Advice on combating blackhat within an organisation
-
Hello,
I have an unsual challenge I would appriciate some feedback from the community.
I have been managing the digital marketing for a UK franchise for around three years. My approach has been to try and keep to the priciple of one microsite per franchisee - listing only the serviced locations once as appropriate.
Now this franchise has been aquired by a US company and a new marketing manager for the US company is overseeing the site - why I am still involved is unkown and is a matter of time I supsect.
This marketing 'guru' is clearly blackhat and is pushing agaisnt my eithical, brand driven approach in favor of creating landing pages for pretty much every location. I can see from the other brands he manages - this has been his approach --- boiler plate content and fake addresses (complete with schema markeup) for every location and and additional websites per actual valid location (so 2x listings per term for same brand)
My question is how do I go about combating this - or is it a lost cause? I feel responsible for the success of the franchisees.
Thanks in advance.
Steve
-
Thanks James
It is frustrating that Google rewards such practices, and as the sites in question operate around lower volume search terms I dont see this changing any time soon.
The argument has been, 'look at how well we are doing with these other sites - how can it be wrong'..... its difficult to educate managment on the risks when the current data proves the wrong way works.
I wonder if anybody on here has been in a similar spot and managed to result in some form of win?
Thanks again.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Panda penalty removal advice
Hi everyone! I'm after a second (or third, or fourth!) opinion here! I'm working on the website www.workingvoices.com that has a Panda penalty dating from the late March 2012 update. I have made a number of changes to remove potential Panda issues but haven't seen any rankings movement in the last 7 weeks and was wondering if I've missed something... The main issues I identified and fixed were: Keyword stuffed near duplicate title tags - fixed with relevant unique title tags Copies of the website on other domains creating duplicate content issues - fixed by taking these offline Thin content - fixed by adding content to some pages, and noindexing other thin/tag/category pages. Any thoughts on other areas of the site that might still be setting off the mighty Panda are appreciated! Cheers Damon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digitator0 -
Pros & Cons of Switching Your Main Domain to Mask Links & Combat EMDs
Hello Mozzers, I'd love to receive some advice for a client of mine and insights you may have regarding pros and cons on changing your main domain to mask links. Within a competitive niche there are about 4 different sites that routinely rank 1-4. Our site crushes all three on just about all metrics except we have a high volume of nofollow links and our site remains at #4. Our site is much older so we have significantly more links than these smaller sites, including pre-penguin penalty spammy links (like blog comments that make up 50+ nofollow links from 1 comment per domain). Obviously we are attempting to remove any toxic links and disavow, however the blog comment nofollow links skew our anchor text ratio pretty intensely and we are worried that we aren't going to make a dent in removing this type of links. Just disavowing them hasn't worked alone, so if we are unable to remove the bulk of these poor quality links (nofollow, off-topic anchor text, etc..) we are considering 301 redirecting the current domain to a new one. We've seen success with this in a couple of scenarios, but wanted to see other insights as to if masking links with a 301 could send fresh signals and positively effect rankings. Also wanted to mention, 2 of the 3 competitors that outrank us have EMD's for the primary keywords. Appreciate your time, insights, and advice on this matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leadhub0 -
Advice on Content Marketing in a Tough Niche
Hello, In our niche, nobody links to the content/information with rare exceptions. Do you guys have any good articles/ideas for cases like this? The content that is linked to is once removed in subject matter from the content of our site, like if we sold shoes and had to write on different types of clothing stores. Looking for advice on what to do and how to figure out what to write about. We've probably got a descent budget this time but we're not sure how to go about this. Any advice is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Advice on Link Building?
