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We know that the SEO community is an opinionated bunch. In fact, it’s one of the reasons it can be fun. Well, here is your chance to sound off on whether someone is truly making SEO sense or not. It’s Friday so let’s have a little fun.
An article that was run at SiliconValley.com (which is part of the Mercury News) has opened up the latest can of worms of a website (and in this case a large network of websites) feeling mistreated by Google. Their cause has been picked up by antitrust attorney Gary Reback (hmm, I see a dotted line connection here, what about you?).
The initial site in question is ShopPaloAlto.com along with a few others and there are claims that it has been unfairly judged by Google in the SERP’s.
ShopCity, the parent company of local sites such as ShopPaloAlto.com, ShopMountainView.com and ShopPleasanton.com, says Google provides it an unfairly low ranking, especially since those sites have the backing of groups such as the city of Menlo Park, the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce and the Palo Alto Weekly newspaper. A search for “Palo Alto restaurants” on Google this week didn’t reveal a ShopPaloAlto.com result until the seventh page of results, while the site ranks at the top for identical searches on Yahoo (YHOO) or Microsoft’s Bing.
First of all, just because a chamber of commerce is involved it doesn’t give a business a free pass on quality. I have seen a lot of bad chambers and even worse chamber members in my time.
Secondly, I am not quite sure when having a search result show up in Bing and Yahoo (the same search engine, by the way) is any indicator that it should be number 1 in Google as well. Aren’t the engines trying to differentiate themselves in order to get more people to use them because their results are better etc, etc? But hey, what do I know?
Here’s what we are proposing for you, our expert SEO readers, to consider. Rather than let lawyers and just one search engine expert (Danny Sullivan is the only industry voice in the article) determine whether these sites have anything to complain about, we wondered if our experts, our readers, would make the case for or against ShopPaloAlto.com and the over 8,100 sites that are just like in this network. Here’s what we would like you to do:
- Read the article to get as much background on the situation as most people would have (including lawyers, judges, politicians and anyone else who might get into this ruckus)
- Take a look at the SEO fundamentals of the sites and other related sites
- Determine whether these sites have leg to stand on from the SEO community’s point of view
- Voice your findings and opinions in the comments here (and maybe even argue your point a little
)
We are finding that more and more, SEO battles are being played out in the courtroom rather than in the SEO community. The value of these sites and their arguments for whether they are treated fairly are often determined without the input of true experts, SEO’s. We would like for you, the experts, to put your two cents into this discussion, if for no other reason than to have a forum for your own expertise.
So what do you say? Interested in giving your two cents worth regarding why or why not a site should be treated as it is in Google? Now’s your chance. I bet more people are waiting for your opinion than you might think.
Thanks for your comment Joe, and while you raise some good points, I don’t think any of those issues would be cause for penalization, do you? In fact, with this exact same architecture, some of our sites like http://www.shopmidland.com ranked very highly – in the top 3 results for almost any ‘midland, ontario’ + ‘category’ search for years.
We implemented the robots.txt file because of feedback we received in the Google Webmaster Forums about duplicate content. If that’s not the right way to go, what do you suggest?
I happen to think most of our URL structures are quite nice actually, with the exception of a couple of sections that haven’t been rewritten yet, but even those are decent I would think. We will always be working on making things as intuitive and clean as possible and will work on the URLs.
I don’t think we’re stuffing keywords, but we could definitely work to make them more succinct. Thanks for focusing some attention on it.
The merchants themselves enter the product descriptions, so we don’t have as much control over it as we would if we were publishing the content. We will try to provide better guidelines for them to follow – what length would you say is optimum?
Also, just wanted to point out this article on your site as I thought it was well done and a little ironic
http://joehall.me/dear-seos-please-shut-up/02/
Just subscribed to your RSS feed and look forward to your posts!
Hey Andrew,
I think we’ve crossed paths at a couple of conferences. I read your blog and appreciate your response.
The Pleasanton campaign is just getting off the ground, and I agree that there’s still a lot of work to be done. You will see more of a presence in the community in the coming months. I’ll make sure the campaign manager gets this message and that we step things up… Would love to be able to impress you in your own back yard…
We are not the ones in control of their properties, but have asked them to change the links to 301s from 302s. I believe they’ve gone ahead and done that now.
