What do you think of this "SEO software" that uses Rand's "proven method" ?
-
I saw an ad on Search Engine Roundtable and the call to action was... "What is the #1 metric that Google uses to rank websites?"
I thought, "I gotta know that!". (I usually don't click ads but this one tempted me.)
So I clicked in and saw a method "proven by Rand Fishkin" that will "boost the rankings of your website". This company has software that will use Rand's proven method (plus data from another unattributed test to boost the rankings of your website).
I am not going to use this software. The video made my BS meter ring. But if you want to see it....
http://crowdsearch.me/special-backdoor/
Rather than use this "software", I would suggest using kickass title tags that deliver the searcher to kickass content. That has worked really well for me for years. Great title tags and great content will produce the same results. The bonus for you is that the great content will give you a real website.
-
Responding to the original question about crowdsearch.me:
It definitely does work, but the results are a little unpredictable. The best way to use it is to help push pages on page 2 or better up the rankings.
There are other similar services out there, and they are also effective.
Sooner or later the Google boys will figure out how to combat it, but for now, it's a viable black hattish weapon.
-
I think the sauce is women's products. Ever client that I have ever had that does strictly women's products seems to be able to drive things with social media. Men on the other hand it does nothing from what I have seen.
-
That's awesome. I have often asked... "Is anybody really making money from social media - Tell The Truth". They have a secret sauce.
-
I have been torn lately on the issue. I have a couple of clients that do absolutely nothing in regards to SEO. (they are e-commerce sites) By nothing I mean no SEO firm, most pages don't have meta descriptions, the title tags are just the auto generated tags, no content what so ever. If someone were to give them an on site audit they would be basically have a field day with them in terms of SEO. But social media powers their sales, it powers it hard too. They might have a pinterest post generate 1000-2000 orders in a day.
So that really has me torn to be honest. I have always seen the value in social, don't get me wrong, but I don't guess I have seen it drive a whole marketing strategy before.
-
Definitely organic SEO.
I do not participate in any social media that is connected to my website. I don't have an inclination to do that and I don't think that it is worth my time to do that. I believe that creating more content that a visitor might share is a better use of my time.
A few things that I do that might have a social element are...
I have social share buttons on my sites and some visitors use them.
I have retail reviews on my sites. Customer response to them is positive and with schema mark-up the pages of those websites receive review stars in the organic SERPs, which I feel is helpful.
I have category pages and content recommendations that automatically promote the content that visitors are engaging. This allows my visitors to determine what should be promoted. I believe that visitors do better at that job than me.
I have an industry news page that is updated five days per week. It links to several items of news and excellent content on other websites each weekday. Lots of people subscribe to Feedburner feeds and emails of that content. Also lots of people visit the site daily and click to that page. When I have new content or content that is relevant to the news, I promote it on this page. That immediately promotes it to a large number of people. I pay attention to what people engage on this page and that informs content development.
Those are the ways that I try to give visitors a role in the site or an opportunity to share it with others. These are not "social" but still enlist the help of the visitor.
-
I wanted to ask something, which do you put more value in organic SEO or social sharing?
-
You would be essentially being flying blind for however long you used it.
Right. And as soon as you stop paying them, then your rankings will tank. They will probably turn the network onto your competitors to retaliate.
-
All great points. I guess where I was going with the automatic content writing is that it seems to me more people are headline readers these days, or at least short article readers. From the different content I have on my site and using things like GA and Crazy Egg, I can see that only a dwindling percentage reach the bottom of the page.
Oh, about the software that you posted, I think that could work, but at the same time I can see it being easily blocked by Google as well. I don't personally think that would increase a site in the SERP's, but it would help with auto-complete for discovering new sites. At the same time using all of the VPN's and distributed computers that the service would use I imagine it would wreck your baseline stats too.You would be essentially being flying blind for however long you used it.
-
Do you think machines generating content will eventually take over the SERPS?
