Even though Iâ??ve received dozens of requests for site gradings, this month I’ve decided to pick a site that didnâ??t ask for it. Why? Because this month Iâ??m going to air some poor, unsuspecting black-hat SEO’s dirty laundry in order that you might learn from their mistakes and indiscretions, rather than subject a loyal Practical eCommerce reader to potential intense and unwanted scrutiny by search engine reps reading this article. There are so many sites out there committing search engine sins, it was really hard to settle on one.
Search Results for: inbound links
Beware of Black Hat SEO
Search engine spammers never prosper. Sooner or later, they get caught. And when they do, it’s almost never pretty. Consequences can include ranking penalties, removal of the site’s “voting” power (i.e., ability to pass PageRank), incomplete indexation (i.e., a partial site ban), or, worst of all, getting “graybarred” (i.e., a total site ban, when the PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar is grayed out). You can’t exactly just pick up the phone and give Sergey or Larry a call with a “Mea Culpa” and then everything magically comes right again. It could take years for a business to recover from a site ban.
Competitive analysis critical to SEO success
Understanding your competitors — their strategy, their tactics, their level of success, etc. — is crucial to the success of your SEO initiatives. I’m not just talking about your traditional competitors, I’m referring to the other sites occupying spots in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for keywords that you are targeting. Many free competitive […]
SEO Report Card: Golfgods.com
Golf equipment seller Golfgods.com was undergoing a site revamp â?? with numerous SEO and usability improvements, along with a shift in ecommerce platforms. Jason Mischel, President of Golfgods.com explains: â??We currently receive about 5,000 – 6,000 unique visitors per day to our site but much of it is of very poor quality because of the search-engine-optimization tactics employed by the previous regime.
SEO Report Card: StayLeaner.com
Stayleaner.com, the ecommerce site for J & J Health Foods, sells vitamins, herbs and supplements for sports nutrition and body building. Fred Evaristo of J & J Health Foods states: “I rely heavily on pay-per-click advertising as I can’t get ranked in the natural searches no matter what I do.” We feel your pain, Fred! Let’s see if we can’t help Fred and his team…
SEO Report Card: DiscountFlies.com
DiscountFlies.com has really missed the boat (yes, the pun was intended) when it comes to search engine traffic. They do not show up in the first 100 results in Google or Yahoo! when searching for the popular search term fly-fishing or for the more targeted term fishing flies. But all is not lost. With some concerted effort, DiscountFlies.com should be able to turn things around.
SEO Report Card: BalancedLifeProducts.com
BalancedLifeProducts.com is a small ecommerce site, based in Madison, Wisconsin, that sells meditation and massage products such as yoga mats, meditation cushions, and reiki timers. The site doesn’t fare well in the search engines in the natural (unpaid) search results, so they have been relying on Google AdWords to fill in the gaps. It wasn’t hard to see why their rankings in natural search traffic were so low. After a quick health check-up of their level of search engine optimization, I made the following diagnosis…
RSS Made Simple
An RSS feed is merely an XML file that you host on your Web server â?? it kind of looks like HTML code. But don’t let its simplicity fool you; in the hands of a sophisticated marketer, the potential applications for RSS are huge.
Link Buying Basics for Business Bloggers
Any search engine optimization consultant will tell you that links are the currency of the Web. They’re also the currency of the blogosphere. Without any inbound links, you’re just blogging to yourself. In Mike Grehan’s seminal piece “Filthy Linking Rich“, he explains how those rich with links just keep getting richer. So how can new […]
SEO, Blogs and RSS Feeds: A Magical Combination
The major search engines – Google, in particular – seem to love blogs, which are the personal or professional diaries that number in the millions online. Search engines favor blogs because …