Strange client request
-
I have a client who attends an internet marketing meetup. I have been once myself. Good group of people but most seem lost when it comes to SEO and can't tell Black from White!
Well today my client emailed me and in the email she mentioned doing a trick to the title tags.
Client: "there is a trick to use with the title by putting keywords in quotes and parenthasis. I'm sure you know how to do that little trick. If we do it in the title and in the first few lines of the verbage it will soar us near the top and hopefully on the first page of Google."
a few sentences later
"We could use a tad more content on the first page ( with parantesis and quotes) to boost us up in the ratings. At least it is an easy trick to do."
I have never heard of this. Has anyone else heard about this. Please share thoughts. It sounds completely bogus to me but I will be the first to admit that i don't know everything! However i would like to have more than just my opinion when I talk to my client.
Let me know what you think.
-
Thank you all for your input. I couldn't agree more with everyone. Like I said, i needed to have more points of views to bring to the table.
-
Bad bad idea!
As others have said, I suspect the theory here is to try to rank higher for when people use speech marks in their Google query.
In my opinion, the idea is bad for 3 reasons:
-
Hardly anyone searches like that these days - I do sometimes but only when the results without "" fail to return the results I need - or when I'm doing specific research (intitle:" " etc). Not many 'normal' users search like this
-
From a user perspective it doesn't make sense. In the body of content it would look very odd and unprofessional (unless you are citing a quote!) - Moreover using " " marks in the title tag is a bad idea - you only get a few characters for your title tag, so take FULL advantage of each character! I don't mean over-optimise keywords here either, but as well as having your primary keyword in there, use the title tag to help turn 'would-be' visitors into visitors - using " " marks in your title tag reduces the space you have to use, making it a bad idea.
-
It's a pretty blatant form of trying to manipulate results - Something that big G would likely not approve of... Ask your client if they want to gamble their online presence on something designed to 'trick' Google
If they are promoting a crappy $7 affiliate product I'd maybe understand them being that silly, but if they want a long-term online business... Nah!
Kinda makes me wonder who suggested this to them! Did they enter a time-warp when they went into the meeting, going back to 2001?!
-
-
Sounds bogus to me. Any time I hear something that is to good to be true, I typically will ask the presenter for data/proof behind the statement. 9 times out of 10, they won't have it or will "email it" after the presentation. The other 1 out of ten seems to be one example that is an outlier and can't be replicated for some reason.
-
Keri just nailed it.
You will actually hear a lot of crap in places like that. Actually, ive been to events where speakers just talk crap. Stuff they don't even test, just "heard" or made up.
-
If it worked, we'd all see text with lots of odd quotes and parenthesis, correct?
-
Google does allow for people to search exact keywords in that manner so if they think you're going to get more traffic because you know people will search identical keywords answer it just is written and not a good idea to use "whatever" or (don't do it) as people just don't do that as much as writing something unique in google
From a grammar standpoint it should be as user-friendly as possible unnecessary question parentheses is not user-friendly to me.
Thomas
-
To be honest, it sounds bogus. I've never heard of it, and just from a user standpoint, I'd imagine that would be annoying. Let's try that sentence again with what was suggested...
To be "honest" (it sounds bogus); I've never "heard" of it (and just from a user standpoint); I'd imagine that would be "annoying".
Not saying those are the keywords, but how annoying is that sentence to read? From a grammar standpoint, it's giving me chills. Anything in quotes is hinting at something other than what it is... what are we talking "about?" I hate reading through paragraphs where people use quotes out of context. Here's a great example of what I'm talking about: what does this sign mean to you, http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Admin/BkFill/Default_image_group/2012/2/10/1328896276621/cheese-burgers-sign-on-sm-007.jpg? Is it cheese or not? Not sure, but I don't want that burger!
-
Unfortunately clients trick is to attract the exact match's of the words in quotes not your normal broad search terms that include keywords. I think it's a very bad idea to implement
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
-
I redesigned a clients website and there is a pretty massive drop in traffic - despite my efforts to significantly improve SEO.
Hi there, I redesigned a clients website that was very old fashioned and was not responsive. I implemented 301 redirects, kept the content pretty similar, website linking structure very similar - the only things i changed was making the website responsive, improved title tags, added a bit more information, improved the footer and h1 tags etc.. however although clicks are fairly similar search impressions have dropped about 60% on average over the past week. The old site had some keywords linking to pages with no new content so i removed those as seemed like black hat seo tricks and also there was a huge list of "locations we deliver to" on the homepage followed by around 500 citys/towns I removed this. Could this be the cause for the drop? as i assumed those would do more harm than good? Fairly new with SEO as you can probably tell. Looking for advice on what may be the cause and what steps I should take now. Thanks for reading! duGeW
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | binkez321 -
Something is strange, should be ranking fairly well - no visibility.
