Legitimately beaten to top spot or ripped off?

[Steve W]

I'm new at web design and recently launched a mortgage site that was scoring well with Yahoo UK for the clients search terms (not ambitious ones), but on the recent update, we were knocked down by a site that used our content including the company name like a directory site would, but when you clicked the link it took you to what looks like a landing page for another mortgage company. I'm sure most people would click the 'enter' text. However, if you scroll down there are a bunch of mortgage related links, but the site I developed is not among them?

This seems wrong to me. If they hadn't indexed our content, they wouldn't have ranked above us, they give total priority to one site only and they don't even link to our site? It seems like a scam to get traffic for the mortgage company that gets total priority on the page. Any comments appreciated: whether I am right to be upset and can/should do anything about it?

The site I developed is http://www.openchoicemortgages.co.uk/ and the search term for Yahoo UK is 'stop repossession south wales'. If you do the search, you'll see what I mean straight away.
Thanks.

[ADAM Web Design]

Man, talk about your Spammy McSpammerson sites.

Dude...you've got every right to be pissed off. I'm not sure how common a search phrase that is, but that's some hardcore spam.

You could report it to Yahoo!, but I don't think they'd do a hell of a lot about it. Never hurts to try though.

Personally, if I were you though, I'd go after some quality IBLs. Put out a few articles with your backlink included in them. That should knock those idiots off their perch.

[brian.mark]

Yahoo states that the SPAM reports are looked at by a human in a timely fashion at every SES conference. I'd report it and then see what happens. Give them a few days and see what happens. If you were ranked at the top before, you shouldn't need to do a whole lot to get back up there.

Brian.

[Steve W]

Thanks for the comments guys.
I will find out about reporting to Yahoo and try for good IBL's, any pointers for either appreciated.
Cheers

[ctabuk]

Hi Steve, I'm a Mortgage Broker too.I see your points, and reporting it to Yahoo might help. Have you ever thought of the Yahoo Directory? OK it's more money to pay out, but I did that 5 years ago and I've been on page one of Yahoo for my search term 'Right to Buy' for 3 years now.
Our search phrase 'Mortgages' is highly competitive. But one point here that might be missing is the fact that Yahoo is not doing that well on my SERPS, it's down to 10% Google is at 60% MSN has leapt up and so has Ask Jeeves. If you visit the marketing forum here at wpw - I'll see what I can come up with for you. Cheers David

[Steve W]

Thanks for the info David,

I'll look into the Yahoo Directory and visit the marketing forum as you suggest.

Google is of course high on the agenda but we have PR 0 despite what I consider a decent amount of honest content (although there's still a bit more to add). I've heard about the 'Google sandbox effect' but not sure what to make of it, and I've read the importance of IBL's to Google many times, but not sure how to go about getting good IBL's - I'm looking through this site for information, any help would be great.

We also don't appear on MSN or Ask Jeeves yet, is it only a matter of time (the site was launched July 3rd) or is there something I need to do? Neither site appears to have a free submit, and I was told submitting a site loses rank anyway (??true/false??)

Cheers,
Steve

[ctabuk]

Well I'll see you in marketing, then you'll probably get all my business - oh hum

[brian.mark]

Originally Posted by Steve W

Thanks for the info David,

I'll look into the Yahoo Directory and visit the marketing forum as you suggest.

They've got a decently high ranking directory, so that can get you a lot of spidering traffic, but then just about any directory will get you some spidering. The key is quantity, Yahoo just happens to be quality. Oh, and Yahoo admits at SES conferences that they set a flag when your site is manually reviewed for inclusion into their directory if it is considered quality or not. Not doesn't bring a penalty, but quality means you get a bit of a bonus in the SERPs in their engine. They do randomly inspect sites with lots of content according to their reps, but the only way to guarantee a human view is paying the money.

Originally Posted by Steve W

Google is of course high on the agenda but we have PR 0 despite what I consider a decent amount of honest content (although there's still a bit more to add). I've heard about the 'Google sandbox effect' but not sure what to make of it, and I've read the importance of IBL's to Google many times, but not sure how to go about getting good IBL's - I'm looking through this site for information, any help would be great.