I think that a lot of "mash-up" and "spun" content gets good traffic in the SERPs. I know a guy who used to publish this type of content and had people write to him about "his articles".
What is your opinion of the death of the content writer?
If you are going to make a massive improvement in anything you have to do something new. Something different. And, the more different you make it the greater the probability that you are going to fail but also the greater the probability that you are going to win big time.
I believe that the automatically written stuff is going to digest and regurgitate instead of creating something new, novel, amazing, better, groundbreaking, spectacular, creative. So, I still think that good content writers have a better chance of winning than the spinners and mash-upers. But, they can do things at a much larger scale.
From what I am understanding talking to different people in the journalism industry it is already happening..... they look promising to a media outlet that pays $60k a year for someone to rewrite AP or Reuters news articles.
Journalism done by people in the field will be the source of all news. But, most of the news that we read is rewritten, rereported, plagiarized. Very little of it is truly "breaking". It's a shame that the original source has trouble making money these days. But, often those who rereport do a better job of explaining and presenting.
-
This is just the application I have been looking for to push my site up through the ranks. I am totally joking. I think it appeals to people looking for an easy way to rank. There are always going to people that want the easy way out of things that is why the "1 trick doctors hate" type advertising is so popular.
I think software like this does start a good discussion though. What is your opinion of the death of the content writer? Do you think machines generating content will eventually take over the SERPS? From what I am understanding talking to different people in the journalism industry it is already happening. There are apparently programs that you can feed "lesser" news into in and from a paragraph or two it can spin a few paragraphs on the story using Google, internal algorithms and other sources. While now they are not helpful to the average SEO person, they look promising to a media outlet that pays $60k a year for someone to rewrite AP or Reuters news articles.
Also I saw you recommend Hemingway App a while back, I have been using it to rewrite some of my content, I absolutely love it. Thanks for pointing it out.
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
-
Silo architecture and PR dilution! What's real?
Hi all, Today I have gone through this "Silo" concept where we need to build 2nd hierarchy level pages and then lower hierarchy pages further to rank good for related terms of "keyword(s)". But I wonder, is it real? the so called Silo structure? Google may consider that we are trying trick if we create multiple pages (doorway pages) targeting same keyword. And one of my competitors is having too many 2nd hierarchy level pages against this Silo structure and even the homepage rank may dilute by contributing to the so many pages. But their web pages rank good for the keywords they chosen by creating multiple landing pages. These are contrary to each other. How it works in real? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
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 -
Google says 404s don't cause ranking drops, but what about a lot of them
Hello, According to Google here, 404s don't cause rankings to go down. Our rankings are going down and we have about 50 or so 404s (though some may have been deindexed by now). We have about 300 main products and 9000 pages in general on this Ecommerce site. There's no link equity gained by 301 redirecting the 404s. A custom 404 page has been made linking to the home page. There's nothing linking to the pages that are 404s Provided that no more 404s are created, can I just ignore them and find the real reason our rankings are going down?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
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 -
Why is this site performing so well in the SERP's and getting high traffic volume for no apparent reason!
The site is https://virtualaccountant.ie/ It's a really small site They have only about 7 back links, They don't blog They don't have a PPC campaign They don't stand out from the crowd in terms of product or services offered So why are they succeeding in topping the SERP's for difficult to rank for accounting keywords such as accountant and online accounts. What are they doing better than everyone else, or have they discovered a way to cheat Google, and worse still - ME!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PeterConnor0 -
Negative SEO? Or?
