seoapprentice
11-28-2005, 03:01 PM
For starters I am fairly new to SEO – so please bear with me. I have several questions, but first here’s a little background of the issue:
I manage a site that acts as a directory for many categorized topics. The top level (home page) has a simple list of text links to each category, along with some featured companies text ads. The home page has a PR6. There are 50 some odd categories - all of which are related to the main topic, in which we sell webspace for our customers to display their company information and services in a customized format and a means in which web users can contact that company (basically their own web site in our directory). The website has been indexed sinced 1997 and has generally ranked well.
All of the categories have their own subdomain (cat1.mainsite.com, cat2.mainsite.com, etc...) Most of our category home pages are ranking PR3, but many don't perform well in their category specific keywords.
We do not participate in link farms, however each category has around 20-40 IBLs, from related sites (which for each category seems to be what our competitors have). All of our subdomains are on the same IP block, as is also true with our main site. Our listings/customers are far more extensive and useful than the sites that rank higher, the main difference is the sites that rank higher are dedicated to that one category – where it is considered a subcategory in our main scheme.
I'm assuming our performance isn't that great for each specific category because that is not the main theme. I think another problem may be that we are not a content rich site per say. We don't provide fresh content such as in blogs or news articles as this is not our business. The unique content is provided in each of our customer’s webspace, which they have full control over. Their pages are in subdirectories of the category. For example: “http://cat1.mainsite.com/acme/” would be the url for company acme’s home page. These pages rarely have PR and if it does is PR1.
Short of examining our site, what suggestions would any of you have in regards to our situation? We already heavily participate in Google adWords, but are looking to decrease this (much like everyone else!). Here are some specific questions I have:
Would having dedicated websites (top level domains) for each category help us/hurt us?
Is it not wise to have all of our sites/subdomains on the same C Block?
Should we invest in syndicated category specific content? Or should we start writing our own for each category? (not really thrilled on this idea as we are not experts in all categories)
Finally, we have been banned from Yahoo - completely. I don’t know why. We’ve never participated in any black hat tactics or linked with bad neighbors or anything in that regard. We used to do very well with Yahoo (we also used to heavily advertise with yahoo until this), and the change that seemed to get us banned was moving from directory based categories to subdomains (i.e. www.mainsite.com/cat1 to cat1.mainsite.com). Would this get us banned? How does one get re-included?
I manage a site that acts as a directory for many categorized topics. The top level (home page) has a simple list of text links to each category, along with some featured companies text ads. The home page has a PR6. There are 50 some odd categories - all of which are related to the main topic, in which we sell webspace for our customers to display their company information and services in a customized format and a means in which web users can contact that company (basically their own web site in our directory). The website has been indexed sinced 1997 and has generally ranked well.
All of the categories have their own subdomain (cat1.mainsite.com, cat2.mainsite.com, etc...) Most of our category home pages are ranking PR3, but many don't perform well in their category specific keywords.
We do not participate in link farms, however each category has around 20-40 IBLs, from related sites (which for each category seems to be what our competitors have). All of our subdomains are on the same IP block, as is also true with our main site. Our listings/customers are far more extensive and useful than the sites that rank higher, the main difference is the sites that rank higher are dedicated to that one category – where it is considered a subcategory in our main scheme.
I'm assuming our performance isn't that great for each specific category because that is not the main theme. I think another problem may be that we are not a content rich site per say. We don't provide fresh content such as in blogs or news articles as this is not our business. The unique content is provided in each of our customer’s webspace, which they have full control over. Their pages are in subdirectories of the category. For example: “http://cat1.mainsite.com/acme/” would be the url for company acme’s home page. These pages rarely have PR and if it does is PR1.
Short of examining our site, what suggestions would any of you have in regards to our situation? We already heavily participate in Google adWords, but are looking to decrease this (much like everyone else!). Here are some specific questions I have:
Would having dedicated websites (top level domains) for each category help us/hurt us?
Is it not wise to have all of our sites/subdomains on the same C Block?
Should we invest in syndicated category specific content? Or should we start writing our own for each category? (not really thrilled on this idea as we are not experts in all categories)
Finally, we have been banned from Yahoo - completely. I don’t know why. We’ve never participated in any black hat tactics or linked with bad neighbors or anything in that regard. We used to do very well with Yahoo (we also used to heavily advertise with yahoo until this), and the change that seemed to get us banned was moving from directory based categories to subdomains (i.e. www.mainsite.com/cat1 to cat1.mainsite.com). Would this get us banned? How does one get re-included?