Search Engine Optimisation or Optimization
- 11th Oct 2006
- Leave a Comment
- SEO
I have been getting some flack, in private emails and in public places about the lack of seo advice been given out in public places.
Well the reason why I stopped was all the fucking idiots that decide that because their 8 page website on some hardware shop in some backwater town selling gay pink hammers didn’t get a penalty for hiding text in a hidden div, or the fact that they only have forum - blog - guestbook links has IBL’s, then I must be wrong. To be honest I don’t care that much whether they believe me or not, It’s advice nothing more nothing less..
If I say buying links from here and other sites like that could get you banned for 18 months doesn’t mean that it will happen, just means it could happen, it’s called experience.
If you have every keyword under the sun linking to autogenerating pages you may get banned .. OH btw this I could be wrong but doing the following isn’t a sitemap ! even more so when all the links go back to the homepage
My rule of thumb is build a site for a user not a spider. Don’t link exchange, I know with links they’re hard to get these days. If you have to buy them, get them from someone you can trust; someone that if they said can I borrow your car you throw them the keys without thinking. Thats the person you need to buy your links from, not some guy that will get you 100 links at $2 each that can’t even speak your langauge.
Make your Titles User friendly whilst adding keywords, remember when people see your listings in the search engines, it’s better to have a call to action like:
Buy The #1 Ranked SEO Book Today! rather than SEO Book, SEO eBook, SEO Guides, SEO Books …
Don’t go crazy with your keywords and prop the page up with synonyms (they are the bold one) here and here
I might post up the big onpage - offpage report later ..
DaveN
32 Comments | Leave a comment »
David, put the http:// on the “SEO Book, SEO eBook, SEO Guides, SEO Books …” link.
lol will it make a diference.. i think my blog is pretty messed up already :)
DaveN
Hey Dave I really don’t know whats up…
I have consultants telling me that my pages are falling out because the content isn’t updated. I have a catalog of hard to find products and thus they don’t change, ever. Thus I don’t update my product pages. Is this a problem?
In the past I experimented with making changes to the pages and they
seemed to be removed from the index, or at least no longer scored in
the top 1000. Please help, I don’t know what to do.
LOL I thought this was going to be a post about the correct spelling of optimisation.
That’s what i thought! HA
J-man send me the URL and i will have a look for you
http://www.nowcomponents.com
http://www.nowcomponents.com/item1/page.cfm/1
Those catalog pages specifically
dead simple you have a dupe content issue..
to bee honest you have a shit load of work ahead of you ..
ask yourself
a) what are those pages supposed to rank for ??
b) where is the user experience.
then you have sites like these
http://www.datasheets.org.uk/datasheet-mc68.html
http://www.iceuro.biz/item1/page.cfm/1513
http://www.summitelectronics.com/sumbsc2006/844.php
http://www.sumbsc.com/part/467.php
http://www.partminer.com/page/5002/pm5002.html
you need to stand apart, build a database that is indexable, create chip families and description, for indexing add other families on page, but don’t just pop 10,000 ic on a page lol.
DaveN
Dave,
I appreciate your looking at the site immensely. When you say I have a dupe content issue, are you referring to title tags, page content, anchor text… I ask because the skus on the bottom of the page are actually unique across the whole catalog. We are in the secondary market of integrated circuits (obviously). We have literally millions of sku’s.
What are we ranking for- The skus on the bottom of the catalog page is the actual search term our buyers use. Engineers and purchasers for large manufacturers of say cell phones or or video cards or anything in between know the manufacturer number and that is what they enter into google.
The user experience is not exactly what google would have in mind by thier guidelines, our users don’t want to read articles, they don’t want to see pictures, they need a hard to find or obsolete part and they need it quickly (generally they are below par in their inventories and need the part as quickly as possible)
As far as the data you are referring to use to create families etc it is practically an impossible task. JEDEC has been trying to standardize part numbers for years to no avail.
Aaaarrgghhhh, I came over here to get away from all the duplicate content discussions in the forums, and what do I find…. more duplicate content discussions.
Heh, if you’re not sure what sort of duplicate content you have then start reading some of this stuff, and pronto.
Hi JMan
Why dont you ask as many of the manufacturers/suppliers you know to ftp you an updated parts list every week with stock quantities available and then push this into an eccomerce package like http://www.OScommerce.org (Open Source), it wont solve all your problems but should keep your content freshish.
Even if the actual part number doesnt change many of the QTY will each day and this combined with the fact the data is being updated regularly you might do OK.
