LOL,,, the kid in the car used our product to make that video. It's all the ones under it that are in question.
Here is the resulting search without time filters.
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LOL,,, the kid in the car used our product to make that video. It's all the ones under it that are in question.
Here is the resulting search without time filters.
Hello Everyone,
I have just spent the past 9 months designing, engineering, and manufacturing our first product. We just opened our web store and started selling product. http://miveu.com. I have spent zero time doing any kind of SEO. We haven't even put up a sitemap yet or any redirects. I'm just now starting to take a look at things.
As soon as I start digging, I find that it appears that someone is at least attempting to do some kind of negative SEO against us. It seems to have started about a month ago. Check this out.
At first I was thinking this isn't so good, but it seems they are just trying to build crap content about our keywords and make it relevant to us. After taking a closer look, I'm thinking maybe this isn't all bad. They have targeted all of our exiting YouTube videos and created new videos that use all of our keywords, titles, people, etc in an effort to make our existing videos irrelevant. They have have also done the same thing with articles that were written about us, awards we have won as well as started negative campaigns about us and people who have said good things about us.
Here are my thoughts. While the content is really crappy, it seems like they are actually building keyword relevance to us and our products. They have all the right keywords, the content is just crappy. "There is no such thing as bad press". I don't know if anyone has ever said this before, but I'm going to refer to their effort as "White-Hate SEO" because it doesn't appear to be a real dark effort.
Am I missing something here, am I way off base?
My bigger worry is that their campaign may include some much darker efforts that I just haven't found yet.
I'm pretty sure I know who is responsible for this. They have made it clear that they really do hate us. Frankly, I'm not interested in retaliation, I just want to get my own house in order with some good old-school whit-hat SEO. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this.
Thanks!
David
Hey Mozzers,
Our company designs, develops, and manufactures products for a living. Last year we came up with an idea of our own, designed, developed, tooled and produced it all on our own dime. We did all the branding, website, EVERYTHING on our own.
The product looks like it's going to be pretty successful. We are now planning on opening our web store tomorrow and expect to be selling and shipping product tomorrow.
The product is an iPhone accessory that basically turns your iPhone into a wearable POV camera similar to GoPro. Check it out at http://miveu.com.
I'm wondering if we should actually do a press release about the opening of our web store. I only say this because it seems like a natural thing to do at the moment. That said, it sounds like it could actually hurt us. If this is a good idea, what's the best channel. Doesn't need to be the cheapest channel, but one that will spread the word.
I guess the real question is, "how can we drive traffic to our site?" over the next few days.
Please don't bash me after looking at our site. While the site looks great IMO, we have done ZERO SEO work to this site. This includes even the most basic novice work, like titles and descriptions. To this point, we have focused all our efforts on getting the product to market, getting the website running, getting the store ready, etc. I do plan on doing some SEO work soon or maybe even hiring and agency to do it. For now, we just need to get selling.
BTW,,, we have gotten some pretty good exposure by exhibiting at CES and have won several awards. Our reputation is extremely important to us and we don't want to do anything that could tarnish our reputation, now or in the future.
I look forward to all your thoughts and feedback.
Cheers!
David
Yeah,,, that's what I thought.... THANKS!!!
Yeah,,, that's what I thought.... THANKS!!!
Sorry if I'm asking a rookie question here, I'm a hobbyist not a pro. I purchased a domain from Dodaddy and it's hosted on Network Solutions. We are now adding a shopping cart and need to create the subdomain shop.mydomain.com and forward the DNS to Volusion.
I assumed this is done at Godaddy, where I purchased the domain. I called and they told me that Network Solutions needs to do it. I called NS and they told me GD had to do it. I called GD again hoping to get a different answer, but NOPE... guess what??? "everyone knows that it's done by whoever is hosting the site." UUUUGGGG
So PLEASE let me know WHO has this responsibility???? Hopefully everyone has a common answer.
I still believe it's done at GD.
Thanks Everyone
Hey Everyone,
I think I may have screwed up big time. I have an old 4 letter domain that I've been sitting on for many years. I had no idea what it was worth and ended up putting it up on ebay. I have since been told that it's quite valuable. I just tried to end the auction and ebay won't let me end it.
