Archive for the ‘webmaster’ Category

Are SEO companies good things?

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Let me explain what has happened to me.

I enlisted an offshore SEO company to find links for several of my sites.  The company is big and well respected, and boast about being totally white hat, so I gave them the job.

From the beginning things didn’t seem to be going quite above board.

Sure, there was a slow development of some one way links, which most web masters would be satisfied with, but, as I checked out a few of the links, I started to get worried. 

Oh yes, they were links on bona fide web sites, with good PR for the most part, but one of the links was clearly on a site that had no other purpose than to provide link space.  My link appeared in prime territory on the main index page of the site, then when I checked out other pages, I found that spaces were left for other sites to be linked to, and when I looked at the text - the content - I saw about 10 links to other sites.

So, obviously, this was a site they either owned for putting links on, or they were buying links from the site.

I raised the matter with them, but they never explained a thing about it,  just said they would send the links back for correction, but one month later they still weren’t corrected.

Then there was a lapse of about a month or two, and on my insistence they sent out another list of links as to where they had attained new links for my other two sites.

Well, I checked 2 links, a PR 0 and a PR4, the PR4 looked good, but there was no where to request a link from, which seemed a bit odd.

The PR0 link page - that also belonged on a PR4 domain - was extremely disturbing.  I knew this site, it was a competitor with one of my other sites, and I knew it’s two link pages, and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to link to it - written badly, lousy content, just an affiliate site with no class.

It was disturbing at first because the link page my two sites appeared on I knew had been filled with links previously, but now it was just about 15 links, and mine was two of them.  If that wasn’t enough to raise my eyebrows, one of my sites had a nofollow tag on it, while the other didn’t.

You see, why bother putting a link to one of my sites up in the first place, to just hit it with a nofollow tag ? - why bother adding the link in the first place? - Where did all the other links go that were there before mine?

Am I paranoid?  Have I stumbled onto an SEO company in India, who wants more than to find white hat links for me? They want to own the whole internet?

Think about it, cheap labour to build and write web sites, US$ going in from people like me to build white hat links, they stick my links on their sites that they are making/made, but when I stop paying them to build links, I guess the links disappear that were already built, just like all those other sites vanished from the link page I knew well, and they have used my money to build more websites and to get more links for themselves by going after real links. 

So it ends in the position where the person trying to improve the serps of their web site, has been cheated of the links, and the India company’s web site competing with them takes the lead.

Most likely though, they are buying links, and are just profiteering, and obviously, when the money stops, the links drop off.

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Drop in SERPS? Check TTL: Time To Live or Thief Thief Look!

Friday, June 12th, 2009

TTL is the abbreviation for Time To Live.  Normally, this is seldom, if ever,  heard of, outside of a small number of web masters.  If you are losing your SERPS by great amounts, 50, 100, or 100’s each day, chances are, if you have changed to a new server recently, you may have a problem with your TTL’s being set low.

Sometimes the serps positions can drop by hundreds, pick up a few hundred places, then drop by twice as much again. It is a confusing, bewildering and scary time.

TTL’s can mean two different things it seems.  TTL can be defined as  the number of hops / routers that your web site is allowed go through, before it is extinguished.  So, if you had a setting of 3, after the web page went through the third router it would be killed off. 

Anyone within 3 hops of your server can see your page, any one after cannot.

Apparrently TTL can also be set to minutes, rather than hops, but essentailly it means when a certain time has passed the site is killed at the router when it goes over time.

Now, you can see why a search engine doesn’t like displaying sites with low TTL in its search results, when many people may not be able to see the site - it looks like the search engine may not be that good, and it frustrates the person trying to access your site, they can’t see it, so they hit the back button and try clicking again. 

Hence during your first month of low TTL’s, your visitor numbers will likely seem to rise to perhaps record levels.  It hasn’t really, it’s just that people are downloading your page repeatedly when trying to get to it.

But why did I refer to TTL as short for Thief Thief Look! ? Because, criminal based web sites use low TTL’s. 

Why low TTL’s?  Because, when you are going to move to a new server, you need to have low TTL’s for the change of servers.

Now, every bona-fide site that changes to a new server goes through low TTL’s for a short time.  Once they get to the new server successfully, the TLL’s are increased again.

BUT, criminal type sites keep their TTL’s low for a quick transfer to another server.  It’s like leaving the car running when you go to rob a bank.

So search engines also look darkly on low TTL’s for that reason as well.

If you are unlucky enough to have had your TTL settings put on low and left there by your host provider, after about a week or a month, you will definitely start seeing your keywords dropping dead around you like flies.

At first you will think the loss of serps  has something to do with what you did on site, so you’ll check all changes, then you’ll check your links, for any that may have gone bad. You’ll make changes because Blind Freddy reckons it’s too many links, too many keywords, but no matter what you do, the serps just keep plumetting.

If more than one site went to the new server, you will find that they too will drop in serps.  Interestingly, they don’t all seem to drop at the same time or rate I’ve found, and it may not be all your keywords that dropping, just some, but the longer the TTL’s are left low, the more keywords become adversly affected.

When a bona fide site is left with low TTL’s it suggest that the move to a new server went somehow wrong, and the rush to fix the transfer meant that the TLL settings were forgot about as a result.

Once you become aware that your sites appear to have been affected by low TTL settings, you need to contact your host provider, let them know that since the change of server you have been losing serps positions greatly, and ask them if they could plase check and correct any and let you know.

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