I work for a company (to remain nameless) that sells websites. We currently offer a SEM product that includes 5 optimized pages (for different cities) and a link to a page with a few hundred links and growing. They tell clients that the pages will be ranked in search engines because it is "optimized" and the link network will boost their rank. However i recently took over this department and was amazed to find out how they were going about it. Each "optimized" page is actually a template that you perform a find & replace to put in a different city. So basically all the pages are duplicates of each other, something google might see as spam and ban the client’s sites for. The "link network" is a link to a page with hundreds of links on it, yes..however google is recognizing this as one file instead of hundreds of links. To fix that for the time being they have used a include or redirect to another page hoping google will not notice. but since google sees all, that wont last long either. I am looking for a solution that will allow me to manage.. right now about 400 sites and growing. For the link network which is constantly growing and changing... Some type of software that automatically adds and updates links directly onto the sites simultaneously, so that it is not a separate page and so i do not have to do them one at a time? and customizing each clients 5 optimized page. I know this is going to be a huge task but im willing to saving the integrity of this company. Any thoughts/suggestions would be so helpful. Thanks.
Start from the bottom up - If thats what you have found so far, there may be things you havent. Be careful not to risk any further work being undone aswell. First thing I would do is remove anything that could cause problems, to prevent being banned, even if it dents the serps. Good luck - it doesnt sound like a job i would like to take on.
Welcome to DP. You may want to try a program called Addweb. It is used for linking, submissions, page optimization, publishing reports for your clients plus many other helpful tools. The linking is set up by creating profiles for each of your clients and policed by the software. I personally recommend this program for the price it's great. Good luck
And people wonder why I have nothing nice to say about such companies! :/ Good luck in your endeavor. I hope you turn it around.
Tuning can probably help you start to get those sites some REAL directory placement - he may even feel like doing a 'group rate' These guys may be able to help you with some quick, cheap unique content You can get these guys turned around - but better do it sooner than later
Nice work, also try 'spdude' - he could be useful to you. Once you have those issues sorted, you might also want to sign up to the Free Coop Advertising network. http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/?s=4585 - With my referral ID http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/ - without
Thanks for all of your help guys. This is going to be a wild project. I also got this reply as well on another forum: ----- Hello HomieGFunk, 2 Problems: 1. Duplicate Content 2. 1 Duplicated link page For the first problem your either going to need to manually rewrite every page or your going to need to create a pretty smart program to randomly generate pages from a bunch of groups of text. The first option is probably the best but by far the hardest. If you get yourself a halfway decent programmer you could easily create a program to randomize a ton of content. Basically you create dozens of sentences or paragraphs and then randomly put them together so that no two pages are alike. You can get much more sophisticated by using news feeds and other sources of unique content. I might suggest you use Yahoo RSS to pull in a few unique articles for every city etc. etc. etc. 2. The second problem is probably easier. You could create a file on every site that includes (Through a PHP/ASP include statement) the main links directory page that has all of the links on it. That way whenever you add a link to that page it gets added to every site that is including that page. Let me know if you would like a better explanation. Having all of the same links on every site may be a little much though, I would probably suggest grouping them up a bit. Like only putting links to sites in the same region. You have enough sites that you could probably pull that off. These are just a few examples of what you can do. There are much more complex ways of doing it. The more complex you get the better your chances of being detected are. Hope that helps, Jarrod Hunt ------ I guess the type of program I am looking for is one that can do the above automatically. Is there a program for this? Im not a programmer but if anyone would be interested in submitting a proposal to write a custom program- please email me. Thanks again guys. Very helpful.
Its a relatively new product to our company and was thrown together quickly. Something my boss was fulfilling in downtime. Now they have decided to run with it and push this product and that is where Im coming in, to work out the kinks. So........I'll let you know when these sites are on the first page of google.
If you want to stick with this link scheme as a selling point, I'd take the duplicate links pages off the clients sites and have a directory on your companies site listing the sites they manage. Then link to the directory from the client's homepages once. Drive the PR of the directory up to at least a 5 or 6 and give them some simple education on the value of a link from page with pagerank. You never know they may even bring some links in themselves to their sites. But really, it's all bullshit this approach your company has at the moment. Cut the crap and give them something real with value that provides results... thats where your company will really start making the money. BTW, glad to see you want to try and sort the problem out.