My thinking is that someone here may want to take advantage of my mistake. Even better, let me know if there are any tricks to ending the auction.
The domain is http://proa.com
If for some reason it doesn't sell, where is a good place to sell it at a fair price?
Have a good one.
David
Hello Everyone,
I'm just wondering, is there a quick and good way to actually cause a google alert for a keyword? I'm thinking of a press release, but there must be several other ways as well.
I look forward to your response.
Thanks!
David
We don't block robots from our mobile site. Our site is designed to work well with iPad. We have found that our KWs perform slightly better when searched from a mobile device. It's a once little bonus for us. Duplicate content hasn't been a problem, I think the engines are smart enough to figure it out, even without a mobile sitemap.
So bummed, flight delay = missed flight = spend the night in Detroit. Don't land in SEA until 10:20. I was really looking forward to Randy's opening speech and getting a good seat. :(. Oh well, I'll be late, but at least I'll be there.
I check both yahoo and bing regularly. It seems like Yahoo pretty much treats us about the same as Google. Bing gives us very high ranking only for the keywords that best describes our site. It seems like the keywords are tougher to get ranking on, but the ones that do enjoy the fruits of success. We don't do any SEO specifically for yahoo or bing. Thats my and I'm sticking with it.
Key Keri,
Thanks for the link, was a good read. Funny thing, once I figured out how SENuke spins articles, I started to notice them. Several times I have found myself reading an article and think to myself that I would really enjoy reading the original version of that article. Frankly, I can't stand spun articles and hopefully people and search engines can learn the difference between an original article and a spun one. I really can't stand spun articles and think anyone doing it should be penalized.
Having said that, if I can read a spun article, and I probably have, and I don't notice. Good enough for me.
I would also expect the search engines to be a little more aggressive about spun articles than they are about paid links. Your competitor is much less likely to spin articles on your behalf than they are to build crappy links for you.
David
I loaded it on my computer and it looked like it was hard to use, at best. After educating myself more about what SEO really is, I decided against actually using it. IMO it may have been good at one time, but I think the search engines are getting wise to this kind of thing. It looks like a really good way to get sandboxed to me.
Never heard of it, but it seems like a GREAT idea. Glad it's working for you.
Oh YEAH!!! I'm going, first time, PSYCHED! No hotel yet, coming in from Boston.
Sorry, nothing personal, but you asked.
My opinion is you have a huge problem witht he domain name. I'm sure some people think it's cute and don't mind. That said, I would be much more likely to buy ink cartrides from a domain like best-ink-cartridges-dash-dash-dash.whatever than from stinky ink. Even if the best ones were more expensive.
In short, many people will relate the name with the quality of the product being sold. I bet changin your name would lower your bounce rate across all your pages.
Sorry, nothing personal, but you asked.
My opinion is you have a huge problem witht he domain name. I'm sure some people think it's cute and don't mind. That said, I would be much more likely to buy ink cartrides from a domain like best-ink-cartridges-dash-dash-dash.whatever than from stinky ink. Even if the best ones were more expensive.
In short, many people will relate the name with the quality of the product being sold. I bet changin your name would lower your bounce rate across all your pages.
This website is pretty nice, well done. The few links they do have are nice and clean, from his brothers website, very much white hat. However, it appears that they aren't doing much of anything from an SEO standpoint.
This site, is PA31 DA21 is also doing unusually well.
In both cases, these guy are outranking the best know, most famous, and most trusted company in the industry who is PA84 DA81. This is a HUGE company that wins the most awards and gets tons of media coverage both in print and on televisiton shows.
I'm also noticing that the websites that are ranking well in my niche (every keyword) all have the name of their company at the beginning of the title tag, those with the name of the company at the end of the title tag are consistantly a few ranks lower. This seems to be consistant across all search terms.
My niche is highly competitive for a very low amount of traffic. Adwords is crazy expensive for some of these keywords! That said, one valid sale generates a significant amount of money.
Would love to hear your thoughts. I'm thinking the first company is being treated so well becase G considers them to be virgins, the purist of white?
Do it, you'll convert to Pro so you can run it the fourth time. It's a VERY nice tool.
