YourAmigo

[LizDonaldson]

Good Evening,

I am looking for some information about the services offered by YourAmigo. I have done some forum searches and the opinions are scant on their product offering, specifically Spider Linker. All opinions and experiences welcome.

Thank You in advance

[Marcia]

Never heard of it Liz, but there are references when searching

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-11,GGLD:en&q=youramigo

Looks like it started as an Open Source project, and sometimes there's feedback during the development stages at a site like FreshMeat.

[LizDonaldson]

Thank you!! I should have been more clear. I have seen all the documentation refering to their offerings in fact I have had conversations with their sales reps. WHat I am looking for is some info to share with my team members as to whether this is a good thing or bad thing. We already have a website where the content is fully indexed but not ranking due to some significant technical factors (non US site - english - hosted on a .com domain in the US) :eek: I have not found one recent opinion on this product ( good, bad or indifferent) . I love other peoples opinions!!

[Marcia]

Liz, if it's fully indexed it isn't a crawl problem, though it wouldn't hurt to give Google's Sitemaps a try.

imho, if it's technical problems preventing rankings, it's hard to imagine how any off-the-shelf software could do an individual diagnosis and come up with a custom technical solution.

What type of technical problem is it? Is it a database driven site, is it spitting out session IDs or churning out duplicate page URLs for the same content, as some CMS packages do?

[LizDonaldson]

Marcia,

The site in question is a non US english site hosted on a .com domain in the US. The kicker is we also have a site that is US, english and hosted on .com domain with the same type of content that is ranking in the regional google engines ahead of the the non US content. The country I am talking about is UK.

I 100% agree with you. This product is not going to help overcome our technical constraints. We realize we need to host our country sites under the country domains ... . We moved to .com domain model in order to be able to set a site wide cookie for metrics tracking rollup accounts. I have seen other big companies also host their country site under .com domains such as IBM. When you visit their country picker and choose UK you get redirected to this URL: http://www.ibm.com/uk/ ...

Thank You for validating my thoughts.

[Marcia]

I realize it's a multi-country thing, but if the content is very similar, isn't possible that it could get picked up as near-duplicate to the other?

I haven't checked further, but notice when you type this into the browser address bar:

http://www.ibm.co.uk

[Robert_Charlton]

Liz - If your pages are indexed but not ranking, I'm not sure that YourAmigo will be of help, since mostly what their technology does is get your urls indexed. The page architecture and other ranking factors are still up to you.

I've had some correspondence and several long conversations with YourAmigo over the past few years. They're nice people, but I haven't been super-impressed by their product, and I got the sense that they didn't know much about SEO when they started, but they've been learning. In our last conversation, they did demonstrate to me that they could be useful to some sites that fit the extremely narrow description that I'll provide below.

Essentially, and this is both oversimplified and purposely sketchy, their server application creates site maps from dynamic content, smooths out the roughest url parameters, and uses various strategies to link to these site maps from spiderable pages on a site. The technology manages to bypass session IDs, log-in cookies, etc. I don't know how well it avoids potential dupe issues on form driven sites. The company is apparently well known by the engines and has a seal of approval that what it does is OK.

Unfortunately, there's not what you'd call great PageRank management in this system... the links end up getting really buried in a large site... nor is there much benefit from an optimized onsite architecture. But they do get content crawled that wouldn't be seen otherwise. The catch is that there's not much there for the algo.

If you've got a PageRank 7 site and pages with parts numbers or product names that are extremely rare on the web, with good titles, etc, this system will get your pages indexed well enough to have a shot at ranking. On the three-word phrase they proudly demonstrated to me, I needed to point out to them that there were only 19 pages returning that phrase on Google.

A more or less turn-key solution as YourAmigo provides, with everything in one package, appeals to a lot of companies. Probably mod_rewrite and/or cloaking would do what YourAmigo does, and a lot better, but I truly haven't looked at all the situations to which their technology is applied.

The site in question is a non US english site hosted on a .com domain in the US....

Re the possible dupe situation with this setup of US and UK sites, take a look at this thread...

SEO For Multilingual, International & Dynamic Web Site
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=7970

In post #9, I talk about the situation you describe, and my feeling is that where these sites are hosted and how they're linked is what determines whether they're seen as dupes...

I've been wrestling with the question of dupe content on English language versions of international sites... in particular on US/.com and UK/.co.uk. Putting together the various answers to questions about this that I got at SES, including some from Matt Cutts, I got the sense that Google is smart enough to make this distinction if you segregate your inbound links by country/TLD. (I'm not quoting Matt... only interpreting what I thought he was saying with regard to my own theories)

What segregating your inbounds means is that you get your inbounds for .de from .de domains... for .it from .it domains... for .co.uk from .com.uk domains... and .com from .coms. I don't think there'd be any "penalty" (bad word, but the easiest here) to link cross-countries, but it might be problematic if you depended on these.

[Chris_D]

Great response Robert!

I'll add in an additional comment. I presented at an SES conference in Sydney with the CEO of Your Amigo a few years back http://www.jupiterevents.com/sew/sydney03/agenda2.html
One of the key benefits was 'discovery' of dynamic URLS - as they were linked to from a static page - back when that was an issue. I haven't looked at the product for a few years.

