What in the Heck is Going On With my Dealer.com sites in Google SRP's?????

[Andy MacLeay]

Gerry - I want to be PERFECTLY clear on this. We are NOT intentionally back-linking to anyone's pages and those backlinks are NOT actually there (see Google webmaster post)...I AGREE this is spooky behavior and if I had to guess, Google product is probably running in circles right now trying to figure this out, because this is not the user experience they should be delivering. Their algorithm is built for efficiency, I am betting (and this is speculation... which I said I wouldn't get dragged into, but here we are) because of our scale as a vertical-specific automotive platform we are an absolute edge-case for them and Google AI is making leaps, automatically indexing like/similar pages, (e.g. to Google: service pages all look kinda similar, so they cross index a small percentage of them, so on and so on)

We have and always will use the whitest of white-hat tactics to rank for SEO, some say we are overly conservative, I am ok with that.

Again, for everyone if you want to reach out to someone direct

Andy MacLeay
Director of Digital Marketing
[email protected]

 

[Alexander Lau]

This is unethical. How are you going to link to other dealers without permission? Has anyone tried to remove these backlinks through google? Do they just show back up?

The Car industry is so strange. Everyone is holding the dealers' hostage. OEM rules, co-op rules, etc etc. Add in that there are several 3rd party platforms in which companies (cars.com - DeaerRater.com etc) can hold reviews hostage for INSANE amounts of money monthly -- Reviews that show up in SERPs and knowledge panels, reviews that we the dealership can't respond to unless we pay exorbitant monthly fees....

It's a racket. The whole thing. It's frustrating, counter-productive and quite silly.

HA! Good points dude and welcome to the industry. It's actually far dirtier than that.

 

[Alexander Lau]

Hummm.... do you guys think that this could partially be part of the problem??? Good thing jksubaru is only linking to 7 pages and not 15 or 20. @kevinfrye, jeffwylerspringfield.net has a pretty strong hold on 2nd place for most linked to our website. LOL

View attachment 3740

• Create a list of all of the URLs on your website – using Screaming Frog, I crawl my website so I can get a full list of every URL, title tag, meta description, number of inlinks (number of internal links pointing to that URL), and the word count.

It's pure ignorance on their part and bad form.

 

[Alexander Lau]

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Meanwhile at Dealer.com....

 

[Alex Snyder]

@Andy MacLeay will be on RefreshFriday with us today. We're going to ask about this topic. We're also going to dive into Andy's bigger area of expertise: digital marketing.

 

[Rick Buffkin]

Hummm.... This just popped up in my news feed on FB. Clearly the Advertising Dept. hasn't been in touch with the SEO Dept. this year and they are severely clearly cutting the SEO Dept. short. So, I made some edits on the ad!! If anyone would like to pass this along to the Advertising Department at DDC, please be my guest!!

 

[Carluminati]

Switch to Nabthat like we did. No lie, I'm not considering anyone else, no matter what. No way. You'll hey leads like you've never seen. Give it one week, then pow. They are also brilliant SEM managers. We make it far more difficult than it really has to be.

 

[Alexander Lau]

@Rick Buffkin how do things look?

 

[Rick Buffkin]

HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa...(Breathe)HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!!!

Bro... These MoFo's are jacked UP!!!! Now, even if you change site providers from DDC, your still gonna have issues because of DDC. Here's an example and my .02 cent at the bottom!!

I brought this issue up in another group and a gentlemen chimed in and said to the group basically verbatim what DDC has been preaching about the results not showing in a standard search and other providers having this issue. I figured I would check out his sites to see if A) he was a DDC client and B) if his sites were affected. The answer to both of my questions were, yes. But.... I found something else!!! And you can see this as well if you do the search!!

site:warrenhenryinfiniti.com -miami



Look at the cache for this site! Scroll to the bottom. You'll see that it's not a DDC website! Even worse, look at the URL structure in the cache info at the top of the page!! It's a diff URL structure!!



The site provider isn't DDC. It's a company called Dealer Spike. I started thinking, maybe this is the evidence that DDC has been claiming they have of other site providers that this Google anomaly is affecting!!!

Then I went over to web.archive.org to see the history and guess what?!?!?! This Dealer was a previous DDC client.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180112162726/http://www.briggsbikes.com:80/




My thoughts and .02 cent.... This old DDC website is still live and active inside of DDC's platform! The dealer or the new site provider simply pointed the dealers URL to the new site providers servers for the new website!! Since the site and files are still live and intact, it's still being crawled via Google on DDC's servers and getting thrown into the mixup of garbage that is coming out of DDC!!! Like I said, this is just my .02 cent.

The real problem here is Google is relating a Motorcycle Dealers website that is located in KS to a Infiniti dealers website that is located in FL. Thats the real problem here folks!!

So, if you do decide to move from DDC, you need to make sure all of the website files are deleted and completely removed from their system or you to can have some crap like this to show up in search results from your new website provider as well.