Search Engine Musings

Sometimes it makes more sense to start again rather than to try and fix what you’ve got. That applies in website optimisation as much as anywhere else.

Sadly there are plenty of sharks in the SEO pool, and taking their advice can cost you thousands of pounds. I’ve recently spoken to a couple of people who’ve spent a lot of money trying to fix sites that are not ranking well. Investigation soon revealed that they’d had some pretty dodgy advice in the past and had been penalised for unethical optimisation techniques. Now you can either sort out the problems so you’re whiter than white, do more good quality optimisation, and then sit out the penalties until you come out the other side; or you can chuck that domain in the bin and start over.

Sometimes it may be worth sitting it out if the penalty looks like it might eventually end, but other times if there’s no sign of improvement it may be throwing good money after bad. If a previous optimiser has really made a mess of your site with doorway pages, hidden text, duplicate text, etc. it may never recover no matter what you do.

A new site on a new domain will take a while to rank well - 6 months is not at all unusual before rankings start to come through on Google and to get anywhere useful may well take longer. You need to decide if you can survive on MSN and Yahoo results (which usually come through rather sooner) or if you can afford to use PPC to get the traffic you need until natural listings start to kick in.

It can be a tough choice but it may be better to learn the lessons of the first site, apply them to the new one and move on with the advice of a trustworthy SEO.

Well it’s actually never been away but since it was taken over by Yahoo it’s certainly been a bit quiet. I always had a soft spot for it as it seemed to produce good quality relevant search results even when Google didn’t.

Now however it has a new version with an interesting feature - AlltheWeb Livesearch. As you type into the search box it produces a drop down list of alternatives which updates continuously, and it puts up the search results for the nearest search to what you’ve typed so far as you go. Seems pretty fast too; which was another feature I appreciated in the past - unlike Yahoo which sometimes seems to take ages while waiting for sponsored results to load.
Might make for some interesting experiments. I’ll be going back to it more often from now on and comparing the results to Google.

… the same ones seem to all come at once.

For some reason we seem to get batches of companies from the same industries appearing together. One month all the calls seem to be from mortgage and loan sites, the next they are all job agencies, the next it’s the turn of the Spanish property sellers.

This would merely be a minor curiosity were it not for one important consideration - conflict of interest.

Strangely enough potential clients seem to take very differing views on this. Some are worried that there may already be a similar site to theirs’ being optimised by the SEO, while others look explicitly for such relationships on the basis that “if they can get them to the top of the rankings they can do the same for me”.

In my experience most ethical SEOs look at it something like this:

If the potential second client in the same industry is looking for different keywords/phrases from the first then there’s no conflict of interets and it’s ok to take them on.

If they are looking for substantially the same keywords as the first client then it’s potentially a conflict of interest and both the existing and the potential client should be made aware of it and have the right to respectively veto or withdraw from the project if they object.

Try asking your shortlist of possible SEO companies what approach they would take. It might tell you a lot about them.

Hi

Welcome to the introductory message in the new SpiderwritingSEO blog. This will be a periodic look at some of the issues that come up in day to day SEO work and a heads up about any interesting changes that occur in the search engine firmament.

Hope you enjoy it over the coming months and find it useful.

Bill