Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Bring the heat MSN!
[edited by: MLHmptn at 6:30 am (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
You have to be willing to spend money.
Or time. In my opinion you can invest either money or time, or both of course.
We tried adwords - it wasn't very effective for our particular items. We depend on a mass of targetted traffic. Items are low price, so we have to sell a lot of them . Why this industry, well we're one of the few that still do it - but someone has to, and in general we are one of the biggest companies out there for what we do.
MSN & Yahoo don't refer much, even though we rank ther better than Google. It just so happens, Google is where everyone searches when they want these items (hobby items). Traffic from Google converts great though.
I invested money in adwords before, then I decided we needed to invest more time, so me and my guys spent months working on content - not only for engines, but for our users.
Now that we've followed all the rules, writing loads of content, we now find ourselves in a worse position than before... and no, I won't be using AdWords again.
What's really a kick in the teeth though, is that we spend literally thousands of $$$ on a new website design.. it went live on Feb 1st - this update happened on Feb 2nd .. so now we've got a great site, and only about 10% of the visitors we had before that will even see it.
The new design launch was too close to the update to be the cause here though.
Yesterday when the pages had a fresh date, we were ranked in our original position, today it's back to being nothing.
perhaps your redesign had something to do with it. i really think you'd be better off trying to learn how to fix your site then hoping that google will just fix its results for you.
Is anyone using mcdar to check the data centers? If so ... the results delivered bare no relationship to the actual search results performed on the individual data centers.
The allinurl: results on mcdar may illustrate a feature of current SERPS that are new to me: an importance is given to website age which ranks above content:
allinurl: my-domain
1 www.my-domain.freeserve.co.uk (6-year-old)
2 www.my-domain.co.uk (5-year-old)
3 www.my-domain.co.uk/home.html (frames page for above)
...
7 www.my-domain.com (3-year-old)
Doing a 100-result-per-page `standard' `allinurl: my-domain' search on the same DC (216.239.53.99) => the same order for these pages (8 -> 11, although the .com does not feature on the first page). It is a touch staggering to think that a page which contains nothing much more than a single link will rank above 58,500 (not-my-domain) information pages. That is taking KISS to extremes.
andrew_m:
is whoever got hit by this update also seeing an increase in the number of indexed pages
site:full-domain currently shows 14,000 for me. Across January this number steadily dropped day-by-day by hundreds or thousands at a time. Most of the SERPS results are URL-only.
anyone else notice DMOZ descriptions are being pulled and displayed as the snippet for the index page?
I'm sure others have mentioned the DMOZ descriptions in earlier posts in this thread, but the thread's too long to search them out anymore.
I have found a number of my inner pages which had never seen the light of day before, popping up into top positions for money phrases - all with the DMOZ description as snippets. The referrals to these pages are currently outperforming anything else I have. It can't last. I would be the first to admit that these pages don't deserve top billing.
These pages:
- Have few or no inbound links from off-site
- Have good on-topic content
- Have many on-topic outbound links
- Have on page basic SEO, nothing more
- Low keyword density
- Are aged 5 years
