Lamest Comment Spam from an “SEO Company” Ever.
All right, all bloggers get comment spam. You just delete them and don’t really give it a second thought. But when it’s so freakishly blatantly SEO spam and it comes FROM an “SEO company” and it’s left ON an SEO blog, I’ve really got to wonder: How dumb are these guys? Do they really think I’m going to approve their comment and that I won’t resent that they’ve tried to paste their unrelated, poorly written marketing drivel in my comments? This is just another example in a long list of reasons why good SEOs have to work so hard to prove themselves — because any numb-nut can call himself an SEO and claim that his lame tactics are SEO best practices. Yuck.
Here’s the text from The Web Coast, minus the links of course, for your amusement.
Our affordable san diego seo services will give your website the web page drop necessary for you to find for those looking for what you do and where they do it. Our expert san diego seo website offers affordable san diego seo services. We know that your company is specialist and it is important for you to find a partner that provides expert honest, ethical results. http:// thewebcoast . com [link removed] is a company that provides affordable search engine placement and investment results not excuses san diego seo website.The site and san diego seo services can provide more traffic to your website than any other online offering. If you use pay per click advertising to reach a page on Google or other search engines as natural biological techniques to dive into a shallow pool share up 14% of traffic for the whole page. If you’re not in two or three first places for your pay per click campaigns, you can see very significant traffic using our Affordable San Diego san diego seo Services. Studies show that 83% of people searching on the internet use organic techniques.
You can read more about it here: http:// guiaourense . com / story . php?id=34824 [link removed]It all starts including Organic SEO Services. You might call for an Organic SEO Services blog or just natural old economical seo services. We can help you uncover this. Just give us a phone call to get on track. We can answer many questions and satisfy in any blanks that you have.We are a San Diego SEO corporation that offers smart Affordable SEO that include everything from Website Promotion to specific e-commerce solutions and online marketing tools.We take a research-based approach to make sure that you locate target customers through valuable and reasonably priced seo services. If you are interested in improving your organic search engine standing please take advantage of our offerings.
Seriously. Yuck.
I suppose there’s a small chance that a rival of The Web Coast posted this comment to make it look like they were spamming, in the hopes that bloggers would post negative things about them. Looking at their site, the links they included in the comment, and the pages that those links link to, it looks an awful lot like a legitimate and seriously poor attempt at funneling links through various blog and forum posts and profiles, none of which add any value, to get external links eventually pointing back to their primary site. If this is an elaborate smear campaign against an innocent SEO company, I invite The Web Coast to let me know and I’ll gladly recant. I won’t hold my breath.
UPDATE: A comment from Brian R. Brown left on Facebook:
I’d exercise caution in using their services…based on their terms, you might have to pay a restocking fee on any returns: “You will have to pay for all shipping cost along with being SUBJECT TO A 25% RESTOCKING FEE.”
Based on this, the comment spam and a brief look around the site, I’d say Richard Kingston of San Marcos, CA is lucky if he can spell SEO, let alone perform it. Sorry Dick, calling yourself an SEO doesn’t make you one… a spammer is a spammer, regardless of their stripes.
What DOES a keyword restocking fee cost, anyway? A link restocking fee?
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Priorities on Ice? Open the SEO Icebox.
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I’m a gal of action. If something needs to be done, now’s a great time to do it. So I’m finding one of the hardest parts of in-house SEO for me is the icebox. While I try to chill out, I’ve got to remind myself what I would have told my clients in this situation: Stop focusing on what you can’t do and start doing what you can.
Our development team has different priority levels for projects: active, backlog and icebox. We might all agree that a project is a critical priority for SEO, but when pitted against resource conflicts like server uptime and affiliate widget development not even I can argue that my SEO project is more critical to the bottom line. So while I’m cooling my heels in the icebox waiting for the resources to get my technical SEO roadblocks removed, I’m turning to my own SEO icebox.
Most tasks in my icebox have kept perfectly well. Some of them are even interesting! A competitive analysis on a key rival. An analysis of the URLs driving keyword traffic, and whether they’re the URLs most likely to convert. Research into relevant directories & wikis to submit to. Stockpiling content to flow into the pages that will exist when dev thaws out my SEO project. And many others.
Yes, some things expired too quickly or grew a thick layer of freezer fur. For instance, it’s a bit late to whip up a Father’s Day landing page. But if it had been a higher priority, it wouldn’t have been in my icebox in the first place. So no harm done.
So that’s my mantra this week: Stop focusing on what you can’t do and start doing what you can. It may not be the huge leap forward I want, but I’ll be better positioned to leap farther faster.
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Back in the Blogging Saddle
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Howdy Web PieRat pardners. I’m back in the blogging saddle, though some of my giddyup has got up and went with a new job, new city, new house and all that other stuff that comes along with big life changes.
