Sort of lost my way - Links, SEO
-
Not sure where to start with this so please bare with me.
I do the SEO for our company website (we're a small family business), I'm not an SEO'er by profession (I'm a carpenter/joiner) but been doing our site for ten or so years.
About 12 months ago sort of let go of work & web things a bit due to very sudden family bereavement which kind of hit me hard. So when I did get back into doing bits on our site I probably then concentrated a little bit too much on content building rather than going after links etc. As a result we've dropped in the SERPS a bit, but having said that still just about clinging within the top ten for our terms.
Since I've started again we've had Panda/Penguin and I'm a little unsure how to go about getting links in, most of my competitors are using things like blog commenting (just random blogs that are do follow) , recip linking (any sites as long as they give a link!) etc basically things that long term will hold no value long term (or possibly none even to begin with).
All this brand stuff leaves me at a loss, we're a small family business as our the majority of our competitors so not 100% sure that the branding stuff I'm reading about is relevant?
As I say I've got some pretty decent content, some of which I am trying to push with mixed results – we're not in a very sexy niche so not much chance of it picking up links naturally!
Another thing I am noticing is in my niche I don't think any SEO companies are involved with my competitors, most of our competitors are ranking their home pages for every single related search term, whilst I've have always tried to create a page for each search term and I have these pages ranking.
For example my main search term, lets say 'wooden doors' I rank an internal page for this term whilst everyone else seems to rank homepages. I'm finding it hard to get new links into this page, so one idea I do have is elsewhere on my site I have a guide to fitting the doors (with videos, pictures and text) so what I'm thinking is place this guide on my 'wooden doors' page making it a bit more linkable (it's fairly new and not yet gained any links, so no loss to move it) and would also mean a variation of anchor text. A good idea do you think?
Some of my other content has been linked to by colleges in the UK, unfortunately all the links are behind moodle log-ins (give me a decent link you leeches! Lol) ! I am thinking of getting in touch with other colleges to see if the content would be useful, but actually getting hold of the person responsible for the subject is proving difficult!
I've also done a bit of guest blogging, however I'm torn between writing decent stuff for our blog or giving it away (I wouldn't like to give something away thats poor, ok or doesn’t make sense) to other blogs.
Sorry for the ramble (if you've made it this far then thanks for reading!)! Would appreciate all advice. Ultimately would love to get an SEO'er involved but looking around the good un's are out of our price range so I may seek some training as it may prove more beneficial.
-
Yes scraper sites are common and again devalued by Google. But, you are judged by the company you keep.
So cleaning up an ugly link profile is important.
-
A few of the links are claimable, so I'm thinking I shall do that and then change the text.
Looking at the list of them I think two are my fault and the rest have just copied and pasted away (thanks!). Never used any link submission software or automated directory stuff.
Just saw a site called 'Find the needle' they have pages and pages of my stuff but I have otherwise never heard of them.
-
Because of the amount of work entailed in having them changed by a third party.
Find the ones you can control and change them- review any link submission, directory submission etc- software that may have been used, for a list of these that you did unintentionally.
Focus on the other recommendations that I made, and then restart your manual submission process, for obtaining HIGH quality links. The majority of these links/ directories etc, will be ignored by google- as they are low quality. Yet I do notice that these are pretty specific to your industry.
These could be scraper sites, which scrape your content and then add a link - because these have been hit by algorythm updates, more than likely they are strongly devalued anyway, but they can appear to be purchased links on your end, which gives the appearance of breaking Google's TOS.
Apply a copyright tag, publisher and author tag on your new site as well to avoid this abuse from scaper sites in the future.
There is no short cut, you have a lot of work ahead of you- I don't envy your situation, but I have seen much worse.
-
I shall get to it, most of these (if not all) seem to have just copied and pasted directly from my site.
How best do you think my time would be spent, getting these changed or writing new copy for
our site (or does this still leave me with the same problem as various places linking to me with duplicated copy) -
While I do have tools, yes- you can use Google to locate these and establish a level of duplication.
You can use copyscape.com as well.
Just a sampling here of using google, as I stated earlier it looks like your content on your home page is what is often used to submit to various directories- causing duplication there are variances in the duplicated numbers, I just took a quick peek:
-
How did you find my content duplicated across 3700 urls?! What tool shows this?
-
Hello again,
Your main focus in my opinion is to remove all the duplicated content that you have within your links, your content is duplicated across approximately 3700 other URLs. This is where we meet the Panda Penalty. Instead of links at this time, focus on "On site" Optimization.
