7 replies to this topic

[Wyoming]

[Split from here.]

Thanks for the warm welcomes, all! They are very much appreciated.

Let me tell you what we did to optimize our sites, and why Google has frustrated us so much, while Yahoo responded in a much better way. We have a couple of clients who sell buffalo meat. We carefully wrote the text for their websites to use the phrase "buffalo meat" as much as possible, and still be readable English that convinced visitors they should buy from our clients.

We used alt tags, wrote the title carefully, and put in keywords and a description for those engines that use meta tags. I even convinced my clients to get urls with the phrase "buffalo meat" in them - and not hyphenated monstrosities, either. We have 18 websites that we own with unique urls and somewhat unique content. We put links to the client websites on all 18.

For years, those techniques worked very well, and our clients floated in the top ten - or at least top 15. Once Florida hit, they were gone. I only looked down 100 listings and they weren't there - but if I typed in the url, they were still in the listings somewhere. A couple of weeks after Florida they floated back to the top, and then got clobbered again with the other updates.

Yahoo's launch had my clients back in the top ten - the rankings were just as they used to be in Google and it was very gratifying to see the sites back up. We are still invisible on Google.

One more point - we use exactly the same techniques with all of our clients - it's the only thing we know how to do to optimize sites. Other clients involved in other businesses are still near the top. Google has been a roller coaster ride and it's not been a lot of fun.

So what did we do wrong with Google that Yahoo thinks is just fine?

[Jill]

We have 18 websites that we own with unique urls and somewhat unique content. We put links to the client websites on all 18.

Glad to see that Google is finally catching this sort of thing. There's your problem, right there.

Jill

[Wyoming]

Jill,

I need to explain myself a little better - it sounded like I was spamming Google with links and I'm not (at least that is not the intention, and if Google sees our sites as spam sites there is something wrong - especially since the problem does not apply to all of our clients.) I apologize for giving the wrong impression - I was trying very hard to not do anything that might be interpreted as self-promotion.

We have 17 community websites. Each one focuses on a separate community, and includes local restaurants, churches, schools, events, movie theater times, etc. They also carry news and sports. The news and sports are duplicated across all the sites (kind of tough to write a story about the President's speech 17 different ways!). The movie theater times, local restaurants, schools, events, etc., are unique to each url.

The urls are all short - CheyenneNetwork.com, CasperNetwork.com, LaramieNetwork.com, etc. Not a hyphen in the bunch.

These websites were not built to create links pages - they were built to be community websites. We put links to all of our clients to benefit them, not only from the search engines, but also from the local traffic. If we build a website for a local carpet cleaning company, a link from the local community website could bring the client some very appropriate business.

I would think this is the way the Internet was supposed to work. Content-heavy websites with appropriate links. Some of our clients do very well, and in fact Yahoo has our buffalo meat clients near the top. Google did too, for all of our clients for years - but since Florida has penalized the buffalo meat clients (but not other clients).

I don't think Google has it particularly out for us - we're not on the radar screens. But I am curious as to why techniques that work wonderfully for client A fail so miserably for client B.

There is another side to this, and another question. We have been lucky enough to be successful at website design and have a lot of clients. We put links to our clients on our corporate website. Would Google consider us a link farm because of that?

Jill and other SEO's - if you put links to all of your clients on your own website - and you had a lot of clients, would Google penalize you?

[Jill]

Thanks for the clarification. (I split this thread since it's not about Yahoo.)

So, are you saying that like the buffalo meat site has links from the CheyanneNetwork site, and all the others? If so, is it done in a logical manner?

Without actually looking at your sites, it's hard to say, but it does sound like it's possible that your sites are viewed as some sort of mini-network. But then again, maybe not.

I would think that you might do better to not have the sites actually share content, but point them all to the same content that resides somewhere else (if it makes sense for them all to share that content). But each site should definitely have it's own purpose and it's own unique content.

Again, this may not be your problem at all, it's just a guess. From your first post, as you could tell, the 17 cross-linked sites certainly raised a flag in my mind! Not sure if it would in the search engines, but it might.

I assume you have other links to all the sites besides just the links from each other? If not, that right there could be your problem. (And they of course should be different links for each site, not the same ones, or else you're back in your own little loop.)

Jill

[nedguy]

Woah..!

At the risk of splitting this thread off in yet another direction....

The urls are all short - Not a hyphen in the bunch

Have i missed a newbie trick here?

I never liked hyphens in domain names for aesthetic reasons, but I wasn't aware of any SEO issues.

Are there any?

Nedguy

[Wyoming]

We have a links page on www.CheyenneNetwork.com and our other community websites. It is just one of many pages and not a primary one, at that. The links page lists our other community websites, our clients websites, and links to local non-profit and community organizations (United Way, Chamber of Commerce, etc.) The links are identified so people know which ones are website design clients, which ones are community organizations, and so on. The links to the clients usually just use their business name as the hotlink - that's it.

When we design a website, we put a link back to our corporate website, so it says "Website designed by ....."

There was never any intent to fool Google or any other search engine. I remember posting on another forum a while back, asking if the increasing number of clients we had would lead to Google considering us a link farm. I'm guessing that that is what happened.

Naturally, we are upset about it - but that's nothing compared to the reactions from our clients who saw their websites suddenly drop.

Jill, you have a wonderful and very deep website. If you had a couple of hundred of SEO clients, and wanted to put links to them so that prospective customers could see their websites and contact them for references about your work - would Google punish you by downgrading all of those other websites? That is kind of what happened to us, imho.

[Jill]

I never liked hyphens in domain names for aesthetic reasons, but I wasn't aware of any SEO issues.

Are there any?

No.

Jill, you have a wonderful and very deep website. If you had a couple of hundred of SEO clients, and wanted to put links to them so that prospective customers could see their websites and contact them for references about your work - would Google punish you by downgrading all of those other websites? That is kind of what happened to us, imho.

No.

But if each of my client's websites linked to all of my other client's websites, then there would be a chance that yes, that could cause a problem. It wouldn't make sense for them to all link together that way. Certainly not if they were all in different industries, etc.

Certainly, if there was a common thread between the sites (other than the fact that they were my clients) then that might work. Like if they were all in the same industry.

But even if you could stretch it so that there was a good reason for them all to link to each other, you'd still want distinct outside links that were not part of the network. It's very easy to spot a network "island" if you're looking for it.

Jill

[Wyoming]

Jill,

Thank you for your response. I apologize if I came off a little too strongly - the situation has been upsetting, and I'm sorry if I took it out on you.

Our clients do not link to each other. They just link to our corporate website. Yes, all 17 community sites link to one another - but that was so that someone living in Casper could easily jump to the Cheyenne website to see what it offered.

Anyway, I may be belaboring the point. We are obviously not doing something right as far as Google is concerned. Yahoo doesn't see it that way, and we are lucky for that.

Thanks again for all your help - not only here, but also with the newsletter.