Forum Moderators: open
Search term: <any generic product name>
The one thing I see and have been seeing for awhile.
The manufacturers site is in the top 10.
Huge sites like epinions and amazon are in the top 10.
Does the amount of pages your site has have anything to do with how high you rank?
Search for any popular product and I see the same type of results. Sometimes the search term isn't even in the title tag.
[edited by: Woz at 12:16 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2004]
[edit reason] No specifics please, see TOS#13 [/edit]
what do the top ranking sites have in common
>>The manufacturers site is in the top 10.
its number 1 on my search
>>Huge sites like epinions and amazon are in the top 10.
yes correct
>>Does the amount of pages your site has have anything to do with how high you rank?
yes
Whats your point caller?
It's not. My sites regularly rank above manufacturers' product names - and that's without even any emphasis on SEO.
They shouldn't but that's another story. (The manufacturer's pages are good resources and the visitor is best served by these being in #1.)
Your right the manufacturers site should rank first, it's the other sites that are up there with them I am curious about. They all seem huge, they don't have the best product info.
So you agree then, on page SEO has little to do with why sites rank first?
I certainly don't agree with this. Google has made the mistake of placing too much emphasis on on-page factors. Then it made the mistake of placing too much emphasis on off-page factors. I believe they have found the right balance now - unfortunately, so have the spammers ...
An industrial product, no affiliate sites or such. Seems the big companies, the ones with the most pages win. They certainly don't link to each other.
So how does a small mom and pop vac store compete with the likes of Amazon and epinions and magazines that report on products Doesn't make sense for these people to exchange links with their competition.
1) If the store has really, really useful content--e.g., an objective and comprehensive "complete guide to selecting and using a vacuum cleaner" or "the universal guide to vacuum-cleaner bags" or "Herbert's Hoovering Guide"--then it may well receive inbound links from editorial, reference, or community sites that normally wouldn't link to an online retailer. And by having pages on many different topics, the Web site will have more points of entry (and more chances to do well for various keyphrases related to vacuum cleaners, cleaning techniques, etc.).
2) The store may need to advertise, just as it would do in the brick-and-mortar world.
So how does a small mom and pop vac store compete
You may need to alter what you are aiming for. Perhaps instead of "brand widgets", you would need to go for "mycity brand widgets" or something along those lines.
Mom and pop businesses shouldn't be aiming to compete with the Amazons or Ebays. That's a dangerous game in more ways than one. Should they have some limited success they could easily get wiped out by the big boys tweaking their ad campaigns. Imagine the mountains of $4.00 a month text links Amazon could buy if they so wished :)
If - to follow that rather generic example - I typed "Hoover" into Google, I wouldn't want 400 small-time shops on the first 40 pages, I'd want the big suppliers.
If I wanted a small shop, I'd add my town or county to the search. For a start, I'd never find anything local to ME in the first 40 pages of "everybody's local results"!
This has always been the way us in the UK search for something - we either use Google.co.uk to omit all those US sites, or we add our town or county.
Is this any more of a problem than walking into a library and saying "I want a book of fiction" without being more specific?
DerekH
It seems to me that in many areas the only way to get to the top is to be a big company.
In my category (travel), mom-and-pop businesses rank at or near the top for many important keywords and keyphrases. Some are editorial sites like mine, some are travel agencies, and others are affiliate sites.
blah blah blah blah
option #1
If you do more seo you will win.
If you are on page 10 do ten times the seo and you will get to page 1.
Dont know what seo really is.
Than you are s o l
Noone on this board will give away any real secrets to good seo.
option #2
pay a firm to do it for you .
Just make sure they have competive listings as proof of there work.
Noone on this board will give away any real secrets to good seo.
That's patently not true.
Brett and many others try very hard to give good, ethical, practical advice.
Indeed, if you are so convinced that no-one (or noone, as you would have it) gives (or give, as you would have it) away any real secrets, one wonders what the point is in your being here.
Many of us try to post questions and answers in equal quantity. For you to suggest that no answer is worth the pixels it's written on makes me wonder what is your point exactly?
Do tell...
DerekH
My several sites that still rank high in google are large sites. They don't rank well in MSN or Yahoo. My sites that Google doesn't like anymore are on the first page of Yahoo and MSN results.
Guess they haven't got to the travel sites yet but they will. Consumer and industrial product searches seem to bring up the largest sites first.
The other type of sites I see coming up first in google are nothing but links. Again they are large sites and their main purpose seems to be to make money off google adwords.
I wanted to know if others had noticed that larger sites seem to be ranking first. Do you think the size is now part of what google thinks is important?
I haven't noticed any big differences. Maybe some small moves towards bigger sites, but there are so many issues to consider, especially if you're only focusing on a handful of search terms.
Are the big sites climbing because they have much broader supporting internal link structures? Possibly because their site happens to be properly themed? Maybe it's because their PageRank far exceeds everyone else? It could be good old fashion incoming link text... That's just scratching the surface...
If you've been noticing big changes with the larger sites, maybe there is something up, but it's most likely that these sites have been around the top for a long time and as a result have picked up a lot of the basics that G looks for when ranking sites.
SEO can get you a long ways, but when you look at the basic tips on this board that actually produce results, you'll find most of them revolve around content and links. Big sites in general have been generating content for a while and have been pulling links in for a while as well.
You can compete, it is hard and you have to be creative about it. You should be targetting derivitive terms to get started and see where that takes you.
The posts would all be wow another top listing this is so easy good thing we used the advice on webmasterworld.
I looked but I havent seen any posts like that recently.
As fo why im here
There are lots of good examples of what can get you in trouble, and Im great at seo but I cant build sites that convert to well.
However all is not lost, as somebody already suggested, target the brand keywords with an extra word or two. Like:
<big-brand X> city Y
<big-brand X> buy
<big-brand X> model XYZ
Or a million other combinations. Targeting thousands of keyword combinations is a short term way to establish traffic for the more competitive keywords.
Some poeple just have to stop competing with the big dogs and start getting rich with the little dogs.
I know about on page SEO, I know about incoming links and I think by now Google must know these link exchanges have nothing to do with page value. I know about targeting less popular keywords. I don't think there are any big secrets unless you are talking black hat SEO, which I have no interest in.
I know you can tell someone exactly what to do and they will still mess it up.
I mainly wante to discuss the things Google is taking into account that people have little control over. That is what Google wants to do, find a way to rank pages that webmasters can not manipulate. It used to be so much fun to wait for the monthly Google update and see how you ranked. Just isn't as much fun these days :(
If you had more links than amazon you would have similar results.
[cs.toronto.edu...]
Derek
I didnt want to upset anyone.
Then please don't think you upset *me* - sometimes I get a bit mischievous when I post if a thread seems to have more opinion than fact - sometimes it gets the thread moving again :-)
DerekH
Is it OK to join a webring?
There is a question that has been asked so many times here.
If you want my opinion of webrings.... I say it is not ok. Only because I can rank much higher than my competition who are involved with webrings. So it may be hurting them or.... it may not be helping them. There you go... an answer that is clear as mud.
But if you can get them through otehr ways cant we ignore SEO?
After all 100s of ppl compete for top 10 position in every category!