As Robert said - much less of an issue today - there are better individual strategies depending on the specific issues to be resolved - sitemaps for discovery/ indexing; mod_rewrite/ISAPI_rewrite etc

[Robert_Charlton]

...One of the key benefits was 'discovery' of dynamic URLS...

Chris - Not exactly sure what you mean by "discovery," but I'm thinking it refers to running through all the possible or likely queries on a form-driven site by accessing your database directly and generating a set of dynamic urls for the site. I'm not a programmer, but I'm assuming you run a script of some sort to do this.

On some form driven sites, many of your pages may well be duplicates or near duplicates, so you want to be careful of those. Often, it's best not to link to every possible url to provide a spider trail, but only to those that will return a unique page likely to be queried by search.

[Chris_D]

Hi Robert - yes - thats basically how I understand it - and then produces static pages with the links, which it translates on the fly.

Spider Linker generates a table of contents (TOC) which takes the form of a series of one or more HTML pages with links (direct or indirect) to content on a site.
To provide spider-friendly links, the links encode parameters for both GET and POST method pages in such a way that Spider Linker can decode the URL and translate it to a dynamic page request, then respond with the dynamic content to the original request. http://www.youramigo.com/downloads/documents/SLWhite.pdf

[LizDonaldson]

Chris and Robert. I agree 100% with your thoughts on indexing, ranking and using mod_rewrite to solve issues. I am a huge fan of mod_rewrite use it all the time to straighten out "issues" on the site :-) . Your thoughts are very much appreciated and will be sharing them with my team who is analyzing a regional business unit request to engage YourAmigo.

[caugas]

Liz - If your pages are indexed but not ranking, I'm not sure that YourAmigo will be of help, since mostly what their technology does is get your urls indexed. The page architecture and other ranking factors are still up to you.

I've had some correspondence and several long conversations with YourAmigo over the past few years. They're nice people, but I haven't been super-impressed by their product, and I got the sense that they didn't know much about SEO when they started, but they've been learning. In our last conversation, they did demonstrate to me that they could be useful to some sites that fit the extremely narrow description that I'll provide below.

Essentially, and this is both oversimplified and purposely sketchy, their server application creates site maps from dynamic content, smooths out the roughest url parameters, and uses various strategies to link to these site maps from spiderable pages on a site. The technology manages to bypass session IDs, log-in cookies, etc. I don't know how well it avoids potential dupe issues on form driven sites. The company is apparently well known by the engines and has a seal of approval that what it does is OK.

Unfortunately, there's not what you'd call great PageRank management in this system... the links end up getting really buried in a large site... nor is there much benefit from an optimized onsite architecture. But they do get content crawled that wouldn't be seen otherwise. The catch is that there's not much there for the algo.

If you've got a PageRank 7 site and pages with parts numbers or product names that are extremely rare on the web, with good titles, etc, this system will get your pages indexed well enough to have a shot at ranking. On the three-word phrase they proudly demonstrated to me, I needed to point out to them that there were only 19 pages returning that phrase on Google.

A more or less turn-key solution as YourAmigo provides, with everything in one package, appeals to a lot of companies. Probably mod_rewrite and/or cloaking would do what YourAmigo does, and a lot better, but I truly haven't looked at all the situations to which their technology is applied.



Re the possible dupe situation with this setup of US and UK sites, take a look at this thread...

SEO For Multilingual, International & Dynamic Web Site
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=7970

In post #9, I talk about the situation you describe, and my feeling is that where these sites are hosted and how they're linked is what determines whether they're seen as dupes...


Awesome response RC, very detailed. I am researching this company and this helps. Basically short term success is a viable result, but long term from a true SEO perspective you could do better by implementing long term TRUE seo strategies. Very helpful.

[gary kazmer]

I am President of Partsearch Technologies. We sell electronic parts in the CE and MA area through retail, service and B2C channels. On our B2C channel we get about 45,000 sessions a day. About a year ago we had signed up youramigo to help grow our business. One of the conditions of use was that we block all web crawlers to our site. Our sales through the youramigo link grew to about $100,000 per month and then quickly dropped back down to $20,000 per month. About two months ago I asked the CEO of youramigo if he agreed we were loosing about $1,000,000 in revenue annually due to the drop and he said yes. I also asked if he knew what was going on and he said he did not know. I also asked if he knew how to fix it and he said no. I then had to terminate the contract. Since then we have allowed the crawlers back into our site and our sales have increased 20%. Unfortunately the youramigo solution did not work for us. We sell over 8 million parts and youramigo did not keep up with our offering.

[mmlyor]

Dear gary.
I am the e-commerce marketing analyst at a jewelry company and we are looking into youramigo.com.
can you please have a call with us to explain us what happend to your company when using them?
please feel free to email us back
we are really concern about not screwing up our page rank and seo for using your amigo.
thank you,
Orly

[SanDiegoSEO]

Any SEO option that says you need to block the spiders from crawling your site, is one you should stay FAR away from.