Advice on combating blackhat within an organisation
-
Hello,
I have an unsual challenge I would appriciate some feedback from the community.
I have been managing the digital marketing for a UK franchise for around three years. My approach has been to try and keep to the priciple of one microsite per franchisee - listing only the serviced locations once as appropriate.
Now this franchise has been aquired by a US company and a new marketing manager for the US company is overseeing the site - why I am still involved is unkown and is a matter of time I supsect.
This marketing 'guru' is clearly blackhat and is pushing agaisnt my eithical, brand driven approach in favor of creating landing pages for pretty much every location. I can see from the other brands he manages - this has been his approach --- boiler plate content and fake addresses (complete with schema markeup) for every location and and additional websites per actual valid location (so 2x listings per term for same brand)
My question is how do I go about combating this - or is it a lost cause? I feel responsible for the success of the franchisees.
Thanks in advance.
Steve
-
Thanks James
It is frustrating that Google rewards such practices, and as the sites in question operate around lower volume search terms I dont see this changing any time soon.
The argument has been, 'look at how well we are doing with these other sites - how can it be wrong'..... its difficult to educate managment on the risks when the current data proves the wrong way works.
I wonder if anybody on here has been in a similar spot and managed to result in some form of win?
Thanks again.
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
-
Looking for SEO advice on Negative SEO attack. Technical SEO
please see this link https://www.dropbox.com/s/thgy57zmmwzodcp/Screenshot 2016-05-31 13.25.23.png?dl=0 you can see my domain is getting tons of chinese spam. I have 410'd the page but it still keeps coming.. 7tnawRV
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattguitar990 -
On Page Content. has a H2 Tag but should I also use H3 tags for the sub headings within this body of content
Hi Mozzers, My on page content comes under my H2 tag. I have a few subheadings within my content to help break it up etc and currently this is just underlined (not bold or anything) and I am wondering from an SEO perspective, should I be making these sub headings H3 tags. Otherwise , I just have 500-750 words of content under an H2 tag which is what I am currently doing on my landing pages. thanks pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
SEO advice with having a blog on sub domain.
Righto, so: I've been working on our company website www.nursesfornurses.com.au which is built on .asp which is a real pain because the site is built so messy and on a very dated CMS which means I have to go back to the dev every time I want to make a change. We've made the decision to move the site over to Wordpress in stages. So, (and I hope logically), i've started by making them a proper blog with better architecture to start targeting industry related keywords. I had to put it on a sub domain as the current hosting does not support Wordpress http://news.nursesfornurses.com.au/Nursing-news/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 9868john
The previous blog is here: http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/blog Its not live yet, so I'm just looking for SEO advice or issues I might encounter by having the blog on a sub domain. In terms of user experience, I realise that there needs a clearer link back to the main website, I'm just trying to work out the best way to do it... Any advice / criticism is greatly welcomed. Thanks0 -
Organic search data not representative of site Authority, need advice
Hi, I seeking some advice, I have an organic search issue, I would like to figure out if there is any reason why my site www.aatravel.co.za would not be doing well in the rankings? This domain is more powerful than a previous Domain we had, 51 versus 37 according to MOZ, but despite this it is not ranking nearly as well. There are a few things to consider. The domain was owned by us then got taken away about 3 years ago and then 301ed to a completely new site, then it was 404ed for about a year before we got it back, and now we have it back and have populated it with the same data as the less powerful Domain www.aaholidays.co.za. I believe that most of the AA Travel Authority comes from a stronger backlink profile. Why would this now 2 month after we reskinned and converted 301s back not be ranking as highly? Is there an issue with old site structure and google not passing through the 301 link juice from old pages that have links to the new ones(we have 301ed them)? Also I have 301ed the old aaholidays.co.za site to this one as the new home of AA Travel, that organic traffic was at about 8 000 visits a month, and the new site is at about 2 300. Has Google sandboxed the Domain for a certain period of time, or is there something else that may be the matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Merging blog post tags within static page - Rel = Canonical?