1. Do your keyword research- what are people searching for, choose URL's on your domain that offer value to the visitor and reflective of the keyword query.
a. review your traffic and analysis- what keywords are your current visitors using? Review the traffic on those as well, could they be improved? Are they directing to the correct landing page. Use a variety of keyword tools to review mobile/ desktop and your location.
2. Review all your title tags for duplication - as well as description tags
3. Review your on page links, is the anchor text your keywords ?
4.Shorten your ALT tags on the images- why? Because they are crammed in there like sardines!
5. I am glad to know you are building a new site - be careful with duplications in Wordpress platform.
6. Add at least *400 words of content on your main pages- all of which contain your main keywords.
That is just the beginning, but in truth your site needs a top to bottom overhaul for SEO and the easiest and oftentimes ( with lack of substantial competitors) most effective is the basics. Once the basics are done, we can look then at link building- your site isn't ready for that, as your duplication problems are very obvious to me, therefore- very obvious to the big G.
I hope this helps.
-
Thanks, wasn't sure whether I was allowed to post a url! Don't want it showing up in search so I've shortened it (and broken it in half -- please take the DELETE bit out)
Design is old (Was doing this originally last year but as I say I lost my way a bit) and being redone at the moment in a Wordpress style (Genesis based theme) to make it easier to navigate.
-
A url would really assist a positive response with suggestions. Because there is so much more to seo than sexy niche and link bait.
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
-
Can piracy sites linking to you hurt your SEO?
Hello, Our website sells software that we have developed, but there are piracy websites that offer a crack/keygen to our software and are linking to our site. From an SEO perspective, are those sites hurtful to us if their spam score is below 30 and their DA is not 1? We'd like to understand if there is any action we need to take from an SEO point or if our site's SEO is not affected by it. Thank you!
Link Building | | marynau0 -
Backlinks vs External Links vs Referral Links vs Outbound links
Hello all, I was just wondering if you could explain the difference between all the links above? I'm confused as they all seem to be the same or similar and I would just like to clearly know what distinguishes them from eachother. Thanks for your help, Jayne
Link Building | | NCOREGSEO0 -
Link removal
We were hit by penguin and have been going through the process of removing bad links. Things were looking up but then wasa 20% jump in our bad links. They all seem to be related. There are over 100 different domains that all seem to go back to mbiz. examples include http://www.5stone.com.cn/Literature-holders-.html http://www.building-stone.com/Display-furniture.html http://www.china-tombstone.com/Display-exhibition-products-.html It looks like they have automatically gathered data from google to create these pages. I would hope that the guys at Google are clever enough to be aware of these sorts of links. But if not I need to get them removed. I have tried whois but I cant find out how to contact these guys. Has anyone got any bright ideas? Thanks
Link Building | | Discountdisplays0 -
Outbound links
Hi there, i know inbound links are what hold the main value in terms of link building but if i have an inbound link from a big company such as ITV or BBC and they have put an article on their site linking back to mine, would it be beneficial if i made a comment on my site and then link back to their article or will this not really help? Sorry as you can tell im very new to seo! thanks anthony
Link Building | | anthonybriant0 -
Reseller seo
so i have a web design firm and, when i decided i need to offer seo services i originally went with an seo reseller company. i decided to try them out on myself so i gave them 4 keywords to rank for and tried them for about 6 months. when they started, our website was in google oblivion for those 4 keywords. after 6 months some keywords are on page 1 and some at the top of page 2. the ones on page 1 are the ones i also optimized for by putting the keyword in a footer link in all my clients' sites. when i look over what they did they either wrote cheesy articles that link back to me and posted them in random places or they commented on people's blogs linking back to me. but it seemed to work. at least to get me from oblivion to page 2. now it seems to me these methods are discouraged here but they seem to do at least some good. any thoughts or comments on this?
Link Building | | dad7more0 -
Best way to combat spammy links
Hi folks. A client of mine has taken to building spammy links from commenting on forgein blogs etc. Since hes started this his site has totally dispeared from the SERPS apart from company name searches. I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on how to bets combat this? Many thanks in advance
Link Building | | EclipseLegal0 -
What is the best way to make sure competitors or others aren't buying links on my sites behalf to penalize us?
Is there a good way to do this? Does the Open Site Explorer have an ability to screen by when the link was found, or help by picking up on potentially shady links? Thanks much..
Link Building | | jim_shook0 -
What link building techniques do you teach to new hires with no SEO experience?
Right now I train my interns and new hires on 5 techniques: 1. Appropriate blog commenting the right way 2. Saving social bookmarks 3. Submitting a website to a directory 4. Publishing articles with links 5. How to build up, maintain and use a Twitter/Facebook/Digg/StumbleUpon profile for SEO Are there some other lower level link building tactics you have tried to teach interns or new hires?
Link Building | | DanDeceuster0