Hi Guys, This one is freakin' me out a little. We built my site and optimised it fairly well, especially on this page: http://snowdog.se/dogsledding/ where I am trying to rank for search term "dog sledding in lapland" now I receive a 95 rating for optimisation, I cant see anything wrong with it. We have a sitemap all seems well enough in the Google search console data but heck!!, we have submitted it to major engines but I have zero percent visibility. Can anyone see what's going on here? Free Sleddog Trip to the winner. Hahahaha. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. It must be something simple or weird! Kind Regards, Sno.....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sno3330 -
Strange referral site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com would like some insights from the community
Hello Mozzers! I've noticed that our site has been receiving a significant amount of referral traffic from a rather suspect looking site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com Can anyone shed any light on this beast. Stopped receiving traffic around 11th November, but was getting 20K sessions over a 4 week period. The traffic was of poor quality, but would be good to know how or why they were linking to my site (fejobs dot com). Looks very suspicious. Thanks Justin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Strange strategy from a competitor. Is this "Google Friendly"?
Hi all,We have a client from a very competitive industry (car insurance) that ranks first for almost every important and relevant keyword related to car insurance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sixam
But they could always be doing a good job. A few days ago i found this: http://logo.force.com/ The competitor website is: http://www.logo.pt/ The competitor name is: Logo What I found strange is the fact that both websites are the same, except the fact that the first is in a sub-domain and have important links pointing to the original website (www.logo.pt) So my question is, is this a "google friendly" (and fair) technique? why this competitor has such good results? Thanks in advance!! I look forward to hearing from you guys0 -
Negative SEO from Spammers Killing Client Rankings
Hi - I have identified a client website which was; a ) hacked and had several fraudulent pages added e.g. www.xxx.com/images/uggaustralia.html added which have 301 redirect links to another fraudulent websites. b) had an auto generated back link campaign (over 12k back links at present) with targeted anchor text at cheap ugg boots, ugg sale etc. I've removed the dodgy redirect web pages and also undertook a link audit using Google WMT, OSE and Seo Majestic and have disavowed all the spammy links at domain level. Consequently my client has dropped from top three for the key phrase to #9. Google WMT now sees ugg boots uk, ugg boots sale etc. as some of the most popular anchor text for the site even though it's blatantly obvious that the site has nothing to do with Ugg boots. No manual webspam penalties are in place however the auto generated anchor text campaign is still ongoing and is generating more spammy links back to non existent web pages - which still Google appears to be picking up. Question is - how long do you reckon it will take for the links to disappear and is there anything I can speed Google along as this issue if not of my making? p.s. For the record I've found at least 500 sites that have been targeted by this same campaign as well.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Door4seo0 -
Advanced Outside Perspective Requested to Combat Negative SEO
**Situation: **We are a digital marketing agency that has been doing SEO for 6 years. For many years, we maintained exceptional rankings and online visibility.However, I suppose with great rankings comes great vulnerability. Last year, we became the target of a pretty aggressive and malicious negative SEO campaign from another other SEO(s) in our industry - I'm assuming they're competitors. Overnight, there were 10,000+ links built on various spam domains using the anchor text: negative marketing services poor seo butt crack kickass ... and more (see attached image) The issue we face are: Time Investment - Enormous investment of time and energy to contact each web admin for link removal. Hard to Keep Up - When we think we're getting somewhere, new links come out of the woodwork. Disavow Doesn't Work - Though we've tried to generally avoid the disavow tool, we've had to use it for a few domains. However, it's difficult to say how much effect, if any, it's had on the negative links. As you can imagine, we've seen an enormous drop in organic traffic since this all started. It's unfortunate that SEO has come to this point, but I still see a lot of value in what we do and hope that spammers don't completely ruin it for us one day. Moz Community - I come to you seeking some new insight, advice, similar experiences or anything else that may help! Are there any other agencies that have experienced the same issue? Any new ways to combat really aggressive negative SEO link building? Thanks everyone! UUPPplJ
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ByteLaunch0 -
Negative SEO impacting client rankings - How to combat negative linking?
I have a client which have been losing rankings for the key term "sell gold" in Google AU. However, while doing some investigating I realized that we have been receiving links from bad neighborhoods such as porn, bogus .edu sites as well as some pharmaceutical sites. We have identified this as negative SEO and have moved forward to disavow the links in Google. However, I would like to know what other measures can be taken to combat this type of negative SEO linking? Any suggestions would be appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dancape0 -
Strange link backs
Hi all been looking at the keyword research tool , phrase is dog beds site at number 10 is **www.ideas-4-pets.com ** opened site explorer http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.ideas-4-pets.com%2F Took at a look at linking root domains ths guy has some huge linking domains , so thought I would take a look at how they managed to get links from sites like Samsung , the UN , Php.net, Linking Root Domain Domain Authority Linking Root Domains *.parallels.com/ 97 129,927 *.php.net/ 97 201,007 *.dmoz.org/ 94 80,621 *.swsoft.com/ 92 24,586 *.samsung.com/ 89 54,125 *.oreilly.com/ 88 48,350 *.undp.org/ 88 21,578 I cant understand how he has got links off psd files or on page assets like embedded swf files. Anyone know how they are dong this , is this pure Darth Vader black hat >>??? Thanks in advance May the Google be with You
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jbloggs0