Could it be because it takes far less character to write the same sentence in Chineese than in English. "Blue Widgets" would be 蓝色部件. If you tried real hard, you could probably write a whole paragraph in the title. It might be a good idea to translate it to English and see how many characters it would be.
EGOL, I would have responded directly to your response, but found yet another bug between this site and the iPad. I wrote to tech support, but the response was, well...., not so favorable. To answer your question, yes I tried it. The short story is it takes 15 or 16 keystrokes to accomplish what should be one keystroke. I don't want to rock the boat too hard about the iPad issues because I'm a newb. I think it's an easy fix. If any administrators monitor this, feel free to tap my shoulder at MOZcon. I would be happy to help get it fixed. This is a great forum and I want to thank everyone for sharing their wealth of knowledge and experience so freely. I will try to reciprocate whenever I feel my comments could be helpful. Thanks Again!
Thank You so much! I watched/listened to the whole video, and even listened to parts of it twice. Thanks Again! David
I have found that fixing problems pointed out by google leads to good things. I also learned the hard way that ignoring them for too long will eventually result in punishment. I would make any suggested changes, or at least try it for a while and see what happens.
First of all, sorry this Q is all in one block, but iPads don't like this site or vc/vs. When using the SEOmoz on-site keyword optimizer tool, it suggests at least one link to be to an off-site page. Would it be considered a link exchange if we linked out to an niche SUPER Authority sit that had a link back to our website? It seems like a naturally good strategy, but I'm afraid google may not agree. If the answer is no, there are many similar sites that mention our company in ver good ways, awards, etc.., but with no links. I would think this is a no-brainer. Personally I would like to eventually harvest all this press coverage to benefit our site. Btw, I was grey before I learned about SEOmoz, just like the rest of our niche. Now I'm shooting to be Snow White! Hopefully it works out. I also wrote two landing pages that I tried to SEO the right way. I would love to hear your feedback to know if they are truly effective and if they are actually white. I think they are, but don't know "all" the rules of being white http://jamproa.com/ideology/product-innovation.php http://jamproa.com/industrial-design/what-is.php Thanks!
Hello All,
A major magazine DA98 did an article in 2007 about a project our company worked on. The specifically named our company in both the printed and online (PA53) versions of our article. Even though this article is old, I think this has HUGE potential if we can pull it off.
Do you think it's possible to contact them and encourage them attach a link to our company name. Their newer articles are pretty good at doing this, but I guess in 07 it wasn't practiced by them.
What's the best way to approach this and who should I go to? Webmaster?
There is also a slight downside, the article does contain information about explosives, but not in a bad way. Could the search engines dislike this. I'm assuming not because of the PA and DA numbers for the magazine company.
Would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.
dmac
We put up a new keyword landing page with original keyword rich content last Friday. Sent out some tweets and it was indexed by google by Monday. It drove up the SERPS of our keyword by Monday, but only for our home page. Even though this landing page isn't ranking yet, the results to our homepage are nothing short of amazing. We also have it linked a few times throughout our site. We're building some quality links to it now and are putting up another landing page tomorrow with the same execution plan. BTW, we are also PR4 and in a very competitive national niche, so getting to first page has been challenging. Before the new article we were pages 2-3 now we are pages 1-2.
I agree completely, this will improve both credibility and speed.
From an SEO standpoint, I think each site needs to be written in the native language of the country that your targeting.
I would also suggest doing a little research on the cultures of your target countries.
example: China
Top search engine is not Google, it's Baidu
Facebook isn't accessible from China, they use QQ (600+ million subscribers)
Youtube isn't accessible from China, not sure what they use.
Adult sites are completely illegal in China
Don't comment about political issues, no such thing as free speech.
I'm sure other countries aren't as drastic as China, but the local cultures, trends, and laws will all differ from yours.
I have done this too with some domains we have retired, just trying to keep the link juice going. With a new domain, wouldn't you need to build some links to make it effective?
We are a US based company, but also do a lot of business in many other countries. Though most of our customers are in the states, many of our vendors are abroad. Our vendors need access to our website too. During a trip a few months ago, one of our vendors commented that our website took over 5 minutes to load.
I did some searching and found that putting our site on a Content Delivery Network (CDN) would solve this problem. We ended up using www.cloudflare.com for this. Basically, they put your content on different servers around the world and serve it up from the server that's closest to your visitor.