We shall see how the ‘doghouse’ situation goes. I really don’t think we should be there to begin with, but at this point, removing the penalty would be a welcome improvement.
Thanks,
Colin
Hi Bill,
Yes, definitely a great discussion and lots of excellent feedback that we will look to incorporate.
You don’t think that a site called ‘ShopMenloPark.com’ that contains Menlo Park shopping information, links from the city government and chamber as well as a number of other community organizations should rank for ‘shop menlo park’? Maybe I’m missing something, but I would think it would be exactly the type of content Google would want to serve up.
You’re right, we are competing with Google, and that is the issue at hand. We are hardly the first to question whether they are using their dominant position in search to unjustly block competition in the marketplace. The FTC has begun an investigation into Google’s practices, so this isn’t totally out of left field. Your comments are pretty much summing up our issues.
Do you think it’s smart for a company with 70%+ market share, that built their model around getting people off their search engine onto end-user websites as quickly as possible, to block competition just because they can?
Would you feel the same if Google was blocking your access to the market?
Well said, Tim. That’s why utilize other channels so heavily and partially why we partner with organizations that have existing audiences.
Thanks for the comments, Mark.
There are two issues for us, the traffic loss, and the principle.
If all goes as planned, our PR campaign around shopping locally and strong local economies will catch on and you’ll hear more about us in the press. Unfortunately, this issue is high priority and has taken our attention away from going after better press.
Not at all true, Justin. If you want to catch-up one-to-one sometime we can swap philosophies and I think you’ll see that’s not the case.
Hey Jim,
They don’t owe it to anyone, but if they want to be a business that’s around in 20 years then they should probably learn how to play nice with everyone else on the playground and choose a core competency and stick to it.
I agree that there are many moving parts, and in general Google has done a good job, however, as their dominance grows, they need to be increasingly careful about using that dominant position unfairly in a way that hampers legitimate competition.
Not sure how many are linking back to us yet. As our campaign progresses (and this penalty is lifted) hopefully the number will increase.
Is our baby ugly? Maybe. But prior to being penalized, Google sure didn’t think so. Bing & Yahoo don’t think so. Neither do our partners and our 20,000+ local business members. We are not just looking for praise, and we have already implemented many of the suggestions we’ve received.
The ‘gun fight’ comment is the crux of the matter. Who has a gun capable of matching the firepower of Google’s? There’s no one with as much pull and as many network effects as Google right now. Are we crazy for thinking that we of all people can hold them accountable? Maybe. But there are quite a few people cheering us on and we feel that we have to try to do something to ensure that there is a free, fair search market for all to participate in.
So I have not done even a minor audit on your site but if John Mueller of Google is telling you the problem is with your network of sites, then there’s a good chance that’s the big issue. Let me know the next time you are in Ptown.
Re: “…we are 100% authentic. We are doing all this because we are passionate…”
Colin:
This may be true (even for most web site owners), but there are still only 30 slots on Google’s first-three SERP, and you’re up against sites that already posses one of them – which means they have to give up their slot so you can get it. That’s a tough battle, because you’re not just fighting Google here. A good, SEO-schooled, web site designer will fight tooth-and-nail to maintain their position.
I’ve been lucky enough to receive extremely high rankings at all search engines for over a decade by adhering to the basics: One tip is that the http://www.shoppaloalto.com and http://www.shopmountainview.com sites are so top-heavy with nonsensical words and graphics as to be worthless for a search engine to bite into. (Alt and Title tags are not even helping you here.)
Here are two of Audio Graphics’ web site ranking sheets – for chosen keywords. I present them only to show reaching, and staying, in a top-ten slot is possible. Yes our site design may be outdated, but they remain on the top of the list in most cases, and generate visits and revenue. http://radiorow.com/RadioRowSearchEnginePositions.htm
http://www.rradiomusic.com/search_engine_positions.htm
Thanks for your comment Ken.
We have always followed Google’s own maxim to optimize for the user, not the search engine, so if some of our decisions do not seem so SEO-oriented, that is why.
In markets like Midland, Ontario, Canada with sites like ShopMidland.com, we have maintained those same types of long-term high search rankings due to quality content, trusted relationships with local authorities and a fairly consistent information architecture.
