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#42
03-06-2005
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Understandable. But my training is web development and business programming. SEO is certainly related to webdev, but it wasn't part of what I was taught (although I feel it should've been).
Also bear in mind that our company forums span the entire gamut of I.T. topics, and I'm charged with looking after all of them, and making changes to them. Would be difficult to find one person who was all knowing on each of those topics. And if you did find them, their salary demands would probably be prohibitive.  
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#44
03-06-2005
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Well specifically in my case it consisted of Visual Basic, and Java. Also scripting of Oracle Databases. Creating inventory and sales programs for business. That was most of the business programming end of the courses. The webdev end was the web formatting languages (html/css) along with XML and Javascript. But they never breathed a word about SEO.
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#46
03-06-2005
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I quite agree. But it was an "accelerated" course (The Chubb Institute) and they packed an awful lot of information into it. Something had to be omitted, I suppose. As it was, it really was educational blitzkrieg. Felt like I was in I.T. bootcamp. I was afraid to blink.
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#48
03-06-2005
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Thanks. No, I'm pretty easy-going. Just attending the SES was an education for me. I learn a great deal from our forums. I'm in the process of learning PHP from one of our forums that specializes in it. I hope to learn more about SEO here.
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#49
03-07-2005
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JPnyc, this is kind of off topic but I fully respect you. Once you learn the basics, with your technical ability, you will be able to blow many SEOs out of the water. Your type of Web development, I respect a great deal. There is nothing like using Web based technologies to automate a company's business processes. Now, once you learn a couple basic SEO principles, the sky is the limit.
Keep it up!
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#50
03-08-2005
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A poll within a thread
Quote:
This thread is titled :"What is Spam." Can we step back to the basics for a moment? I have taken the list below and given my "vote" as to wether these are SPAM. You will see that I agree that most are, but some can be or not, depending on the intent. If anyone else feels like it, give your "Not Spam" votes from this list and defend your opinions. Also...has Shari missed any? Quote:
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#52
03-08-2005
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"user intent"
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#53
03-10-2005
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Back on topic...
Please don't judge my lack of posting to imply a lack of experience with SEO. I've been handling all of the SEM for our company since 2000 with quite a bit of success. I'm glad to see this topic get back on point because I WAS at the spam session at SES and walked out of there shaking my head. The only one that seemed to be making any sense was Greg. I thought Shari's presentation was simply giving back the SE rhetoric without any real substance. Greg was at least honest enough to mention that if you simply do what the SE's are telling you to do you'll never rank. He didn't explicitly state that in the session as others point out but he did allude to it and said something similar in one of the site clinic sessions.
I was reading down this list that Shari posted and Rusty commented on and I have to say this is a very good clarification of these topics. It's not enough to simply state that each of these is spam and therefore off limits. We utilise a couple of these tactics very carefully with the only intent being to help SE users get to the right content on an authority site. I agree that doorway pages are very often necessary and can be constructed in a useful way to take advantage of the SE without taking advantage of the user. I'll stop here because I have to run.... if anyone is interested in a further conversation about this please post. Quote:
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#54
03-11-2005
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but can you fix my old sega?
Quote:
I'd hate for this to run into another white/black hat discussion so let's just say we are "exploring shades of grey" why don't we? 
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#55
03-11-2005
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Ok, here goes...
Thanks for replying Chris. Here's a little background.
I'm one of the founders of our company and serve as president and marketing director. We've grown our business from nothing more than an idea to a profitable business with 90 employees. We're an ecommerce-only company selling a commodity product for homeowners. I don't reply to many posts and have mostly stayed out of the conversation because for a long time I didn't feel qualified to put my 2 cents in. After SES NY I realize that the direction SEM is taking seems kind of odd so I decided it was time to join the conversation. There was a lot of talk at the SES conference in NY about spending more time doing traditional marketing and making SEM just a part of that effort. SEM's said they were bored to death of just doing SE placement and that it just wasn't enough anymore. I have thought about this quite a bit since the conference because I find SEO quite boring also. When we first started our company we hired a traditional marketing director, someone that knew how to launch a large media campaign, buy magazine ads, do branding, and other traditional marketing tactics. Problem was, we are (were, we now have a small B&M presence) a pure dotcom, doing 99% of our business online. We quickly learned that folks weren't looking at traditional media and then visiting our website. We tried magazine ads, direct mail pieces, lots of PR, etc. We even placed ads in 900 yellow page directories all over the nation because we thought that our type of business was one that people would naturally look up in the phone book. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. I discovered Overture and can still remember the day I asked our CEO what he thought of the idea. We kind of shrugged our shoulders and said "why not? It's pay for clicks so at least we can measure what we're getting." That was the beginning of a revolution in our way of thinking. Once we launched the campaign and started to tally the results we quickly realized we were staring down the throat of the NEXT BIG THING in marketing. No longer would we have to guess if our efforts were paying off, we could measure them directly. The only problem was, the cost per customer acquisition continued to rise as others joined in. Now, I pay twice as much per customer as I did in 2000 for Overture and more than twice for Google. That's what drove us to take a very serious approach to organic listings, we started doing organic optimization in 2001 or so. Sorry for the long intro... now to get to the point Here's the list again: Quote:
Quote:
I'll send this post now and continue it in the next post so it doesn't get too long.
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#56
03-11-2005
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continued...
We found that one page on our site had a much better conversion for all of our PPC ads than any other page on our site. The reason was simple, people don't know what parts they need and must go through our PartDetective to figure out what part to order. So, we changed gears early on and sent everyone to our PartDetective. That was fine for PPC. Problem is, we supply parts for 80 brands, 15 appliance types, and ~150,000 different appliance models. That adds up to approximately 850,000 different parts. There is no possible way to optimize a site for that wide an audience.