As a blogger, I use a combination of categories and tags in order to organize my content. I do index tags because they've been very powerful for SEO purposes, but there are certain keywords in which I'd like to be able to create an entirely separate static page with the tagged posts merged onto it. So in other words, this is what I'd like the landing page to be: www.website.com/keyword as opposed to www.website.com/tags/keyword Because of this, I'm uncertain what I need to do with that tag page. With this, I would assume that www.website.com/tags/keywords needs to be indexed, but what would be the wise thing to do? Do I place a rel=canonical on www.website.com/tags/keyword to the static page? Do I do a simple re-direct? Do I just leave it indexed? Will it dilute my desired landing page? Would appreciate all comments and thoughts. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | longview0 -
Conversion Rate Optimisation - advice before seeking out a specialist
Hello! I have a site I've been working on for a lovely client, a small business start up since Christmas. The site has a very simple layout, is ranking well and maintaining its positions, has solid social media, is receiving enough traffic and ranking for a number of terms. The problem is - conversions! The site just isn't converting. I have spoken with a few peers who have said advanced CRO will be too much for me to learn in terms of Psychology of Buying, learning about colors, fonts etc. I understand meta descriptions for example are something that I can do, I was wondering if anyone could give me advice on any other basic CRO techniques I could apply to the site before going to a specialist. Any advice would be MUCH appreciated - the moz community is always so helpful! Charlotte 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CharlotteWaller1 -
Seo advice / plan ? penalized ?
I built an ecommerce site for a client of mine just over 9 months ago now. To begin with the serps were great, everything was listed in the results but for some reason a few weeks in all the results vanished from google and now we're lucky to find anything. I've been as far as page 200 and havent found any results. Its been like this for a solid 8 months so i can only presume that the site has been penalised in some form. Searching for unique phrases from the site doesnt even return results. The website in question is = http://goo.gl/A6Gz2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gfxpixeldesigns
keywords we're aiming for = coloured contact lenses, fashion contact lenses
Target = Google UK Now im not really an seo guy but regardless of this my client has hired me to see whats going on and correct it. I've been scratching my head thinking all sorts of things but none of which im certain about so i'm looking for someone to point me in the right direction before i do anything drastic. So to begin with here are some of my suspicions which i personally think are affecting ranking and possible penalisation. #1 - Too many links on the page
#2 - Possibly over optimised
#3 - Lack of content on the product and category pages
#4 - Lack of backlinks and links in general coming from other sites My main concern is the lack of links from other sites and the odd link coming from low quality sites. I've also just found out that my client has been using an automatic link submitter which i've always thought of as a big no no. Some of the sites these links have been submitted to have nothing to do with the keyword we are targetting and are sort of spammy sites containing all sorts of links. Im wondering if these poor quality links could have caused the site to be penalised, google may be seeing it as a spammy site due to this. Whats your opinions on the above, are my suspicions correct and can this be recovered ? My planned course of action is to be as follows: #1 - Re write the content currently on the site so that it is better written and include more keywords, especially long tails since i think these will help bring the serps up.
#2 - Write detailed category and product descriptions as well as making sure every page has some well written content with links and keywords.
#3 - Keep the above pages to one main subject / keyword so that google doesnt get confused.
#4 - Get some links on popular and relevant sites, the only problem here is the lack of fashion contact lens sites. Does anyone have any advice on how to find these or where i should be getting links placed. Are directories worth while ?
#5 - Get more involved in the social side ie facebook, twitter I will be building on the above over time, aswell as running google ads moderately for our chosen keywords. Is there anything i have missed, anything i shouldnt be doing. Please advise. Thanks.0 -
Need advice on local search optimization
HI all, I've found myself in a puzzling position and not quite sure which direction to push my current SEO project so if anyone who's done this particular type of SEO can offer some suggestions I'd be eternaly grateful. I am currently working on a project for a Law Firm based in New Jersey. Lets say the town they are in is Garfield. What I really want to try and achieve is see them appearing in the number one spot whenever anyone within Garfield or the immediate area searches for a lawyer relating to the individuals need. E..g searches like "personal injury lawyers", "real estate lawyer". The problem is I can see how I can easily make it to the number one position if people are specific and enter garfield in the search term but in reality they wouldn't be doing that. An additional problem is that peoples ISP's in garfield aren't located in Garfield, in some cases they're as far away as Newark so when they're doing a search for 'real estate lawyer' google is bringing up results for the Newark based firms. It seems using tools like market samurai to look at the traffic and competition is proving useless as searches like the ones I'm doing for local business are so closely tied to the ISP location I don't really know whether to target broad range searches like "Real Estate Lawyer", or to be really specific and include the town name in my page titles, H1 tags etc... I hope I put across my dilemma and someone can help me chose which direction to go in.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davebrown19750