Google is doing a major disservice to users and businesses in that community by penalizing that domain. It is actually an embarrassment to Google and is seriously affecting the local economy.
Search for ‘midland, ontario menus’ (http://www.google.com/search?q=midland+ontario+menus) for instance and see what comes up. Then click onto page 6 or 7 and see the link to http://www.shopmidland.com/menus
You tell me – what is a better experience for the user? Do you think they really want to get a weather report or learn about a tornado, or would they rather get menus for 42 local restaurants all in one place?
As a consumer, does this make you trust Google more or less? How do we know they are always serving up the top quality results and not hiding things that may be more beneficial due to conflicts of interest or political decisions?
As has been mentioned elsewhere, the fact that Bing & Yahoo seem to be able to make sense of our ‘non-sensical words and graphics’ indicates either a lack of technical sophistication on Google’s part (unlikely), or that we are being penalized for other reasons (possibly anti-competitive in nature).
Thanks again for your feedback,
Colin
Colin:
Re: ” Bing & Yahoo seem to be able to make sense of our ‘nonsensical words and graphics’ indicates either a lack of technical sophistication…”
You keep bringing up these two as if they are separate entities – which they are not. Yahoo! is powered by MSN – and who’s to say MSN is right?
I see you unsuccessfully trying to build a case for anti-competitive behavior, yet not acknowledging the inherent flaws that I (and many others) see in your design. Instead of a constant stream of defending your position, perhaps taken action to change your approach may prove the most efficient means in gaining better rankings.
Advice is like food, it only does good if you digest it.
Another way to look at it is what if Google bought these domains and bought this company out? Where would they end up in the results then? And example for reference exists in the case of Like.com who used decoy display names like Shoe Department to rank high in shoe department searches only to link to Like.com/ShoeDepartment which was a robotic ops or cap site.
@Alysson says it correct ““Google does not freely publish the specific criteria included their ranking algorithms. To do so would be idiotic, as the webmasters who would most benefit from knowing that information are those whose intent is to maliciously manipulate the search results.”
Google doesn’t want people to know how they rank, because people will game the system. FACT, its not unfair, its as fair as it can get.
And what part of Link Farm doesn’t make sense here? personal penalty or not, they don’t like what you are doing. I imagine if you stop doing it, they will gladly put you where the algorithm believes you fit.
@Alysson – Show me where Google openly states that having a network of sites on a single IP is a violation punishable by penalty. If that is the case then most shared hosting should be penalized out of the box as they have 5000 site for each grid IP. I disagree with it being a problem that Google should publish what it will penalize you for. Seriously you know who does the best at SEO? Black hats, because they have way more sites to play trial, and error with.
You are missing my point completely, stating “their network of sites, or at the very least a large part of it, IS hosted on the same IP. It’s a fact.” I never said that there sites being hosted on the same IP was speculation, I said “There is nothing in the TOS for Google that states it will ban or penalize for sites being on the same IP,” If you are going to try and debate and want to look like you know what you are talking about you need to hear the other side of the debate, otherwise you come off sounding very emotional in your responses, which is uniformed and close-minded, but your twitter post sounded the same.
My point is that all SEO is speculation. Was only made stronger by your statement; “Professional SEOs are capable of drawing on years of trial and error.” Speculation is defined as “A conclusion, opinion, or theory reached by conjecture.” Your very definition of what makes a SEO professional is the very definition of speculation.
It is very different then a doctor, sickness is only trial on error on TV with doctor house. Most sickness is found by blood tests, so that doctors don’t have to speculate.
Good catch, Michael. I agree with some of the other comments about the structure and lack of on site optimization, but surely the content here is the problem? What was the advice they didn’t like?
@Colin Pape-
While I haven’t performed an in-depth site analysis of any part of your network (there’d be an extra charge for that, and there are many already present here that are infinitely more qualified than I to do so), I think your frustration is misplaced.
What you have is nothing more than a link network, plain and simple. All the other issues pointed out by Joe, Allyson, Goteq and others are hurting you, but probably aren’t sufficient to bring a penalty down on your head, when looked at individually. The link network, however, IS. Somebody should have seen that on the horizon.
