Yahoo! Relic of the 90s?

Yahoo is a strange animal.

For a long time stevepronger.com was in the sin-bin at Yahoo. Why? I'm not really sure. But something I'd done in the distant past had caused them to place a penalty on my site. Clearly, it wasn't ranking at all for queries that held first page positions on Google and MSN. Indexing was way behind. There were pages in the index which were deleted years ago. I tried emailing support many times but never once got a reply. I'd all but given up hope.

Then a client contacted me to ask for help with his Site Build It site, which he'd built himself. He too had top rankings in Google and MSN but nothing in Yahoo, and only 2 pages from over 100 had been indexed. This was crazy. I know I've pushed the envelope in the past for my own site but there was no reason at all for his site to not be fully indexed and rank well. So, I submitted an XML sitemap (which SBI creates automatically) and started doing some link building. Things have started to improve. There are now over 20 pages indexed although it's still not ranking. Perhaps when all the pages get indexed. I'm still working on that one.

But in working on his site I re-investigated Yahoo's Search Submit. In the past, I'd dismissed Search Submit because not only did you have to pay for a review, you had to pay a fixed charge for EVERY click. This made it very unpopular, and rightfully so. Bad idea. But, it seems things have changed. You no longer have to pay a per-click charge, only for a review, although you do have to pay for EACH URL you submit. Still, I figured it was worth it to submit 4 URLs and get a real human to look at my site. Surely they would see that there is no reason to continue to penalise my site, if ever there was one.

But I was wrong.

When I logged into my Search Submit account my URLs were marked as "URL did not meet guidelines" and my credit card payment was cancelled.

What! Why not? I wasn't sent an email to inform me of this or give any reasons for their decision. The only possible reason I could think of was in their guidelines they referred to affiliate programs. Yes, I promote affiliate programs, but so what? I add value to the sales process with reviews, articles etc. In other words, good "content".

But here's the thing, MANY sites in Yahoo's SERPs for "Site Build It review", INCLUDING the #1 listing, are affiliate sites. And, I might add, have less value-added content than my site, or so I thought anyway. One page, which currently ranks #16 (and is #1 on Google) was originally MY review. Word for word, copied from my site. A straight pinch. It wasn't until I complained to the webmaster that he changed it, although a lot of my words still remain, and in the meantime I've changed my review. Plagiarism does pay apparently.

Anyway, as you can imagine, this left me quite miffed. I was ready to start ranting and raving in blogs, forums etc when I just happened to check "site build it review" in Yahoo one more time. And there I was, on page 1. All my targeted search expressions were ranking well. I didn't understand it, but a for few days at least, I was happy.

So I started writing this post. But, I kid you not, as I wrote this I checked again....

Gone. All my top rankings, gone. Again. Unbelievable.

Why?

Maybe one of my earlier requests to Yahoo's general support resulted in the penalty being lifted, and then a few days later the Search Submit reviewer imposing the penalty again because I'd sent a support request asking why my URLs did not meet their guidelines, and that BTW their FAQ page actually had no FAQs. Pure speculation because I really have no idea. How can I when communication with paying customers is totally absent? And yes, I'm a paying customer. When you hand over your credit card details you expect to be treated with some degree of respect, even if it's a simple email to say "Sorry, we can't accept your submission because...."

Umm..., Yahoooo... I'm over here.... PAYING CUSTOMER. You have my credit card details. I actually want to give you money. And in return all I ask is you include my site in your SERPs for relevant queries. It can stand on its own merits for ranking. It's got good content. Truly it has. It's in your directory after all. Can't be all that bad.

I don't want preferential treatment, but I don't want to be excluded for reasons that haven't been applied to my competitors. That's simply not fair, and degrades your user's experience. They are looking for relevant sites, whether they are affiliate sites or not. When your users search for "site build it review", believe it or not, they are actually looking for pages which contain a review of Site Build It, and not the actual SBI pages which fill half of your SERPs right now.

And would it kill your staff to actually reply to support requests? Especially from people you are holding credit card details for? Your business practices leave me baffled. You win. I give up.

Addendum:

I probably shouldn't mention this, but I feel compelled to. The crazy thing is I have a parked domain (simply the Australian version of my .com) which isn't penalised. It currently ranks 50 something for "site build it review". It ranks poorly because just about all the inbound links point to the .com domain, but it's in there, not dammed to oblivion. So I could probably improve its ranking by link building on the Australian domain. But I'm not sure I want to do that. What effect will it have on my rankings for stevepronger.com in the other engines?

Update:

I decided to go ahead a do some link building on the Australian domain. Within a few days it improved from 50 something to 38 (page 4). As more links are picked up it should continue to improve. Will it get blasted to oblivion like the .com domain? It IS the same site, only with .au added to the domain. Time will tell.

