The Ultimate Question
-
This is probably going to look bad, but Im going to do it anyway.
Ive owned my own business for over twenty five years. Due to the economy and a health crisis, my business has come to an end. Im left pretty much with nothing except my family, which is on shakey grounds as well.
anyway.
Ive been working on the IM, SEO thing for about two years. Ive made some money, but nothing that would make a difference to my situation.
I now have a site in a competitive niche. The site is rated A by the app here on seomoz. But my site is lacking in authority backlinks. I write my own posts, about two a day, and honestly, it is of much better quality than those ranking . My site stays right around #11. Every other day, the site goes to #7 or 8. When that happens, I make between 300-400 a day. Then it falls back to 11.
So the on site is good, rated A here.
My site is speedy
Not enough backlinks
The content is good
I was foolish enough to believe the G story about backlinks not being important. Concentrate on the content. All of that crapola. The sites that are ranking well have all the typical xrumer links. Totally not related links. Junk. And from what Ive seen, I believe the sites ranking 1-3 are making about $1000. a day.
So you can imagine what being this close, after losing so much is doing to me.
So....
Right now I am just writing content, pinging, social bookmarking and submitting rss feeds daily.
Does anyone have any real information on how to bump my site up in rankings. Please, no stories about guest blogging, or attempts to sell me your SEO service
I know I would do it for someone else and I have many times in the past.
If you can help me, please reread, and contact me. I wish you all the best. Sorry for the melodrama.
-
I think it is very difficult to judge your own site objectively. I tend to snap at my wife when she is critical of something on my website (although I am more tolerable with other people weirdly). It sounds like you need fresh eyes on the situation. I am no expert at SEO although I know enough to know when something is not right. I am pretty new to SEOmoz so I am not sure what the rules area about sharing sites etc but if I have your web address I would be happy to give you feedback on your campaign at no charge (if this is allowed) and whether there are any obvious steps that could improve it. I am not looking for SEO business so this is in no way going to lead to me selling you anything. From what you are saying though it sounds like you need to divert some of your time from content creation and syndication to developing relationships with authoritative sites so that they link to you although without looking at your site etc it is hard to make any solid recommendations.
It sounds like you are in a situation where you could really benefit from a professional SEO but do not have the resources to fund one and I really feel for you with this. If your assumptions are correct it is very easy to see how in as little as two months getting the right SEO expertise to add value to your efforts could really pay for itself many times over as if $1000 or $2000 a month makes you an extra $200 plus a day it very quickly pays for itself.
-
You ask for no stories about guest posting, but at present I think this is one of the best weapons an SEO can bring to bear. I have had superb success with guest posting over the past 6-9 months which has resulted in top 3 rankings across all my main keywords.
If you shared your URL, we would be able to make some real critique that may uncover some underlying factors that are hindering our site.
Best of luck with which ever strategy you move forward with.
-
Justin my answer will be short and smile and i am pretty sure that you will not like it too much!
Now when you said you don’t have enough links, so you have two options left
- Similar to others you can also order junk links
- Or focus more on quality links pointing back to your website (that can and cannot be guest posting)
Move for option one will make your condition worst, you might even fall from #11 spot (dangerous option)
Moving for option two might take a bit of a time like (a month or more) but you will move to page one with stability and you will make more money from it.
The choice is always yours but keep yourself updated with the result of each option available.
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
-
301 redirect homepage question
Hi If i have a homepage which is available at both www.homepage.com and www.homepage.com// should i 301 the // version to the first version. Im curious as to whether slashes are taking into consideration Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | TheZenAgency0 -
Hard-working newbie question: benefit of moving my blog to my online store's domain?