Also, looking at your first comment in this thread, I was struck by the fact that your stated mind-set seems to be one of conventional marketing, not Internet marketing. You pointed out a number of aspects that can have benefit to a business, but not to a website. Users might be impressed by links from the Chamber of Commerce, but Google isn’t. I dare say I could probably get one from them myself, given a few days, and I’m in Mexico.
You have a good business, and have obviously spent time and money getting it there, as well as trying to fix the issues that exist. But in my opinion, you were misled at some point, to believe that a link network would serve you well. I suppose it did… until Google noticed it. But I’d say that your risk/reward analysis was either missing or faulty.
You have a tremendous amount of work to do on that site, before it will be in what I would call good shape. If Google traffic is a concern to you, then I would suggest that you concentrate on conforming to Google’s guidelines. They owe you nothing more than a fair shake, and IMO, you had that.
I do wish you luck in achieving a rapid recovery.
@Colin Pape:
The SEOs who have commented on this piece have given you a wealth of free advice. It is not enough that you think your business model aligns with what searchers want. Your site(s) have some serious issues that need to be addressed. Many of the SEOs I respect on here have pointed their finger to the Panda updates and not a manual penalty.
Google is not lowering your rankings because they are worried you threaten their business model. I am pretty sure they would never have the time to worry about your sites. They have lowered your rankings because you are competing against other sites that have SEOs on board or actually pay for consulting. Regardless of what you think about your business model, you do not deserve rankings. You have to earn them.
Instead of pointing your finger at Google, get serious about SEO. You do not understand it. Hire someone who does. End of story.
My 2 cents is that shopcity.com is definitely, absolutely and indisputably penalized with a serious manual penalty (try to search for shop + city.com if you don’t believe him). I cannot be sure about your other domains but the fact is that Google has profiled your domain portfolio as being controlled by spammers. My guess is that Google is unhappy with your whole network because it IS a network, which looks like you are trying to manipulate SERP.
This is a complex case, but I would also weigh in that instead of joining the chorus of people accusing Google of (rightly or wrongly) uncompetitive behavior you can instead find a creative way to aggregate all of your unique content under a single domain while maintaining all of your individual city domains for marketing purposes. If you untangle it correctly, follow the other recommendations put forth by consultants AND THEN submit a re-inclusion request, you can likely generate significantly more traffic than you do no. (although you may never rank #1 for Palo Alto Restaurants).
The fastest way to get rid of a penalty is to stop engaging in the behavior that leads to the penalty. You can punish Google just as much as they punish you by using your 8,000 sites to promote Bing (or Yahoo! or whomever). You can also comply with Google’s guidelines and keep your 8,000 domains out of Google’s index, thus affording you time to fix whatever issues may be reflected in the 44 “healthy” sites — thus setting the pace for bringing the rest of the 8,000 domains back into Google’s index when they are ready.
That’s a pretty simple fix.
Aaron,
As per your suggestion, we have updated the rel=canonical tag to include the trailing slash. Thanks for pointing that out.
The link to our restaurants page is on the /businesses/ page, which is linked from the top level ‘browse business directory’ navigation link.
The breadcrumb link on business profiles is in the ‘categories’ pod in the bottom left corner of the profile homepage. Our categorization system has all of the restaurants listed in the ‘All Restaurants’ subcategory of the ‘Restaurants’ top-level category. For the breadcrumb on the business profile page, we have overridden the link back to the subcategory so it goes to the top-level page now. It is an important category in all of our markets, so it makes sense to do it that way.
There are a few other improvements that we have implemented that I will credit the appropriate people with by commenting directly.
Unfortunately, in our view, none of these issues are the real reasons for the penalties as Google has stated themselves that it’s the number of domains, but hopefully they help, and certainly, having all of our ducks in a row makes our point that much stronger.
Thanks again,
Colin
Hey Joe,
Just wanted to thank you again for focusing our attention on the title tags, etc. We have updated our title schema for categories to make it more succinct.
Colin
Just wanted to clarify that we were told by John Mueller of Google to leave the one page that linked our sites together as a ‘noindex’ page, which would enable Google to crawl to different sites, but would not publish the page in their index. We have now blocked them from accessing the /locations/ and /regions/ page from them completely using robots.txt.
Ken, we have reworded our top level category descriptions (which I assume is what you were referring to as ‘nonsensical’) so that they are easier to read. Thanks.