I tested our website during my last visit and the difference was AMAZING! Cloud flare also speeds up your website, but that's a different conversation. There was a little technical learning involved and a glitch here and there. Overall, I'm pretty happy with Cloudflare. BTW, you will still need to host your sites somewhere, Cloudflare is not a host.
Their basic service is free and they have a Pro version for $20.00 per month. I have the pro service, but could get by with the basic service if we were on a tight budget. I find the pro version is worth the extra 20 bucks.
This happened to me, almost all of my keywords dropped several pages all at once. It took a lot of digging, but I found out what was causing it, at least in my case.
I had been ignoring some pretty obvious crawl errors for a few weeks. After my keywords got dropped, I decided it might be a good time to go fix the crawl errors. Within a day of fixing them, my keywords reappeared and crawled back up to their original positions within a few days.
Again, not saying this is your problem, but it's pretty obvious to me that Google doesn't like crawl errors.
Our previous site was complete flash with ZERO html pages. It and all the other pages were PR2. I think we had PR2 because we had a nice site, but Google had no way to verify what was really there.
We redesigned our site and removed almost all of the Flash. This was about 3-4 months ago. Google dropped all of our pages from PR2 to PR0.
Spent a lot of time prior to 7/6 improving things here and there. On 7/6 our home page jumped from PR0 to PR4 and a few went from PR0 to PR2. Most of the other pages remain at PR0.
We are still improving many things on our site. I can't wait until Google re-rates us. I'm pretty sure it's going to be a good thing.
In the long run, changing the registration from a "person" to a "company" will give you added credibility. Especially if your trying to utilize the search engines places/local listings. They will send you a postcard to your company address. Once you validate the postcard you'll be considered a real player.
Keep in mind, that all goes out the door if you have a brandable personal name like Eddie Van Halen.
Thanks Ryan!
I just got an email saying a ticked was made available and I purchase it. WOOOOHOOOO!
FYI, if anyone else is looking for tix, I suggest getting on the waiting list because it looks like the event is still sold out.
Went to sign up for MOZcon last night and found it was sold out. I would have bought this many weeks or months ago, but I'm brand new to SEOmoz. I'm completely hooked and REALLY want to go to the convention.
I signed up for the wait list and it states they are trying to expand the venue. What are the odds of that happening?
Does anyone have any other ideas on how to get tickets?
I'm a Pro member, if that helps.
Any and all help will be GREATLY appreciated.
Thanks!
David
I was thinking of doing that too, but it's just too much work. This site only gets a little traffic, so I would need to build it up and then build something good to blog about. I'm just going to 301 it for now. Maybe in the future I will be inspired to do something better with it. Good thinking though.
THANKS!
That was my thinking too. I just wasn't sure if too many 301s might be considered a bad thing. I already have another 301. It used to be the same site as our home page, but 301'd it after I learned about getting beamed for duplicate content. THANKS!
I bought a domain a couple months ago while having delusions of granger. The domain is PR2, has around 30 decent backlinks, and a small amount of traffic. It also has one of our keywords in the domain name. I'm thinking of 301 redirect to our homepage. Is there a downside to doing this? We really could use the additional traffic on our site.
Agree 100%!!!
We got a VERY powerful keyword ranked #3 in Bing. Two days later, Bing sent me an email through webmaster tools letting me know that they dropped the keyword from us because our website had no content about this keyword. However, our website is almost exclusively dedicated with original content specific to this keyword.
I have never thought that a competitor could rat you out to the SE and get you dropped. That said, I find myself thinking this was almost certainly the case. I have no idea how.
The good part was Bing was kind enough to give me a way to solve the problem. I was out of the country at the time, so I ended up doing it though chat and email. It took a few days, but the person was extremely helpful and even gave me some good SEO tips. It took about a week to solve and get back on the SERPs, but I am still far away from my original #3 position.
The entire process took about two weeks. Getting a real human to verify our content took the longest.
I would have never been able to fix this problem had I not been using webmaster tools.
HMMM??? Good input from both of you, maybe a combination of both.
When to do site/index.php? It stands the most to gain and loose at the same time.
