Google's form for "Small sites that should rank better" | Any experiences or results?
-
Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google".
There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html
Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share?
*private message if you do not want to share publicly...
-
I personally get phone calls/emails claiming to be Google and to "confirm" business information for rankings. [...] Likewise, if they receive a call/email from "Google" and choose not to respond because they are used to spammers, they would be unfairly dropped lower in rankings even if they have great CS.
I get calls like this all of the time. They make me angry because I believe that they are spammers calling. But could they be from Google?
** If there was an official setup like that, the two could get confused and people taken advantage of.**
Yes, how can Google discover who takes care of their customers and who does not? The small company selling nationally often can't afford the feedback and ratings systems that google can monitor, or support for their website and Google Plus.
I can't put myself out there to do tech support for all of the third party sellers on Amazon, WalMart, Sears, ebay and dozens of other big brand sites that sell my product.
-
Very solid idea - track email response times, phone call wait times, etc. But I think it would be very hard to implement while preventing spammers.
Phone numbers and email addresses can be spoofed with ease. I personally get phone calls/emails claiming to be Google and to "confirm" business information for rankings. If there was an official setup like that, the two could get confused and people taken advantage of.
Likewise, if they receive a call/email from "Google" and choose not to respond because they are used to spammers, they would be unfairly dropped lower in rankings even if they have great CS.
But I'm with you... Google definitely needs to give small businesses a fighting chance against the big boys. Just needs to be extremely well thought out.
-
Maybe Google should invent a robot that calls or sends a question to customer service?.
-
To be fair, they were clear they wouldn't just boost rankings just because you submitted a page.
They would instead look at all the sites that were submitted, look for patterns on what makes them great and try to develop an algo tweak that would help similar sites rank.
Could you imagine if they form actually functioned as a "submit good site > site gets better rankings"... they would drown in requests.
-
No Results!
Google loves brands.
You can have more content than all of your competitors combined, greater selection than anyone, have intelligent people who answer the phone and give free advice, respond immediately to email enquiries with generous advice......
A third party seller on a big brand website posts one crappy page with one low-quality item that is such a piece of trash that we refuse to sell it and they are above you in the SERPs...
Then the customer who bought that piece of crap from the third party seller on the big brand website (who offer zero support - you can't even find a phone number or an email on their site or in their packaging) are calling and emailing us wanting to know why they can't get that piece of crap to work... and ask us to send them a replacement!... and then get pissed because we tell them to "contact the vendor where you purchased it".
-
Hi Egol ...so does that mean "no results" ...or does it mean you can't share?
-
Has anybody used it?
Yes!
Any experiences or results you can share?
No!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?
Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th. Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority? We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Interested ranking results
Hello, I have different pages that are written on the same model. I updated their content 2 weeks ago. Some of those climbed to 1 st page or beginning or 2 nd some didn't move or stayed where they originally were, 3 rd of 4 th page ? My question is whether there is a longer delay for some of them to rank (due to the term being more competitive for example) or if I should look somewhere else in maybe something that I wrote in the content of the pages that ranked versus those than didn't move. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Web Site Ranking
Hi Folks, I made some changes on my website www.gemslearninginstitute.com and published it two days ago. It was ranking on Google first page for a few keywords. I did not touch the pages which were ranking on first page. Since then I am not seeing the website ranking on the Google. Does it take a few days to rank again? How can I ensure that next time if I update the website or publish some blog on my website then it should not effect the ranking. Secondly, if I would like to rank in three different cities then do I need to create separate pages for each city or how should I proceed with this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fslpso0 -
Is it a good or bad idea (in Google's eyes) to add a forum to my website?
I have an active website with many users adding dozens of comments on the many pages of the site daily. I'm am wondering if it would be good for the overall ranking strength of the site if I were to add a forum to it (in a subdirectory, like forum.mysite.com). On one hand, I can see the forum posts as thin content, which Google wouldn't care for. On the other hand, I see the additional user engagement on the site, which I think Google would like. I know the benefits it can have to the users, but for this question, all I want to know is if this would be seen by Google as a plus or a minus for my site, assuming the forum succeeded in becoming popular. I don't want to do anything that will diminish the value of my site in Google's eyes. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Is there a downside of an image coming from the site's dotted quad and can it be seen as a duplicate?
Ok the question doesn't fully explain the issue. I just want some opinions on this. Here is the backstory. I have a client with a domain that has been around for a while and was doing well but with no backlinks. (Fairly low competition). For some reason they created mirrors of their site on different urls. Then their web designer built them a test site that was a copy of their site on the web designer's url and didn't bother to noindex it. Client's site dived, the web designer's site started ranking for their keywords. So we helped clean that up, and they hired a brand new web designer and redesigned the site. For some reason the dotted quad version of the site started showing up as a referer in GA. So one image on the site comes from that and not the site's url. So I ran a copyscape and site search and discovered the dotted quad version like 69.64.153.116 (not the actual address) was also being indexed by the search engine. To us this seems like a cut and dry duplicate content issue, but I'm having trouble finding much written on the subject. I raised the issue with the dev, and he reluctantly 301 the site to the official url. The second part of this is the web designer still has that one image on the site coming from the numerical version of the site and not the written url. Any thoughts if that has any negative SEO impact? My thought it isn't ideal, but it just looks like an external referral for pulling that one image. I'd love any thoughts or experience on a situation like this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BCutrer0 -
How to get a site out of Google's Sandbox
Hi I am working on a website that is ranking well in bing for the domain name / exact url search but appears no where in Google or Yahoo. I have done the site search in Google and it is indexed so I am presuming it is in the sandbox. The website was originally developed in India and I do not know whether it had some history of bad backlinks. The website itself is well optimised and I have checked all pages in Moz - getting a grade A. Webmaster Tools is not showing any manual actions - I was wondering what I could do next?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AllieMc0 -
Google webmaster tools showing "no data available" for links to site, why?
In my google webmaster account I'm seeing all the data in other categories except links to my site. When I click links to my site I get a "no data available" message. Does anyone know why this is happening? And if so, what to do to fix it? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nicktaylor10 -
After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
Hi Everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMA-DataSet
A few weeks ago now I received a "Googlebot can't access your site..... connection failure rate is 7.8%" message from the webmaster tools, I have since fixed the majority of these issues but iv noticed that all page except the main home page now have a page rank of N/A while the home page has a page rank of 5 still. Has this connectivity issues reduced the page ranks to N/A? or is it something else I'm missing? Thanks in advance.0