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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[Henry-F]

One of the great joys of being thrown off the Google ladder is being able to actually write web content for customers rather than search engine robots. The reality is by doing one you probably do the other as well. It's hard to sell Umbrellas without using the word unbrella but I found the customer experience was being ruined as we tried to conform to the SEO company's requirements.

Having quite a large and broad site allows us to concentrate on key areas particularly when giving advice. We don't have to cram in all the key words onto one page, there will probably be a page specific to that topic / keyword.

I have always thought that Google genuinely wanted to serve up the best, most relevant information. These days I'm not so sure. The link posted earlier about the most current algorithm change offers a glimmer of hope but we shall have to wait and see.

Henry

[Henry-F]

Do you think a good engaging site with everything laid out properly, image tags in place, meta descriptions - I hear conflicting attitudes to meta stuff, unique content etc. can and will rank well regardless of back links ?

Would we be better off with someone who manages and maintains the hidden part of the site and probably also keeps tabs on Google Ads to make sure people are clicking on who want to stay on the site rather than an "SEO" company per se.

Henry

[Henry-F]

dmsims said:

Henry

it's odd things that can put people off a site

e.g. I just went and clicked search

I was expecting to be able to type in it but no it spawns a bar with nowhere obvious to type (no input box)

so you have click on Search (again FFS)

to me that's just perverse

I presume you mean on our site.

I take your point, but I hope you agree that the actual search facility is quite good in terms of layout and how it delivers results.

Henry

[Henry-F]

dmsims said:

If people manage to get through the barriers you have put in place clicking on the search icon gives you precisely nothing - what is the point of that ?

Type dvr into the search and you get 1 dvr (no price) and 3 leads

so no I don't agree

Well, the search entry box has been changed to make data entry more intuitive - incidentally I have to give a mention to Applecado who built the site and are helping us settle it down. A fellow "Header" and a company I would have no hesitation in recommending if you needed a website. I've just come back from a meal out to be told they'd changed it in view of the comment on here.

As for the results, in site searches a really tricky. I'm not sure I've seen the perfect solution so much so that for a long time we had the search facility disabled. I think our solution is an interesting one. 2 areas, shop and advice so we aren't funnelling you into spending money. You can't flood the screen with results and you don't want to leave the area your were in, I hate sites that dump me somewhere new.

In your case there is a DVR suggested. You aren't going to buy straight from the search, you just want to be pointed in the right direction. So you click on to it and sure enough it's a CCTV DVR recorder. It may not be the one you want but you can easily click the breadcrumb just above the photo to see all the DVRs available.

https://www.cctv42.co.uk/shop/dvr-recorders/hd-108...

Indeed you could navigate to the Shop, the Home page, Help & Advice, About us or Contact without scrolling. I think that's a reasonable result. It isn't the Carlsberg of results because it didn't read your mind but it's having a good go and I hope pointing you in the right direction.



Henry

[Henry-F]

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 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