I know webmasters shouldn't focus on link building but unfortunately there are some types of content that doesn't get shared as much as other. And for content to go viral, it ain't that easy and it's almost impossible in some smaller niches where you don't have the volume to go "viral". That said I know about the common link building techniques. I know I can submit guest posts but when you're competing with websites that have over 10,000 backlinks, there is no way I'm going to get close to this with guest posting and commenting on other blogs. One way I found for getting backlinks is to publish interviews. Most of the time, people/businesses you interview like to link to this type of content. Publishing value-added content about other businesses' products or services may get some backlinks in return but not that often. So other than that, can some of you share some "out-of-the-box" link building strategies? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Please help me with your advice
Hi all, Couple years ago I started to build my business based on EMD domain. The intention was to create the source with the rich unique content. After a year of hard work the site achieved top 10 in Google and started to generate good amount of leads. Then Google announced the EMD Update and site lost the 90% of traffic (after Pandas updates our SERP was steady ) “ a new filter that tries to ensure that low-quality sites don’t rise high in Google’s search results simply because they have search terms in their domain names. ” But I don’t consider my site low-quality site, every page, every post is 100% unique and has been created only to share the knowledge with others… The site has EXCELLENT content from industry point of view.... Since the “ EMD Update “ I read hundreds , hundreds of different articles and opinions related to EMD update and finally I am confused and lost. What should I do… • Kill the site and start new one
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
• Get more links, but what type of links and how I should get them
• Keep hoping and pray....
• Or do something else Please help me with your advice0 -
Domain advice needed, please
Could i get a little domain advice please. Launching a new website project and want to put it on a domain we already own (both domains are in the same niche as the larger project). The new project will be aimed at the UK market. The choice is: .co.uk we own with a good name, however it's Domain Authority rank is 7 and it's only about 8 months old. .com domain which is 6 years old, has a Domain Authority rank of 33 but is not as good a domain name. The Competitive Link Analysis tells me that the rivals for the keywords we would be targeting are between 24 and 42. Which domain would people go with? All things equal it would be a fair guess that the older, higher Domain Authority ranked .com will require less work to rank in the engines, however it's not as good brand wise. Thanks Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
I need some blogging advice please!
My name is Matthew and I am a new PRO member and founder of my own Internet marketing company in KS. So far I love the interaction and tools and functionality of seomoz. I am a true student of seo and love the subject. My dilemma is I know a blog is an important piece of any good seo campaign but I know very little about HOW to blog well......this is my new site and blog page. I only have a couple articles so far but many more planned. http://sawwebmarketing.com/seo-blog/ When I read an article that would be particuarly beneficial for my visitors can i post or share that on MY blog (giving the author the credit of course) without google thinking its duplicate content? is there anything specific I need to do with my blog for google to "see" the new, fresh content that is being added to the site? I have seen "tagged" items at the bottom of some blogs. Is this important? Some blogs will have a word or string of 2-3 words that are a link to a specific website. Does this help me or just them or just people reading the blog? **All I know is articles I write need to be relevant to my site and interesting and ORIGINAL and of benefit to my site visitors. ** Any advice that would help insure my blog articles get me all the juice they can would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you in advance! Matthew ps - my site only went live a couple days ago so I am still working on a few onpage items but ANY feedback about the site itself would be spectacular! Have a GREAT weekend!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mrupp440 -
How to best migrate / rebrand our organisation without losing the SEO on our current website?
I searched the current questions and found similar questions but nothing as specific as what I wanted, so... We are a graphic design school in Melbourne Australia. We have a website - www.graphicschool.com.au - that ranks fairly well in Google for our particular search terms. We have rebranded the organisation and want to change the website domain name to the new branding - www.grenadi.vic.edu.au - but obviously do not want to lose our hard earned SEO and rankings. We only have two strategies so far, and are not sure what the pros and cons to either strategy are, or whether there is a better way. The two ideas we have are: Option 1) Just swap the domain name. We were thinking about swapping the domain name and setting up 301 redirects to tell Google that the old page that ranked well is now this page 'x' on the new site. I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links. Option 2) Build a second website. This idea is that we would build a second website with our new domain name and branding and build up that site until it ranks as highly as the first site and then start to remove the first site. We're planning on completely redeveloping the current website anyway and changing and adding lots more content as well so this option is not out of the question. Any help, thoughts, suggestions or further options would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to discuss. Can I also please suggest that a new category is added under 'The SEO Process' - something like 'rebranding / migration' Cheers, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0