SEO advice: truth or fiction?

[themissy]

Hello all, thanks in advance for reading/answering. You guys are some of the best advice-givers around.

A retail site that I do some work for (not the site in my sig) has hired an outside SEO firm to optimize their site. The firm has recommended some changes to the site, but there are a couple that I just don't understand. What do you guys think about the effectiveness of these suggestions?

1. Move departments to the root directory: this retail site has a big variety of items, and the old webmaster arranged them by subfolders, so that (for example) the socks page would be at www.site.com/clothingbrand/socks.html. The firm wants all pages moved up to the root directory, so that the pages would be www.site.com/clothingbrand-socks.html instead. According to them, search engines put more weight on pages in the root directory. I myself have seen many pages in subfolders do just fine in the SEs, so is this change actually an efficient use of time?

2. Never have two pages with the same keywords: the firm optimized the department pages for the top 25 keywords, with an emphasis on the top 5 keywords. They're supposed to build some new extension pages for the site, and they refuse to use any of the keywords that are already used on the department pages. If the Baby Joggers page uses the keyword "baby jogger", they won't use that same phrase on the extension page (which is also being built to bring in baby jogger traffic). Their arguments are that (1) the two pages would compete with each other in the search engines, and (2) the site may be penalized for duplicate content. As for the first argument, we already have some keywords where the department page comes up #1 in Google, while a FAQ page for that brand or product comes up #2, so I don't see where two well-optimized pages could hurt. And their second argument doesn't seem valid to me, since the department page that just lists products would have vastly different content than a page detailing, say, the features and benefits of a product or brand.

Help me out, please! Are these valid points from the SEO firm?

[bhartzer]

...search engines put more weight on pages in the root directory.

That's absolute hogwash. The search engines do not put any more weight on one url or another. In fact, moving those pages would actually do more harm than good. You already have established links to those pages, so moving the current url to another url just for that reason would hurt your rankings and would be an overall seo nightmare. Any time you change a url can be a real hassle and a pain. I never recommend doing it, let alone all the problems associated with doing redirects.

new extension pages for the site

Whoa Nelly!! The term "extension pages" sounds too much like "doorway pages" that can get your site banned. I wouldn't add any new pages unless they're actual product pages. You don't need to add any new pages--just optimize the current product pages. No duplicate content, no problems with duplicate keywords. There's absolutely no reason to create a new page when you can optimize a current one that targets the same keyword. Is there any reason why they cannot optimize the current product page?

You have three types of pages on your site:
1-the main page that links to departments page
2-the departments page that links to products page
3-actual products page that links to departments and main page.

Optimize the current product pages, don't create any new pages.

[themissy]

Bill, thanks for your input.

I'm so glad someone agrees with me about moving the pages to the root directory. Unfortunately, this firm put it as one of their most important changes to the site, so 15 department pages got moved. They've been moved for around 2 months, with 301 redirects in the .htaccess from the old locations to the new.

As for the extension pages ... yeah, I'm not a fan of those either. The firm describes them as "keyword-rich text pages", which sure sounds suspicious. Most products/departments already have a FAQ page/"about this manufacturer" page to go alongside the department page, which I believe adds genuine information/value to the site.

We're now thinking of not getting the extension pages, and instead asking this firm to optimize the text on more pages (their agreement was to have the meta tags optimized on 15 pages, and the text only optimized on 5 -- seems fairly useless for the other 10 pages). Unfortunately, they're locked into a 1-year contract with this SEO firm. I'm working on my own to optimize as much of the rest of the site as I can, and it appears that we're getting much better results from MY optimized pages than the ones the firm has worked on.

[bhartzer]

I would absolutely not allow "keyword-rich text pages" on the site. I don't care if there is a 1 year contract or not, if the site gets banned then there will be no more contract, the site would most likely sue the SEO firm.

Meta tags are a joke and absolutely a waste of time--and the SEO firm knows it. That's not optimizing a page properly, they're just trying to take money from the company saying that they "optimized" the page.

Glad to hear that you're optimizing, as well. It sounds like you're going to do a much better job.

What about a linking campaign? The site won't rank anywhere without a proper linking campaign.

[themissy]

Ah, it's nice to have my suspicions confirmed by an outside source.

Supposedly the firm is currently working on getting the site inbound links ... but I get those Google web alerts, and I haven't seen much in the way of an increase in incoming links. So far, the firm has submitted the site to a couple of dozen directories, but that's about it.

Unfortunately, the guarantee in the contract has already been fulfilled, so they can't get their money back. The guarantee was "to get at least one new top-10 ranking on one of the top 15 search engines", with kewords recommended by the SEO firm.