects. I did a search on Bing this morning for a term which returned us as No1 position but it said, "We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us." in spite of the fact we have page descriptions in place for that page. For the same page Google (page 3) says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."

Ultimately we need to work with someone who knows.

Potentially positive news on the latest Penguin update.

Henry

[Henry-F]

dmsims said:

Henry

this is another site written by you and Matt ??

it has a load of hardcore spam links on this page http://www.i-on-u.com/about-us/

We set that up as a blog many moons ago and haven't really done much with it since.

Henry

[Henry-F]

dmsims said:

Henry

these are examples of the existing backlinks to your site and I am not even going to look

http://www.nigerianelitesforum.com/ng/science-powe...

http://www.linkresell.com/index.php?s=H&c=86

The first is obviously an article written by someone, no idea what the second one is.

We spent the first year with the last SEO company removing poor links from the first company. It was supposed to take 3 months but the job kept growing.

Henry

[timlongs]

Henry-F said:

timlongs said:

Hey Henry, I've asked your exact same question, but from the other side of the coin.

I've been applying for graduate level jobs in SEO companies. And one thing I've struggled with is finding a company who I think are trustworthy, there certainly are a lot of cowboys in the SEO game. I've spent the past month doing a lot of research on SEO and companies, and doing a little bit of SEO myself on a friends Wordpres site.

One thing I will say is SEO can be a slow process, the often quoted figure is 6 months to start ranking well, especially if you've been penalised. The newest update to pengiun is due to come out shortly, take a look at this: http://searchengineland.com/preparing-penguin-make...

Have you ran your own website through an auditor online to see what problems it throws up? If you've been stung for having spammy/bad links in your site, to recover you're gonna want to have some good authority links coming into your site. I'm sure there is someone on here way more knowledgeable than me about SEO - but if you have any questions, let me know.

I start work next week for an agency so looking forward to getting stuck in.

Hi there Tim

Thanks for the reply. As you say, an interesting perspective from the other side of the fence. The scary thing is if you struggle to find good guys with a bit of knowledge how on earth do the rest of us manage !

I have left the monitoring of the site to the SEO companies, it is after all what I pay them for, so my knowledge is limited.

We recently - within the last 6 months re-built the website from scratch and one worrying aspect for me is the fact that I think the search engines are still looking at the old site for a lot of the pages. Please forgive my lack of knowledge but I think we use 301 redirects. I did a search on Bing this morning for a term which returned us as No1 position but it said, "We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us." in spite of the fact we have page descriptions in place for that page. For the same page Google (page 3) says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."

Ultimately we need to work with someone who knows.

Potentially positive news on the latest Penguin update.

Henry

Hey Henry,

I know, it certainly is a minefield. It seems like there are already some knowledgeable people popping up on this thread. Was the website built on a content management system, for example, Wordpress?

Robots.txt is your problem. Basically you're not allowing Google to crawl your site, this is what your robots.txt file says:

User-agent: *
Disallow: */shop/review*
Disallow: *.aspx*
Disallow: *www.cctv*

Is there still a company managing your account? Fixing your robots.txt is simple, and if you update your sitemap and submit it to google using their webmaster tools, this will tell them to start crawling your site again.

[Henry-F]

megaphone said:

FYI. I've just googled CCTV and you don't show up in the first 4 pages I checked.

Well in some ways that doesn't surprise me. "CCTV" is such a broad term. Are you looking for footage, laws related to, news about, etc.

CCTV advice, CCTV cameras for sale, etc would be more relevant to us. We have been off the radar for those terms as well which is the problem !

Henry

[Tonsko]

timlongs said:

Hey Henry,

I know, it certainly is a minefield. It seems like there are already some knowledgeable people popping up on this thread. Was the website built on a content management system, for example, Wordpress?

Robots.txt is your problem. Basically you're not allowing Google to crawl your site, this is what your robots.txt file says:

User-agent: *
Disallow: */shop/review*
Disallow: *.aspx*
Disallow: *www.cctv*

Is there still a company managing your account? Fixing your robots.txt is simple, and if you update your sitemap and submit it to google using their webmaster tools, this will tell them to start crawling your site again.

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.

[alock]

Henry-F said:

Are there genuinely good SEO people out there or not?

Maybe I'm missing something, but surely anyone claiming to be good at getting a website near the top of search results will have a web site near the top of some search results.

[Dave_ST220]

alock said:

Maybe I'm missing something, but surely anyone claiming to be good at getting a website near the top of search results will have a web site near the top of some search results.

Indeed. Unlike the dipsts who have been calling me for months from India with a spoofed number from Glasgow trying to "fix" my sites

Google has changed immensely in the past few months, me thinks old school SEO is dead as it is next to impossible to track results these days. I see people claim their SEO has got them back to where they were only to find my sites have improved too (with no work), probably because someone at Google scratched their ass and pressed a button.

They rolled something in September & ever since a lot of people have been feeling the pinch, it was really nice of them (Google) to keep emailing us with Adword vouchers though s.

[Henry-F]

alock said:

Maybe I'm missing something, but surely anyone claiming to be good at getting a website near the top of search results will have a web site near the top of some search results.

The thought did occur to me as well, I'm clever like that The problem is just because someone manages to get their site at the top of Google for a bit doesn't mean they will do the same for you.

Henry

[TheEnd]

alock said:

Henry-F said:

Are there genuinely good SEO people out there or not?

Maybe I'm missing something, but surely anyone claiming to be good at getting a website near the top of search results will have a web site near the top of some search results.

Good point, if you want to find the best SEO, put SEO into google and see who comes up first!

Google uses some simple things like watching how many people click into a site and stay there, which shows they found what they were looking for.
Older metrics like number of links pointing to a site were handy once, as they'd show which things were popular, but SEO companies would spam the links everywhere and it was decided that's an easy way to cheat the system.

I don't know how SEO works these days, I suppose it's something that wants to be kept secret, but I could imagine that some sort of bot net of computers that search for, trawl through, then click into your site would help.
In some cases, I'd say it is kept secret as the companies will just tidy up the site to make google happy (visible in google webmaster tools) and spam backlinks.
Again, Google would be watching for stuff like that, so repeated searches from your home PC will only come up as one unique user finding what they wanted.

Maybe Google would help those that pay for promoted ads through google, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, but they are going to be looking for "organic" true click throughs.

If you haven't already, I'd go for putting reviews of camera systems on there, a top ten systems, pros and cons.
That's the kind of stuff that will keep people on the site, and google will then start pushing people searching "best cctv" or "cctv reviews" your way.

Obviously everything can win an award, best budget system, best large, best small, best inside/outside, best all-rounder.

[timlongs]

Tonsko said:

timlongs said:

Hey Henry,

I know, it certainly is a minefield. It seems like there are already some knowledgeable people popping up on this thread. Was the website built on a content management system, for example, Wordpress?

Robots.txt is your problem. Basically you're not allowing Google to crawl your site, this is what your robots.txt file says:

User-agent: *
Disallow: */shop/review*
Disallow: *.aspx*
Disallow: *www.cctv*

Is there still a company managing your account? Fixing your robots.txt is simple, and if you update your sitemap and submit it to google using their webmaster tools, this will tell them to start crawling your site again.

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.

Hey, like I've said, I don't admit to being an expert all, just someone who has done a bit of reading, and not a lot of practical. Hopefully starting work at the agency next week will rectify this. With that said, and with security in mind, I found this to be an interesting read: https://www.dionach.com/blog/the-security-value-of...

[Tonsko]

Good link; I've been pondering the worth of advising people just to disallow everything. The HTML code is a lot more granular and can just exist on the files in the folder structure you don't want crawling.