Forum Moderators: open
First post here. My problem is two fold. 1) I'm the webmaster for www.widgets.com and although we are still refining our content and products, we feel we still have a very strong and informative site on those products already in. We were in the index about mid January and had a PR0, but as of late are no where to be found at all. Why are we not there? I know that to be higher in the results I need to work on getting incoming links (very hard in this industry to get relevant links.) and alt tags and the many other things suggested at WebmasterWorld, but what is the point if I am not even listed.
Then to complicate the problem 2) Many of our top competitors use spam techniques. My clients see this and want me to do the same. This puts me in a fairly uncomfortable position because right now we are spending huge amounts of money for PPC's while our largest competitors do not do paid advertising but employ spam. Well today I got fed up and reported all of them to google and hopefully action will be taken. The worse offender had 9 out of the 10 search results with 5 different URL's some going to duplicate content for the search term "discount widgets". Another had hidden text in his doorway/main page. While still another has EXACT duplicate content on two different urls, (www.widgets.com & www.widgets.net) that are indexed. These are just quick searches this afternoon, I am sure I could find more if given the time to research.
Over the next few days I am going to go through my site and do what I can to make it more search engine friendly if in the meantime you guys can shed some light on why I am not in the index AND what to do about my competitor's techniques.
Thanks
as much as I would like to tell you the secret, I cant, as there isnt one.
I am concerned that you say you can not get backlinks easy, I dispute that as EVERY type of site can acquire relevant backlinks on the web.
as for alt tags, well they are not really that difficult, but do you NEED them?
furthermore if you are spendin money on PPC, thats your choice and is a commercial decision taken by your clients, if they want go down the spam route, fine let them do it.
as for competitors, who cares, let them do what they do, and you do what you want.
as annoying as it seems, life goes on.
probably hasnt answered your question, but we are big boys now, and cant go round crying because the other bigger boys get all the goodies.
Shak
I know that to be higher in the results I need to work on getting incoming links
Forget about getting higher for the moment... you need to focus on these to get into the index. The lack of links is quite probably why you had a PR0 (assuming no spammy techniques), and why you may have fallen out of the index.
By and large I agree with Shak.
If you can't get links from your same industry, go for an associated one. Builders linking to plumbers linking to painters linking to gardeners, etc. Read paynt's posts in the link development forum here and start thinking about it from your customer's perspective.. who they are, what they want.
Approach your linking as if you were planning a cross-selling programme... there's a reason peanut butter is on the shelf next to strawberry jam and within sight of the bread aisle at the supermarket, y'know.
Yes you are brought a relavent page, but it is like a mini site for each of their products based on a keyword url. This would be fine if they used robots.txt and just gathered the traffic from type ins, but they don't. Plus they have two EXACT duplicate sites also with google indexing both fully that are returned for "discount widgets". BTW thanks for the welcoming words.
Shak:
I know what your are saying and trust me there is no crying going on, just frustration, but on the other hand there are definitely things I can do to make my site better which I am working on. As far as links go, I have been waiting for DMOZ to list me for 4 months now and just paid to be included in yahoo. There is one directory for my industry that I found but is poorly designed with low PR and charges $10 a month. Everyone else is a competitor except for the manufacture's of the products we sell, but NONE have links pages. Again very frustrating
I just wanted to know how others at WebmasterWorld handle these situations and what can be done.
Forget theming for a second. It is good to stay on theme, but not necessary. To get listed in Google, you need a link of some kind from a page already in the index, preferably PR4 or higher.
So go outside your industry. I'm sure you can find somebody in a competitive industry outside your field who will trade links with you. Or, think this way: does your company have any business allies with websites? Any friends with personal homepages? Teenage kids? You don't need much, just one little link. Ask around. I'm sure you can find _someone_ to give you a link, even if it's not a very relevant link. This will at least get you spidered.
Heck, sticky mail me and I'll trade links with you just for kicks, though I usually try to stay on theme, I'll make an exception in this case!
freejung is also very correct. The link does not NEED to be in your category. I would not go wild linking outside your theme though. Probably not the best long term plan.
The message here is to think outside the box a little.
You also have the option to resort to the same tactics your competitor is using. Will you like it? Maybe not.
If you stay the "high ground" your competitor may someday be banned and you'll be left standing. But what if he doesn't get caught? You keep losing sales/money.
Through the "6 degrees of seperation theory" you can get a link to your site.
For example create a 3-5 page personal web site at your ISP or some freehost and have a few typical pages. One of the pages could be some type of humor page (joke of the day, funny pic etc..) which can get linked to from a typical humor directory. Then create a resume page or about me page that links to your widgets.com site
I hope that was kind of clear at least.
Agree much so
One of my sites is a one-man-band home services tradesman, I've had reasonable success with the theory that someone after say, to illustrate, a plumber to fix a leak might well also want a new carpet shop, etcet. Only thing is I found, when asking for links, I was best off explaining my reasoning from the start; before I started doing that right from the gun I had a lot of 'sorry but your site isn't related to ours' replies. After I started explaining my reasoning I was getting a greater proportion of agreeable replies saying something like, 'hey, yeah, I see your point..'