I'm thinking I should start with all the things that I know are blatantly "wrong" and fix all those things first. There is no way this could hurt anything. Then maybe do some experimenting with the other pages that are currently doing well and see what the results are. Then I should know what works, what doesn't.
LOL,,, I agree about the people who go and just kick back, sip coffee and go out for a nite on the town afterwards. If I get anything out of it, it's money well spent. If I come back with more tools in my belt and heightened enthusiasm, it's "time well spent". I have a feeling this con is more like real work than your average convention.
We finished the re-design of our website a few months ago. We have hired a few freelance SEO guys that were horrible. We then decided to pull the SEO work in-house.
I got nominated to do the SEO work. I started with what I thought was pretty good on-site SEO. At that time, with no experience, I was pretty proud of myself. I managed to get a bunch of our pages at top SERPs for long-tail keywords. Good enough for then. Now when I go look at the pages, I'm embarrassed to admit that it's my work. Please be kind.
Since then I have been trying to learn as much as possible about SEO. I'm certainly far ahead of where I was a few months ago.
For the past few weeks I've been trying to focus my efforts on creating original keyword rich original content. Our competitors all have tried this, but their content is hardly readable by humans. Anyhow, we finished our fist article, it got indexed by G almost immediately and started to push our keyword SERPs up within just a few days.
Now for my question. I have a much better understanding of on-page SEO and realize that I could make many improvements to ALL of our other pages. However, these pages are already doing fairly well with the SERPS and are moving up a few ranks a week. I'm very tempted to throw caution to the wind and completely redo all of our on-page SEO for our entire site.
Is this a good strategy?
Should I expect our SERPs to drop a little, a lot, or not at all?
I look forward to your response.
DMac
Hello All,
I'm a total newbie to SEOmoz and am totally addicted. I'm seriously considering going to Seattle Mozcon.
I would really like to hear some feedback from newbies who went last year. It would be really nice to hear if you learned a lot and if you have incorporated some of your Mozcon education into your SEO strategy.
It looks to be a pretty long event and every day seems to be completely filled with things I probably don't want to miss. That said, it would be a really large investment of my time. Is it worth all this time?
Thanks!
David
It's important to stick with one or the other. We changed from www to non www and saw a drop in our SERPS that lasted about 3 weeks. Google was still showing www on our home page only, the rest were non www. We found that all of our pages linked back to www.page/index. We just fixed that a few days ago and I'm guessing google will figure it out in a week or two.
Completely legitimate as long as you're not serving up one thing for the bots and something unrelated to your visitors.
You should try to 301 as many of the dead pagoes as possible to any relevant page you can find. This will pass on the link juice to the new page, especially if it's related content. Otherwise the link juice will be lost and eventually the search engines will drop those pages out of their index. I know doing a couple hundred pages is HUGE task, so I would focus on the most valuable pages first. Ryan is right, 404's is a fact of life. I think it's best to create a custom 404 that your visitors won't mind landing on. For this it's best to be creative, try to make them laugh or smile. Most importantly, give them something to click on. this will allow you to recapture an otherwise lost customer. The very last thing you want them to do is click on their browsers back button.Any visitor can essentially navigate to any of our other pages even though they didn't actually get the page they were originally looking for. Good luck!
Google hates duplicate content, so much so that you will have problems with two urls, let alone 270 of them. Don't bother trying anything funny, like spinning the articles, at least for now. When you submit your site for re-inclusion it will be examined by humans, not robots. You need to have a good story and a nice clean site if you want to get back into the game. Being that your sites are 98 percent duplicate content, that really means you have only one, maybe two, websites at best. I would make 301 redirects from all your other websites to your best performing website. This will show google that you have solved your duplicate content problems while keeping all the links from the other sites. Good luck! dmac
I think having a dash is no longer a negative thing. Matt Cutts has made many open public statements about using dashes in the URL. We currently have a domain in an extremely competitive keyword "keyword1--keyword2.com". it's performing extremely well after about three months. It's also a brand new domain. If you do end up going with the newer domain, make sure you use a permanent redirect (301) from your aged domain to your new one. This will pass most, if not all, of your link juice to your new domain. Google also tends to give new domains a quick boost in SERPs. This usually doesn't last too long, but could be a welcome surprise if your website of high quality. Cheers! Dmac