Hey everyone,
Thanks for your great comments and feedback!
Just wanted to let you know that we have gone ahead and implemented the following changes:
- changed the title tags on about 10 top-level categories to remove additional keywords
- changed the standard category meta description from:
‘Browse Restaurants in Palo Alto, California. Find local business listings for %category% related businesses in Palo Alto, California, including online descriptions, contact and email information. Get all your Restaurant related needs in one place.’
to:
‘Browse Restaurant-related businesses in Palo Alto, California, including descriptions, photos, videos, contact info, email addresses, shopping carts, Facebook pages, Twitter links, coupons, reviews and more.’
- changed the title tags on our gift certificate page from ‘Buy Instant Gift Certificates and Email Gift Cards in Palo Alto, California at ShopPaloAlto.com’ to ‘Buy Gift Certificates Online from businesses in Palo Alto’
- changed all title tags to no longer show the state name
- fixed an issue with the rel=canonical tag on category pages to add a trailing ‘/’
- changed the breadcrumb on business profile pages for businesses in the restaurants category so it links to the top-level category and not the ‘All Restaurants’ sub-category
- completely blocked Google from crawling our /locations/ page instead of relying on noindex as suggested by John Mueller
We are working on rewriting the URLs for the marketplace items, but that might take a couple more days. We’ll keep you posted.
Any more feedback/issues you guys can think of?
Thanks again,
Colin
P.S. This crowd sourced SEO might be the future of the industry! Much better to rely on a whole bunch of competing/complementary opinions than just one or two I think… Anyone monetizing that model in some way?
@Colin – Hence the rub. This is not the norm for sure and it’s while it’s been good to get this kind of input for free it’s not something that will continue because these folks can’t work for free.
It has been very cool as Andrew Shotland pointed out on his blog that the community has done what it has in this case and it just goes to show that SEO’s don’t all hold everything back!
Thanks for your openness to the process as well. One way you could show your appreciation is hire someone who helped you in this thread. I’m just sayin’…………..
@Frank – makes sense, and it definitely was not our intention to solicit free advice, but we do appreciate everyone’s input.
That’s a good idea! We’ll look at doing that for sure and were particularly impressed with a few of the posters who focused 100% on constructive criticism and got right to the point with the technical details.
Thanks again for providing the forum. We’ll see how things go with Google and will keep you posted.
LOL you deserve a gold medal and yes a muffin!
Besides all the content/duplicate farm stuff, it seems the backlink profile is mainly from one site. In fact of the 16k inlink to the home page, there are only 33 linking root domains. Meaning the cast majority comes from one site ie: palo alto online.
That fact right there should speak volumes!
Shopcity = you are competing with Google.
The rest is spin from the likes of Matt Cutts and Google fanboys
Yeah, you provide advice when people go to the press and shame you.
“Of the 1400 claimed profiles how many link to your site? ”
Idiotic comment. He’s on page 7 (SEVEN). He’s not complaining about #3 or #4, but PAGE SEVEN.
Dont see the big deal here, they have a model that is hard to manage without thousands of editors, the google guidelines are pretty black and white, duplicating content across a few sites, maybe not a huge deal, going to hundreds to thousands is a big no no and with their 8k sites, potentially linking and leveraging they squeeze out other businesses as well.
Thank you for stating what I was itching to say Joe!
Also, Colin’s griping about being PENALIZED by Google for being on the 7th page was starting to grate on me. I could see one complaining about being removed from the index entirely (now THERE’S a clear penalty, Colin) but the 7th page? Come on!
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Of course Google plays favorites… Prime example is the way JC Pennys maintained 1st page ranking for so long until a reporter spilled the beans on their black hat tactics…. They were spending 100,000′s of dollars on adwords so of course it let them get away with it…. If they would have caught one of us they would have deindexed our sites….. But because of their adwords budget all they got was a a slap on the wrist…. So YES I can believe Google plays favorites…. I would be naive to think otherwise….
Having been online for a while, I’d love to see Google bite the dust every now and then, however, I doubt this is likely to happen. As far as I know, Google has no contractual obligations to provide traffic to anyone at all. They’re big enough to do whatever they like, and they will. Google might even withhold all traffic to these sites just out of spite after the litigation, assuming if the person made a big enough fuss.