Practical Ecommerce will be publishing my SEO articles monthly again, starting today with a post on SEO for businesses with models or niche targets that make SEO a bit more challenging.
In my monthly column, I’ll be focusing on the challenges of in-house SEO and the struggle for competing resources. I must say, it has been more of an eye opener than I thought it would be. Having done in-house online marketing for Intel and agency SEO for large ecommerce sites with Netconcepts/Covario, I naively thought that those experiences would give me some foundation for the challenges of in-house SEO. More on this topic soon, but for now I need to get back to my day job: Creating an architecture to sell more restaurant deals and discount massages for Groupon’s local businesses.
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Site Speed’s Role in Google Rankings
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Reproduced from my April 19 article on Practical Ecommerce:
In its continuing quest to provide searchers with the best possible search experience, Google announced last week that site speed is now a signal in its search ranking algorithms. Along with the hundreds of other signals, like link popularity and keyword relevance, Google is now factoring site speed (i.e., how quickly a website responds to web requests) into its rankings on search results pages.
Why Does Google Care About Speed?
Searchers presumably associate the quality of the page they land on with Google’s brand. If a page that Google ranks isn’t topically relevant, the searcher’s Google brand experience is negative. Google is taking that a step farther with this algorithm update, implying that a site that is slow to respond or load will also result in a negative search experience that reflects poorly on Google.
It is true that bounce rates are higher on slow sites, indicating that searchers find the experience less acceptable. And Google is thought to factor bounce rates (quick returns from a search landing page back to Google) into their algorithms. Site speed, then, would just be an extension of that logic.
What About the Ugly Factor?
As a search user, I’m all for anything that encourages increased site speed. But, as a marketer and SEO professional, this feels like a slippery slope. Ugly sites also experience higher bounce rates – perhaps there should be an “ugly” factor in the algorithm. Obviously, I jest. “Ugly” is impossible to define empirically and quantify outside of the bounce rate data that “ugly” would theoretically increase.
Regardless of how marketers feel about the site speed addition to the algorithm, it’s live now. Google has introduced the site speed factor to only approximately 1 percent of the search queries performed today, so the likelihood that any one site will notice a dramatic shift today is extremely small.
Google rolls these changes out slowly to avoid the sudden massive shifts in rankings that we used to see several years ago. While this is a welcome change, it does make it harder to pinpoint source of the bounce issue, if there is one. As a result, a site with major site speed issues may have trouble discerning that speed actually is the issue. Impacted sites will more likely notice a gradual decline in rankings and organic search-referred traffic and sales as the site speed factor gradually impacts higher percentages of search queries.
Test Your Site Speed
Google Webmaster Tools recommends an assortment of tools to test site speed to determine if there is an issue, including Google’s Page Speed, Yahoo! YSlow, and WebPageTest. If site speed is indeed an issue according to these tools, a host of business or technical challenges could be contributing. Ecommerce sites tend to include a multitude of analytics and usability feature scripts that can contribute to slow response times, as well as hosting configurations that limit bandwidth available for a site.
These business and technical challenges tend to be the most difficult to resolve, especially for sites without dedicated IT resources. But, don’t panic – test first. If site speed is not an issue today, then file this away for discussion in the future as new features and technologies are added to the site. If site speed is an issue, then it’s probably something the business has been discussing already, since it impacts overall user experience. SEO revenue is yet another reason to prioritize the discussions around site speed and to make technical upgrades that could improve SEO as well as user experience.
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“Search Friendly” Ecommerce Platforms?
Filed under: SEO | Tags: duplicate content, keyword theme, URLs
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After working with ecommerce SEO clients for several years, I’m about fed up with “search friendly” platforms, content management systems & site features. They all come with their own baggage, their own set of issues that need to be tested for and controlled. Which takes IT resources. Which are hard to come by, especially when you’re talking about something as difficult to determine ROI for as structural SEO updates.
And invariably, the client isn’t jazzed about revising their platform to optimize structural SEO issues because they thought they bought something that was good for SEO in the first place.
The problem is, SEO friendliness is more than enabling automated & manually customizable title tags. It’s how functionality impacts URLs, how many URLs are generated for each page of content, whether the navigation path affects URL structure, how tracking parameters are passed, whether sorting modifies the URL, whether categories and products are assigned unique persistent IDs, whether IDs are reused, and many many more questions that impact SEO.
I’m looking for the platform that enables and enforces a single URL for a single page of content that is system-optimized for a unique automated keyword phrase, which can be overwritten by manual optimization. ONE URL, ONE page, ONE unique keyword theme. Across thousands of pages on an ecommerce site.
If there’s a platform out there that does this without heavy customization, I haven’t worked with it yet. Pray tell, what’s your favorite “search friendly” platform?
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