Is your SEO company helping or hurting?

[terrencegordon]

Google has apparently been sending out warnings to websites through their Webmaster tools account warning them of "unnatural link patterns". Google has been after artificial link building (link farms, link rentals, link exchanges) for quite a while now, but it is unprecedented for them to actually warn web masters.

The letter looks like this:

At the same time, Conductor (the SEO software we utilize) released a study on Internal link building and anchor text (the actual text within the link). The result is that proper use of anchor text for internal links increases SEO value and rankings.

I see SEO companies all the time offering link building in their packages. Many of these companies are utilizing 3rd party link farms (usually from India), and most of those links go unchecked. A few weeks ago, we found a link to a dealers' site from let's just say a less-than-professional website (ahem...animal porn). Be careful and be sure to ask your SEO company what tactics they are utilizing to "build links". It can hurt your rankings...or worse.

 

[sweece]

Google has apparently been sending out warnings to websites through their Webmaster tools account warning them of "unnatural link patterns". Google has been after artificial link building (link farms, link rentals, link exchanges) for quite a while now, but it is unprecedented for them to actually warn web masters.

The letter looks like this:

At the same time, Conductor (the SEO software we utilize) released a study on Internal link building and anchor text (the actual text within the link). The result is that proper use of anchor text for internal links increases SEO value and rankings.

I see SEO companies all the time offering link building in their packages. Many of these companies are utilizing 3rd party link farms (usually from India), and most of those links go unchecked. A few weeks ago, we found a link to a dealers' site from let's just say a less-than-professional website (ahem...animal porn). Be careful and be sure to ask your SEO company what tactics they are utilizing to "build links". It can hurt your rankings...or worse.

Short term gains vs. long term strategy. The link on the animal porn site probably provided some SEO value at one point, but not so much anymore. It's a good idea to brush up on the Google Quality Guidelines before hiring someone to build links for your store.

I wrote an article about this in January:

Is Your Dealerships SEO Strategy Ethical and Long Term?

 

[terrencegordon]

Short term SEO is an oxymoron. Good article, Kyle.

 

[kcar]

The problem is too many people want to rank #1 and they want to rank fast, see results. But this is such a bad idea. People have no idea what they are doing, there are about 6-7 steps with SEO, each step has about 4-5 properties within it. You CAN NOT skip each of them or do something from step #7 when you're on step #3... Ex: A site with 400 backlinks, goes out and should be doing 80-120 press and article subs, instead they get a package of 600 High PR backlinks and get screwed..

A ton of people are going all out buying 1-2K backlinks, from a site with prev 200 backlinks and getting hammered by Google. Plus a ton of SEO companies are full of it.. They themselves have no idea what they are doing, either they are doing weak seo and are just sitting back collecting your $$, or they are doing things so fast you're long term SEO is going to have issues.. Either way, good luck finding a decent SEO expert, if you want to learn, plan to do a lot of reading and studying..

Also there's a new wave of neg SEO, I won't get into it much since most of you should not know what it is in the first place, and no one should be doing it at all, period. But you can de-index your competitors sites from Google very cheaply and quickly.

 

[sweece]

Also there's a new wave of neg SEO, I won't get into it much since most of you should not know what it is in the first place, and no one should be doing it at all, period. But you can de-index your competitors sites from Google very cheaply and quickly.

I was reading about this the other day. Seems like it would be a better use of time to just focus on your own site? Unless of course you were trying to get your manufacturer appointed site to get de-indexed [makes evil laugh]. Kidding, of course.

 

[DealerMarketing]

Google's Over-Optimization penalty announced this past March, is an issue like many prior, as a "wait and see" event. But when we focus less on algorithm signals and more on what we know to be good SEO practices, the changes Google makes every day seem less scary.

 

[joe.pistell]

I was thinking that Google's Over-Optimization penalty was hunting for content farms (giant 500,000 page sites built by robots) like Mahalo.com https://www.google.com/webhp?rlz=1C1TSNO_enUS453US453&sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&rlz=1C1TSNO_enUS453US453&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=site%3Amahalo.com&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_nf=&gs_l=&pbx=1&fp=160a46efcf63646c&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1600&bih=799

 

[Paradox]

I was thinking that Google's Over-Optimization penalty was hunting for content farms (giant 500,000 page sites built by robots) like Mahalo.com https://www.google.com/webhp?rlz=1C....r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1600&bih=799

Joe,

It's essentially hunting for anyone negatively impacting the user experience through their over-use of what they believe are "optimization techniques."

Example:

Page title = Don's New Cars Ford New Mazda Cars Used Ford Cars Buy

In the rookie SEO's mind, that title is going to superbly rank for combos of "Buy New Ford & Mazda Cars," except any user reading that title cannot process it in the form of a fluent sentence that carries value, meaning and relevancy to their search, therefore it's overly optimized (and who loses out most? the user.)
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On the topic of all these fly-by-night SEO companies, who honestly don't even do SEO half of the time (more like strictly FB/Twitter posting and Review management) .. well I've been quietly working on an "elixir" if you will, that will put these scoundrels to rest before they steal any more American dealership marketing funds, so I'll be back to elaborate on that when the plan is ready for Phase 2. =P

 

[DealerMarketing]

organic (relevant) vs inorganic (manipulation).. having links from sites that has nothing to do with auto sales is manipulation (inorganic). pruning your site for inorganic links is important.

 

[Paradox]

I've noticed a TON of dealers have racked up hoards of terrible backlinks. I'm talking hundreds of .RU and .CZ backlinks. Through recent analysis and repair, this doesn't seem to have hurt as bad as it did in other industries. One of the dealer's I recently fixed up has about 8k garbage backlinks and I still got them back up to #1 for their main keywords (they had fallen to page 4)