Push the individual part number data into their own OS Commerce record/page each day, its based on MYSQL so millions of part numbers isnt really going to worry it that much, then also you will get the individual part numbers and descriptions in the meta and titles etc and each page will be a separate page
OS Commerce is a pretty decent package, I have just implemented it myself at http://www.seachcorp.com.au you can install it yourself but the payment gateways take a bit of expertise so I got someone to do it for me with local gateway experience, all up development cost under $8,000AUD (which is like 20 sterling :) including a piece of software to OBDC to my accounting software and an affilates module. In hindsite I could have done this myself with a developer for
[…] So none of the SEOs out there are publishing real SEO tips anymore? Well, here’s a small one to keep in mind that can make you a wee bit more competitive while maintaining a decent level of decorum in the keyword spamming department. I call it “Search box suggestion keyword spam” and it is dripping with plausible deniability so Matt shouldn’t have any issue with it. […]
g1smd you always seem to pop up when dupe gets mentioned, although I have yet to see you on DP.
J-Man
Dave hits the nail on the head, of course. Google shows 5400 pages in the index and all of them are duplicate!
You have the perfect long tail keyword dilemna. The good news is that you should be able to get great SERP if you do it correctly!
Absent the kind of individual content for each sku Dave is suggesting, you can at least rework your inventory into a decent content management system that doesn’t show the same sku on multiple pages. Even better if you can include some other fields in you DB, like a description, quantity, price, etc.
You will still need an information architecture and a spiderable link system to get all of the pages crawled correctly. If you get the content management together, its probably worth getting a Google sitemap as well. (Anyone out there who can speak to the usefulness of a sitemap with a million page catalog?)
Matt Cutts posted about how to build a sitemap for a site with millions of pages, but I am not sure how well it works in practice.
But my crappy 8 page website is the authority on gay pink hammers! When the people that run the interweb understand that
:*(
Hey Dave,
Your thoughts are dead on with my own. For the past several moths I have been spewing out free advice like crazy on my blog. This should be free information, help spread the data!
I think this is the problem - everyone in the SEO community keeps talking about “building for the user”. Has the algorithm truly become smart enough that the best site for the bots is the best site for the user?
I truly hope that everyone’s answer to that is a resounding, uniform, multi-lingual hell no.
J-Man, how much is the “071SEARCHUSBIDCOMINVENTORYBUYELECTRONICCOMPONENTS141ASPXALTAVISTA”
component on
http://www.nowcomponents.com/item1/page.cfm/40
I wouldn’t mind having one of those.
Actually, I’ve been looking all over the place for
071-093-004 071-093-004 071093004.
Speaking of dup content, this TBPR 4 site amazes me. Over 5k pages with Identical title/description, I’m looking 1000 pages deep into the SERP and not one supplemental page.
I guess to prevent dup content issues, just spam every page with random text.
Good job for ranking in the 40s for ‘buying cheap viagra cialis uk’. Got sales? :)
Matt,
I found the Price for you
-q
oh dear lol.
Ermm dunno what more to say on Quad’s comment
While osCommerce is a half-decent package, it needs some serious work to stop it serving Duplicate Content. There are multiple URLs to get to the same content. ZenCart is a later adaptation, and fares a little better. But all of those types of packages are quite lacking in that respect.
I have a sitemap just like that and i rank fine. lol..
I always like your advice and listen to your shows when i can. Don’t let some morons with no common sense ruin the chance for open minded up and commers to learn from you.
The fact you even posted this prolly means you already have had this same feeling but hell.. I second it anyhow
Dave, I have had many similar experiences. People don’t realize that SEO is about Best Practices. Neither SEO, not the efforts of search engine anti-Spam teams represent a science. Matt Cutt’s team at Google does a really good job at finding lots of spammers, but many get through the cracks (usually because they are smaller).
Plenty of people take risks and get away with it, for a period of time at least. But if you are running a serious business, rather than hacking out a few bucks on the side, why would you want to take the risk?
Thank you everyone for all the input and taking the time to look at the site. I greatly appreciate it, I have begun the process of evaluating dupe content from the perspective of content, titles, descriptions, and link text. Again thanks for all the help.
Best Regards
J-Man
Try to also evaluate it from the perspective of the same page of content being available at multiple URLs (including different parameters, and different parameter ordering)… you’ll be surprised at how many you can find.
And quad, I appreciate your showing Matt where the price was, much obliged. ;)
What you say about creating web pages for people to read and not merely for getting high rankings is absolutely true.
Unfotunately many webmasters have forgotten the fact that search engines have been created for people to find websites, to read and educate and not for some low quality websites to be on top because of some black hat techniques.
I really hope people begin realizing this basic concept. Thanks.
Why are you spamming so much with your forums? R u into blachat seo ?
I don’t understand james, i only have 2 Forums.
1) is private
2) is none of your business ;) but white hat
unless you mean this blog ?
Daven