Is my SEO company useless?

TO the poster above me ... are you aware how rude your domain / forum username is?

And to the OP: You should always receive a report of what your SEO Co. is doing for you, but if you are ranking #1 or 2 in Google then it sounds like they are doing their job. PR is irrelevant. Some of my highest earners are PR 2, 3 or 4. I stopped worying about PR a long time ago.

Good luck!
~tasty

 

I wouldn't worry about SEO if my site already had the first positions. Don't try to fix it if it's working. Once you get to the first 3 positions, it's not that easy to lose it.

 

I agree with that, many webmasters or business do have the wrong perception that high Page Rank = high search engine ranking. That is a common myth. Why? If high page rank equals to high ranking, then most well known sites like digg, facebook, squidoo, youtube will dominate the search engine results for any keywords that user keyed in. Do you think this is reasonable?

The other thing is I do see sites that have lower page rank out rank the sites with a higher page rank in a given keyword. So Page rank is useless in determine the exact locations of your website in Google for example.

 

Hire a better SEO lol

 

Focus on how well you're doing for your target keywords (you should have a short list of keywords that you're committed to dominating), your traffic, and your sales. Don't get too caught up in page rank!

 

You should increase your pages in the site, on seo theme you need atleast 200 pages to get page rank 5.

Thanks

 

Firstly nice to see someone local around so hello.

Back to your question, as a lot of people have said PR isn't the most important thing in the world, however have you noticed any traffic drop off from when you were PR4 to now?

Although it depends on what your target market is, most users of a site wouldn't know what PR was or how or even if its important.

Another thing to look at is where is your traffic coming from? If a reasonable amount is coming from the links created for link building then they are worth while, however if all they are doing is creating links to your site they cant be that important apart from inflating your PR.

What could of happened of course is that some of the sites you are linked from have dropped PR themselves for various reasons, its just the ebb and flow of Google sites go up, sites go down.

Jen

 

We have i think 7000ish pages on our site so that shouldn't be a problem.

From what everyone has said here its nothing to worry about. My SEO company does provide reports of where they're adding links but as i don't know enough about link building (yet) i don't really know if they're working or not. On the plus side our rankings have not slipped at all and we're still getting good sales results. I will just monitor it for a while.

Thankyou for all your comments, it is really good to get reassurance about things like this

 

The problem with out sourcing off page criteria is it takes your business completely out of your hands, to scary for me... The odds of having spam related to your site, reputation and credibility in another hands...

I don't mean to sound overly negative, i mean if these SEO companies ruin sites surely people would be giving warnings and bad reviews... I just do not see how they get tons of links for other sites without doing something that is frowned on by Google and if not now eventually the algo will catch up with... Then you will have no idea what, where or who done what to try and reverse it...

Just my opinion, but anyway PR can fluctuate a lot, a 1 point drop is nothing...going from a PR 4 to 0 would have me scarred...

 

what do you want ? Higher PR or SERPs ?

Higher PR - Go purchase a PR 7 / 8 quality link with the money you spend on hiring the SEO company

SERPs - Save your money, read DP, make quality content! heh

 

Are you selling a product? Are you getting sales? What are/were your SEO goals? Have they been met by the company you hired? Are you in maintenance mode now? Are there still goals to be achieved? You need to be asking some different questions here.

Your PR is not going to give you sales. Your search engine ranking # will. If you are #1 - #5 for your targeted keywords, then you are FINE. If you are not getting conversions/sales, then you need to ask why. Whether it's on page or off page issues etc.

 

Page Rank shouldn't be an issue and for the most part doesn't matter unless you are selling links based on your PR. Website can rank for competitive terms without any PR nowadays.