We had another website attacked by negative SEO, so now I'm getting a little suspicious. The website went from around 26 linking domains to 1001 links from 311 linking domains in webmaster tools. They're all in different languages, and directories. I asked everyone at the organization and they said they didn't sign up for any services. I trust them, because I know they don't have time to breath right now, with 7 product launches this month. OSE says 79 links from 26 linking domains, so the spam links must be gone now.. but the website's been wiped pretty much clean from Google.com and is just starting to slowly (very slowing) crawl back 😞 Is there anything else that could be targeting the website with hundreds of links? Anything I can do to protect it? I've disavowed the links, but they're gone now so it probably won't help. Thanks in advance for ideas 🙂 UPDATE: The website is still not recovering in Google.com. It seems to be ok in .ca, but a recent conundrum is that it's been basically wiped clean from Bing and Yahoo rankings. I've emailed Bing and the team says it is indeed indexed, and not penalized (manually anyways). OLE says the "bad links" are no longer there, but webmaster tools still lists them all (I know, they don't update that often). My latest strategy is to start building some really strong links into the website with killer content. Their products are amazing (tv lift furniture) so it shouldn't be difficult. Just time consuming! I'm also being super-active on their social media platforms, to see if this helps boost rankings in the mean time. Any further tips to recover from negative SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SmartWebPros
(Note: I do not need link removal tools. We have a process that's working just fine).0 -
When to NOT USE the disavow link tool
Im not here to say this is concrete and should never do this, and please if you disagree with me then lets discuss. One of the biggest things out there today especially after the second wave of Penguin (2.0) is the fear striken web masters who run straight to the disavow tool after they have been hit with Penguin or noticed a drop shortly after. I had a friend who's site who never felt the effects of Penguin 1.0 and thought everything was peachy. Then P2.0 hit and his rankings dropped of the map. I got a call from him that night and he was desperately asking me for help to review his site and guess what might have happened. He then tells me the first thing he did was compile a list of websites back linking to him that might be the issue and create his disavow list and submitted it. I asked him "How long did you research these sites before you came the conclusion they were the problem?" He Said "About an hour" Then I asked him "Did you receive a message in your Google Webmaster Tools about unnatural linking?" He Said "No" I said "Then why are you disavowing anything?" He Said "Um.......I don't understand what you are saying?" In reading articles, forums and even here in the Moz Q/A I tend to think there is some misconceptions about the disavow tool from Google that do not seem to be clearly explained. Some of my findings with the tool and when to use it is purely based on logic IMO. Let me explain When to NOT use the tool If you spent an hour reviewing your back link profile and you are to eager to wait any longer to upload your list. Unless you have less than 20 root domains linking to you, you should spend a lot more than an hour reviewing your back link profile You DID NOT receive a message from GWT informing you that you had some "unnatural" links Ill explain later If you spend a very short amount of time reviewing your back link profile. Did not look at each individual site linking to you and every link that exists, then you might be using it WAY TO SOON. The last thing you want to do is disavow a link that actually might be helping you. Take the time to really look at each link and ask your self this question (Straight from the Google Guidelines) "A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee" Studying your back link profile We all know when we have cheated. Im sure 99.9% of all of us can admit to it at one point. Most of the time I can find back links from sites and look right at the owner and ask him or her "You placed this back link didn't you?" I can see the guilt immediately in their eyes 🙂 Remember not ALL back links you generate are bad or wrong because you own the site. You need to ask yourself "Was this link necessary and does it apply to the topic at hand?", "Was it relevant?" and most important "Is this going to help other users?". These are some questions you can ask yourself before each link you place. You DID NOT receive a message about unnatural linking This is were I think the most confusing takes place (and please explain to me if I am wrong on this). If you did not receive a message in GWT about unnatural linking, then we can safely say that Google does not think you contain any "fishy" spammy links in which they have determined to be of a spammy nature. So if you did not receive any message yet your rankings dropped, then what could it be? Well it's still your back links that most likely did it, but its more likely the "value" of previous links that hold less or no value at all anymore. So obviously when this value drops, so does your rank. So what do I do? Build more quality links....and watch you rankings come back 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cbielich1 -
Would having a + plus sign between keywords in meta title have an effect on SEO?
I have seen one of my clients' competitors do this in their meta title and it got me a little intrigued... I understand that google uses the + sign as an operator in adwords, and to a certain extent, as a search tool, but would it help or make any difference to the SEO in the meta title/data (eg. 'SEO+Marketing+Services')? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LexisClick10