In time we discovered that there were some keywords that were more important than others. Using our PPC data we refined the keywords and came up with a list of about 100 that were most important. Again, you can't optimize a single entry point for 100 keywords. And, we didn't want people wandering into our site through any old page we could optimize. That's where doorway pages came in. I was able to optimize some pages for specific keywords that were completely relevant to the user. The page merely serves as a signpost out there to help people get to the right page on our site for one of the many keywords we use. We have NEVER used any tactics to entice the general public to our site using irrelevant keywords. We use obviously related keywords that people might type in to find parts or repair help for their appliances. Our pages are all hosted at our primary domain. However, they are optimized using conventional SEO practices. This seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate practice. At the conference I heard people discussing this topic as though it were obviously wrong in every circumstance. Black Hat versus White Hat. That seemed kind of short-sighted to me. Also, this past Christmas I tried to do some shopping online. I discovered that nearly all organic roads lead to Amazon or Ebay. I'd be interested in your thoughts about affiliate pages, where do they fit in? We love our affiliates because they bring us traffic that we have missed. They also use ethically sound practices but according to the SE rhetoric I heard last week they're all using Black Hat techniques. What do you think about this? Can doorway pages be a legitimate answer to SE placement for some companies? Perhaps there should be standards governing the pages instead of an outright ban? I look forward to hearing from you and anyone else interested in this subject.
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#57
03-11-2005
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One of the problems with doorway pages is that sometimes they aren't.
Technically, from a search engine's standpoint, every single page in your website can be a "doorway" or "landing" page. I'm using those terms in the original sense where they happen to be the page the the search engine sends you to within the site, rather than the home page, which is traditionally the doorway to your site. The reason that "doorway" "landing" "attraction" "sign-post" etc etc pages are considered spam is because there is a specific definition for them. From a search engine standpoint, all pages pretty much are indexed by themselves and rank by themselves. But there is an acknowledgment that each page IS part of the whole site - that's why your spam on the home page can affect an inner page that does not use the tactic. So rankings are page based and spam detection is site (and sometimes network) based. It's this variance in treatment where a lot of confusion can occur. If you create an optimized page and make it part of your site - it's just another page to get ranked. If you make the exact same page and then make an effort to NOT make it part of the site - it's often considered spam. Why? lots of reasons, but mostly because anything that is not really part of your site but is nonetheless intended to increase the rankings of the site is a prime location for deceit and other bad things - it's a spam magnet. If you are embarrassed to show the world your page because it's ugly or repetitive, then what the heck are you doing trying to make it rank well (and thus get shown to the world?) If it's a page that you truly feel is helpful to visitors, then proudly show it off. No need to hide it. Yes, it might take some extra work to do this - you can't just take the same page over and over again, change a few keywords and run a thesaurus algo on it and hope to convince humans that you actually care about the topic and should be a trusted source. From a doorway spam standpoint, it's not about the fact that the page is optimized, it's about the fact that it's not really part of the site - links to it (if any) are invisible or hard to find. Typically, the links leave the landing page and there is no navibable way to get back to it. That's what I personall consider to be a spam doorway page: you land on it, but once you click on a link to go somewhere else in the site, there is no practical way to get back tot he original page. If there is, if your part pages (to use the above example) link to that page - it's not a doorway from a spam stand point. Have an effective doorway page? Link to it, and make it part of your site. Now it's simply an effective, optimized part of your site. Simple. I find it very odd that many people will want to rank for keywords and yet are not willing to put a moderate amount of work into actually making content to them. It's like wanting to be a concert pianist but not wanting to go through the trouble of actually taking lessons and practicing. Rankings are earned, not owed. I've noticed that most true spam is a result of the people generating it not understanding that concept. My opinion, Ian PS, this was not aimed at repairguru's posts, but rather at the confusion on doorway pages in general.
__________________
International SEO Last edited by mcanerin : 03-11-2005 at 11:26 AM.
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#58
03-11-2005
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Ok, but...
Thanks for your response Ian. Let's leave the obvious black hats out of the conversation for now. Let's assume that we're talking about a legitimate company that does a great job offering a service or providing products but for one reason or another the SE's just don't "care." I see it all the time, not just in my small niche. Many very decent sites out there are practically invisible.
And, embarrassment might be an issue for some but for us it's not a fear of "showing the world" our pages, in fact we try to get them to the page - it's about providing a broad enough, relevant funnel to an appropriate place on the website. If I stick to the popular interpretation of "spam" I will be required to redesign our website every time a major SE decides to change the way they spider and index. That might be easy for some sites but ours is too complex to continually change the way we do things.
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#59
03-11-2005
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Without seeing the site, I can't comment on it specifically - are you certain we are talking about the same thing? Lots of large dynamic sites do very well, so in the absence of specific information (and I understand why you may be reluctant to post URLs) I would suggest at looking at one that is similar in design and doing well, and one that isn't and figure out why.
In the meantime, let me scratch a diagram on a napkin here: Spam: Code:
Home
Doorway | Doorway
| Catalog |
| /\ |
| / \ |
>--- Product1 Product 2 -------<
Not Spam: Code:
Home
|
Sitemap, Product Category Pages, etc
/ | \
Doorway | Doorway
| Catalog |
| /\ |
| / \ |
< >--- Product1 Product 2 ----< >
I'm not talking about re-organizing your whole site - I'm saying add some links and make important pages a part of your site, instead of separate from it. I'm not sure how that would require: Quote:
Ian
__________________
International SEO
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#60
03-11-2005
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wow
This is some great stuff, repairguru and ian. I will have to spend some time on this over the weekend and give a thorough response...
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