The most important things in SEO are Traffic, Ranking and Conversion. Now If they are a link building firm, You should keep track of your link popularity and your competitors.

you can use something like www.marketleap.com/publinkpop

or do it yourself

Search in Google

www.google.com/search?as_lq=www.YOURCOMPANY.com

Search in MSN

search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=%22YOURCOMPANY.com%22+-site%3AYOURCOMPANY.com&FORM=MSNH

Search in Yahoo!

search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.YOURCOMPANY.com&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1

 

Since you have had many SEO providers that have various Off-Page strategies, you will find that the previous SEO firms have taken back their "blog, forum, social book marking" links. As you signed up for the DP forum, you entered a User Name and Password. After time you can add Signature Links. But when you stop using them, they edit the Sig links back to their website and you lose the links.

Also, if Google thinks you are obtaining links to fast, they will drop your PR by a point.

If you are still No1 (or even in the top 5) for your keywords, don't worry about it. PR does not impact placement until you start geting into the really competitive keywords.

Just make sure that you gain access to any and all linking building user names and passwords from them. It's your, you are paying for it and therefore you should consider it your "company asset".

 

# of pages has absolutely nothing to do with PR, so you can ignore that person's comment.

Eric

 

You've got to remember that Google regularly update their PR alogorithm to exclude certain types of links or sites from the calculation. The effect is that it is continually becoming more difficult to maintain a Pagerank and even more difficult to go to the next level. The number of QUALITY links required to gain each pagerank is not a straight progression from the previous number. ie. the number required for each jump is exponentially greater. For example, whereas 2 or 3 half decent links will get you to a PR of 2/10 you will likely need another 20 or 30 of them to get to PR 3 with PR 4 requiring even more quality links... and so on. Therefore it will never be as easy to move from 3 to 4 as it was to move from 2 to 3.

Having said this, I also agree with what others have said.... PR is something to be aware of and aspire to but the telling factors are SERPs and visitors/sales/enquiries... If these are heading in the right direction then you have little to worry about.

 

As i said, its not an issue with our current results. I WAS just a bit worried incase we started slipping on the serps. However i am not worried about that anymore and you can all be assured i will no longer worry about PR again

I will keep an eye on our serps of course.

 

PR HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR SERPs!! People must get that out of their heads!

Who the heck cares about PR? geez

 

Pete,

As the owner of an SEO company I notice many clients become overly concerned with PR. As mentioned it is not the end all and be all, but it is something to consider.

I advocate transparency so if you are uncertain of what your SEO company did, then ask them, they should be willing to provide you with at least a partial list a links, they might not want to show you all the links they helped you gather, but they should be willing to prove their value with data. If not then you should consider doing it yourself or looking for a company that is more transparent.

As to the PR dropping, oftentimes this is a result of the links acquired losing their value. If you or an SEO company acquired links from other sites and those sites have lost some of their authority (PR) then your PR is likely to drop as a result.

On a side note a higher PR does have some value. The primary value is that it can help make the links within your site more valuable and help with your internal linking. i.e. If your site is a PR4 and you link to a page within your site then that link now carries more weight. Of course relevance is still more important than PR and I completely agree with everyone who said such.

I am new to these forums and trying to build some reputation here. If you found this information of value, positive feedback is certainly appreciated.

Also, I am curious to hear others' thoughts. Do other members agree with my points?

 

PR should not be of much concern. PR does help in getting link exchange results, but that is not a major goal as it was a few years back. Some directories also sort by PR, so a higher PR will sometimes put you on a higher PR page or a page that actually gets crawled at regular intervals.

Who is the largest seller of lingerie in the US? Victorias Secret. Yet they have a PR6, and are not even on the first page for the search lingerie on google. The #1 site has a pr4, and the #2 has only a PR2. On page optimization and non- optomized anchor text are the reason VS does not show up well (very few links have the word lingerie in them. 5 minutes of on page optimization and some decent anchor text and VS would be in the #1 position within a few weeks. You can outsource link building (I outsource a lot of work) but you need to have an understanding of what is good, what is bad, and make sure they are concentrating on what is needed. I would strongly reccomend that you AVOID using TLA, but Patrcik Gavin wrote a good white paper on how to get links. Don't hire them, but this is a good read http://www.text-link-ads.com/link-buying-guide.pdf

 

I'm wondering how much you pay to the company and what ranking you get in google.
It is not bad to discuss with folks,you ask more,then get more opinions.