Hi all, I've been running an online wine store in Switzerland for a month and have been working hard on SEO (I love learning about it). Anyway, for a couple of years prior to launching the store, I had been running a wine blog whose articles are ranking well in Google. I now want to link the two. My questions are: A) will the addition of the blog (store.com/blog) contribute to the store's domain authority (currently, the blog authority is higher than the site authority)? B) technically, can I 301 the whole blog to store.com/blog? Any help and tips would be appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | fkupfer0 -
Sitelink Demotion Question
A non profit in our industry that we support pro bono--the awesome Efficiency First--is finding that individual member listings are sometimes showing up within their sitelinks. This obviously does not sit well with the members who do not show up. I know that you can "demote" specific URL's within webmaster tools, but I'm wondering if it's possible to demote an entire section. Their structure is www.efficiencyfirst.org/member/member#. Do we demote the entire member section? Or is there a more structural problem at play here? Thanks much. 2IZuPkD.png
Technical SEO | | PeterTroast0 -
Questions about Redirects
Hi, I am trying to make sure that I can determine if a site has a 301 redirect set up to redirect the site from domain.com to www.domain.com and am hoping that you can confirm the following for me, or let me know if I am off track: is http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ a reliable way to check if a 301 redirect is set up? is Screaming Frog SEO Spider a good tool to use to see if a redirect is in place? if I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com, I should only get results for the site being indexed, not for the site that has the 301 redirect set up, right? For example, if www.domain.com is set up to redirect to domain.com, then I should get no search results for site:www.domain.com and only show indexed pages for domain.com. If I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com and get results for both, then does this mean that the redirect is not set up? if a redirect is set up from www.domain.com to domain.com, should the crawl report should only show one page crawled on www.domain.com? if a crawl report shows same number of pages for www.domain.com as for domain.com, does that mean that redirect is not set up properly? Thanks in advance for your help! Carolina
Technical SEO | | csmm0 -
Quick Seo question regarding 301 redirect
Hi everyone and thank you for showing interested in my problem and for helping me out with this easy thing i have going on
Technical SEO | | caw_roHere is how it puts out : I have 2 websites, same niche, mostly same keywords. Site #1 holding strong on google #2 ranking for months now. Site #2 was holding strong in google top 10 rankings until 2 weeks ago when it got sandboxed for some reason I want to use a 301 permanent redirect from Site #2 to Site #1 to pass all the link juice onto Site #1 and hopefully beat the #1 spot
The question: Will this affect Site #1 is anyway, considering Site #2 is in somehow sandbox ( i assume that, since he dropped more then 70 positions over night ) Is thins a good think to do or i risk damaging Site #1 by doing this ? Thanks allot in advance. Best regards,
Trinca Alexandru0 -
Is this dangerous (a content question)
Hi I am building a new shop with unique products but I also want to offer tips and articles on the same topic as the products (fishing). I think if was to add the articles and advice one piece at a time it would look very empty and give little reason to come back very often. The plan, therefore, is to launch the site pulling articles from a number of article websites - with the site's permission. Obviously this would be 100% duplicate content but it would make the user experience much better and offer added value to my site as people are likely to keep returning even when not in the mood to purchase anything; it also offers the potential for people to email links to friends etc. note: over time we will be adding more unique content and slowly turning off the pulled articled. Anyway, from an seo point of view I know the duplicate content would harm the site but if I was to tell google not to index the directory and block it from even crawling the directory would it still know there is duplicate content on the site and apply the penalty to the non duplicate pages? I'm guessing no but always worth a second opinion. Thanks Carl
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Parameter Handling - Nourls Question
We're trying to make sense of Google's new parameter handling options and I seem unable to find a good answer to an issue regarding the NoUrl option. For ex. we have two Urls pointing to the same content: http://www.propertyshark.com/mason/ny/New-York-City/Maps/Manhattan-Apartment-Sales-Map?zoom=1&x=0.518&y=0.3965 http://www.propertyshark.com/mason/ny/New-York-City/Maps/Manhattan-Apartment-Sales-Map?zoom=2&x=0.518&y=0.3965 Ideally, I would want Google to index only the main Url without any parameters, so http://www.propertyshark.com/mason/ny/New-York-City/Maps/Manhattan-Apartment-Sales-Map To do this, I would set the value No Urls for the zoom, x and y parameters. By doing this do we still get any SEO value from back links that point to the URLs with the parameters, or will Google just ignore them?
Technical SEO | | propertyshark0