Tags: yahoo yahoo indexing yahoo serps steve pronger site build it sbi sitebuildit site build it review

GoDaddy Sinks the Inventors

This has never happened to me before. A few months back I designed a new site for a client called Meet the Inventors. The concept was to help inventors get funding for their inventions. Things were going well. The site had achieved top rankings for queries such has "invention backers" across all engines and was steadily climbing Google for "invention funding" which it had already achieved page 1 on MSN and page 2 on Yahoo. A number of clients had signed up and submitted their inventions.

Until one day when I just happened to check the site and got GoDaddy's default parked-domain page. What's going on?

This was a newly registered domain. It couldn't have expired already!

I tried to login to the account using the details my client had initially given me, but my login was rejected.

I contacted GoDaddy support. Their response was a cut & paste "this is how you set the nameserver details". I then pointed out that I knew how to do this, and had already done it months ago. The domain was now pointing back to them. Why? And why can't I login?

Their response to that was for me to prove I was the owner of the domain before they would give me any info. But I wasn't the owner. I was the webmaster.

Meanwhile, my client has apparently fallen off the face of the earth because I have been unable to contact him at all. I do hope he's ok.

So, why would this happen? If you read GoDaddy's terms & conditions, or any other major domain registrar for that matter, you'll see that they can reclaim your domain and do pretty much whatever they want with it, if you do anything they don't approve of, such as spamming.

Did my my client spam? Not a chance. He wouldn't know how to. A more likely possibility is a spammer has forged his domain (this is common practice for spammers, being the scumbags they are) and the recipient lodged a complaint with GoDaddy, who without further investigation reclaimed his domain. I can only speculate. There could well be more to the story. A copyright issue on one of the inventions perhaps? Who knows. The upshot is all my hard work was for nothing and a good site has gone down the tubes. A real shame.

The moral of the story? Always read the terms and conditions and choose your domain registrar carefully. Price isn't everything. GoDaddy may be innocent of any wrong-doing in this case, but I have heard of other similar instances of domains being lost. This was a fledgling small business, but what if it was a long established business with thousands of daily visitors and big profits? In one fell swoop that could all be taken away.

The funny part is, as I write this, the site is still #1 on Google for "invention backers" even though Google have indexed the GoDaddy page.

Tags: godaddy domain registration meet the inventors steve pronger web design

Google Snatch - Dud of the Year

Google Snatch Review.

Overpriced, poorly-written waffle.

Google Snatch, a new e-book by British marketer Latif would have to be one of the most disappointing reads this year. The sales letter promised so much:

"Discover Google's Undisclosed Secret".

Yeah, right. There are no "secrets" in this book. None.

"It has got NOTHING to do with SEO..."

Crap. This book is ENTIRELY about SEO.

Now, I have no doubt Latif has achieved significant success. There are real sites referenced in the book and the results are there to see. But if you're hoping to find some new ideas and concepts, you'll be disappointed.

The main reason behind Latif's success is the way his sites are structured. He does extensive keyword research and then builds sites using a keyword hierarchy and keyword variations. Nothing wrong with that - it's a logical and effective way to build a website. But an "undisclosed secret"? I don't think so. Ken Evoy has been advocating building sites this way for years. Ken's Affiliate Masters Guide, written years ago, and entirely FREE, says this:

"Think of your site as a pyramid, with the home page crowning the pinnacle. Your home page should link to seven other pages. These seven Keyword-Focused Content Pages will contain content that is about your most profitable keywords AND that fit with the whole Site Concept and VPP."

The rest of Latif's book is made up of various optimisation techniques, even thought the book has "NOTHING to do with SEO", such as how to write titles and meta tags, what to write when asking for a reciprocal link (even though he disses recip linking) with MULTIPLE examples etc. I don't dispute any of the info presented, but again, nothing new.

And then there's some real pearls such as submitting to article directories (gee, why didn't I think of that), but with a twist - submit to EVERY article directory you can find but rewrite your article each time, again with MULTIPLE examples. Or create content by rewriting someone else's article. Just don't copy it, mind you. Exactly how you are adding value to anything with this method I have no idea.

But what really bugged me the most was the poor way the info was presented. Truly, if I read "Do you see what I'm getting at?" one more time I was going to scream.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh. There were a few ideas I'll take on board. But they could have been factually presented on one page. 16 pages of article directories I don't need. 5 pages of the same article, with slight variations, I don't need. The 30 pages of introductory waffle, I don't need. In fact, the waffle never ends. Just give me the facts Latif.

Verdict? Save your money.

Tags: google snatch review seo keyword research steve pronger latif free traffic