(973) 887-0778

Rank Magic

SEO for small and very small businesses.

Home » SEO practices » Page 10

SEO practices

by 1 Comment

JCPenney Slammed for Black Hat SEO Tricks

/ Google, links, SEO practices / 1 Comment

JC Penney penalized by GoogleLast month, the New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization investigation of  JCPenney. Puzzled by how well jcpenney.com did in organic search results for just about everything they sold, they asked an SEO expert to look into it a bit more. The investigation found that thousands of unrelated web sites (many that seemed to contain only links) were linking to the J.C. Penney web site. And most of those links had really descriptive anchor text (the clickable text of the links). It seemed that someone had arranged for all of those links in order to get better rankings in Google.

The New York Times logoThe Times presented their findings to Google. Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and soon the JCPenney web site was nowhere to found for the queries they had previously ranked number one for. Matt tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.

What happened to JC Penney after cheating with SEO tricks?

Click To Tweet

JCPenney, when contacted by the Times, claimed they didn’t know anything about the links and promptly fired their SEO firm, SearchDex.

[Update: SearchDex subsequently either went out of business or changed their name.]

So where did JCPenney go wrong? Why did they do it? What have they lost? And how do they get it back? Read on to learn more and make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

 

by 2 Comments

Rat Out Your Competitor

/ Google, SEO practices / 2 Comments

[January 2015 update below]
Jill Whalen, noted Boston SEO guru, was conducting an experiment to see if Google actually cares about how websites cheat to get to the top of their search results. Her guess is that they don’t, or they would have done something about it a long time ago. To test it, she suggested you rat out your competitor and watch what happens.

How to rat out your competitor to Google

You can participate in that experiment. If you have competitors who are beating you out in search engine results through spammy, deceptive, or unethical SEO practices, go to the website for Rat Out Your Competitor. Let them know what your competitor is doing, and they’ll look into it and report it directly to Google.

How to Rat Out Your Competitor to Google for Cheating

Click To Tweet

[Thanks to Dean Voss for pointing out in the comments below that RatOutYourCompetitor.com is no longer what it once was. A better way currently is to rat out your competitor’s webspam directly to Google via their Webspam Reporting Tool.]

Rat out your competitor.[Update 2023] I’ve had the occasion to do this a few times in the intervening years and find that it does work, but sometimes only temporarily if the Google addresses the problem and then soon afterward the offender puts the spammy technique back in play.

For example, a competitor of one of our clients was keyword stuffing their company name in their Google Business Profile.  I alerted Google to that behavior and Google corrected it promptly, reverting their name back to their real name without the added keywords.  Unfortunately, that competitor soon noticed the change and changed it back.  We’ve gone around on this three or four times; each time Google fixed their company name, the offender put it back within a few weeks.  So this may take a little patience and repeated action before Google makes it permanent.

How about you?

Have you had success with this? Please let us know in the comments.

by 2 Comments

What Makes SEO Fail?

/ SEO practices, web design / 2 Comments

What makes an SEO campaign fail to deliver results?What causes SEO failure? There can be many reasons an SEO campaign fails to achieve or continue achieving the results you desire. One way SEO results are bound to fail is if you don’t keep your SEO consultant abreast of website changes. We’ve seen this happen all to often. Let’s analyze what happens.

What the client thinks:

We need to make changes to the website to reflect the changing nature of our business and our marketing focus. We don’t want to run all of them past the SEO consultant because they don’t concern him or her. And they may charge us for their time to review stuff that’s not related to our search engine rankings. Who needs the extra red tape and expense?

What makes SEO fail?

Click To Tweet

What the SEO consultant encounters:

A Keyword Status Report for the client shows a substantial drop in rankings for a group of important keyword phrases. Manually checking some of those keyword phrases confirms the worst: the client no longer shows up anywhere for those critical search phrases. Next, a review of the client web site shows that the pages that had been optimized for those phrases are gone altogether, or combined with other pages, or have been rewritten such that the keyword phrase no longer exists in the copy or the page title tag or anywhere else. Diagnosis: SEO failure.

SEO failure can be avoided.We’ve seen this far too often. One client that had great rankings five years ago (the last time we were in touch with each other) decided to get their web site redesigned a year or more ago. The new site really looks a lot better than the old site. But their new web designer wasn’t given a copy of our optimization recommendations, so they just redesigned the web site to look the way the client wanted.

Result: every last optimization technique on the site vanished. Suddenly the site can’t be found in Google or Yahoo or Bing unless you search explicitly for the company name. Anyone who doesn’t know the company name will never find them by searching for what they do.

That’s SEO failure. And until we happened to talk, the client was blaming it on the poor economy.

How to prevent this kind of SEO failure:

If your web site has been optimized and is doing well for your essential keywords, make sure any redesign includes your optimization. Keep the recommendations from your SEO consultant and give them to your web designer before they start redesigning your web site.

In fact, it doesn’t take a complete redesign to compromise your optimization. We recommend talking with your SEO consultant before changing anything on your web site. Don’t worry about the small cost that may be involved. You’re better off safe than sorry.

Struggling with your small business SEO? Rank Magic can help!

by 1 Comment

SEO Myths: SEO Experts’ Favorites

/ SEO practices / 1 Comment

Don't believe these SEO myths.There are a lot of SEO myths out there about what does and doesn’t work for search engine optimization. A recent poll of SEO experts revealed a bunch of them.

All of the following SEO myths are false.

  • Linking to external web sites dilutes your Page Authority.
  • You only need keywords in the keyword tag.
  • IP address changes will hurt your rankings.
  • Use of the keyword meta tag will boost rankings.
  • Meta tags help rankings or are more important than visible text.
  • You just have to put all your keyword phrases in meta tags on your homepage.
  • I (or anyone) can guarantee a number 1 position for a particular keyword next week.
  • Submitting to (hundreds of!) search engines has any value.
  • That anyone can guarantee anything via SEO.
  • Google Ads can help in search engine rankings.
Don’t believe these SEO myths.

Click To Tweet

Ask us in the comments below whether anything you’ve heard about SEO that’s either too good or too bad to be true is an SEO myth or not.

by Leave a Comment

Best & Worst SEO Practices for a High Traffic Web Site

/ SEO practices / Leave a Comment

The best SEO practices will drive your sales up.We’ve found a comprehensive list of the best and worst SEO practices for turning your web site into a high traffic sales driver There are very specific discussions of them and they’re weighted in terms of importance. The best SEO practices, those most effective are scored +3. SEO techniques that make no difference either way are scored zero. And the worst SEO practices — those that will hurt, rather than help, your rankings and visibility — are rate -1 through -3.

These SEO tactics break down into six major areas.

  • Keywords
  • Links
  • Meta Tags
  • Content
  • Visual Extras and SEO
  • Domains, URLs & Web Mastery

If you’re doing your own SEO, this can be a valuable reference. We have a bit more in our archive of SEO practices.

[Update May, 2022: the article this links to is pretty old, and a few of the worst SEO practices it decries are fortunately used much less now or not at all. For example, having a home page designed in Flash is no longer a thing. Nevertheless, most of what’s described here is still valid today.]

I encourage you to share your own thoughts and perspective in this in the comments below.