Public PR is only updated every 3 months or more. A site launched July 3rd can't possibly have PR yet. PR is based entirely on incoming links and has nothing to do with content. Submitting to lots of directories and asking related non-competing sites for links is the best way to start. Eventually, you'll have links occurring naturally (but you need to get that jump started).

Originally Posted by Steve W

We also don't appear on MSN or Ask Jeeves yet, is it only a matter of time (the site was launched July 3rd) or is there something I need to do? Neither site appears to have a free submit, and I was told submitting a site loses rank anyway (??true/false??)

Cheers,
Steve

False. Submitting doesn't hurt, but it also doesn't help a whole lot either. It does get the spiders to at least know your site exists. Links are still the best way to be included... the more the better.

If you want to submit to MSN (seemed to help a lot for our sites), the form is here.

Brian.

[wrmineo]

Steve - nice website.

Your problems with MSN and others are simply a part of infancy; if your site is new, getting there will take a bit of growning up. IBLs from other sites act as a nice growth hormone though so it's not impossible to speed up the process. Your listing at Heres1 should help as MSN hammers this site with its bots many times a day.

However, you could also be be getting some hinderance from the flash and java. Search engines are getting better at crawling pages with flash, but they've not yet perfected it except maybe Google.

You have LOTS of content on this page. It all seems relevant, but could also be reducing your content relevancy % to your keywords. I recently took one of my home pages down by 40% on the content and it's now in the top ten at Google for a very competitive keyword phrase - something to consider maybe. Doing a smaller snippets and then linking over to your relevant secondary pages may serve you well in the long run - it could also help you diversify your keyword market reach.

Your page has a link in the footer about XHMTL validation. One point - make sure your pages is valid. Three simple errors, but I can only advise on one - line six "&" should be "&". The script errors on lines 166/7 will need Brian, Speed, Adam or someone much better than I for a quick fix - but they can do it - they've done it for me (oh, was that a challenge) :)

CTABUK can provide you with an infinite wealth of information about your site as he's already offered. Here's another challenge - take him up on it or get yourself a big idiot placard to wear. I'm not trying to be abrasive - the info is that good and someone would have to be stupid not to take the FREE offer of his advice. He consulted with me about etowninfo.com recently - do a search in Google for "Elizabethtown Information" and you'll see HIS advice at work on my crappy site!

Good Luck and Happy Ranking!
w®m

[Steve W]

Thanks again guys, especially the 'nice site' comment Wrm - makes all the effort worthwhile!

Thanks too for the advice and the link Brian - I've now submitted to MSN and will look into Yahoo directory.
Jump starting the link process is definately where I need help!

Wrm - I've also fixed the errors, thanks for the tip-off! The page used to validate fine... I bet they all say that... while lightening the page size recently, I screwed up dropping a graphic link from the 'noscript' tag and added a few keywords to the meta description in the template and forgot to encode an ampersand as you thought.

Seems the java is completely ignored (I've seen the noscript comments turn up in a Yahoo search) which is a bitch as its keyword rich, and the flash is just 'pushing' phrases used elsewhere - I didn't expect robots to decipher it, but when you say 'hurting' the page, do you mean something like the robots not making it past the 'object' tags and missing the rest of the content or pushing the content down the page, or something else?

Talking of the index page content, I'd felt it had got a bit much, thanks for the advice - I'll cut the teasers down a bit.

CTABUK's offer is very welcome, I've already scanned and read a few of the marketing posts and intend to post a discussion there looking for help.

Cheers,
Steve

[dburdon]

Steve W,

I've just checked the number of UK searches for the term "stop repossession south wales". According to the Overture network, which includes Yahoo UK amongst others, the number of searches amounted to Zero last month.

Let your spammy mortgage competitor go for that one - its effectively worthless. From my experience the best term to optimise for is "bad credit mortage". Last time I checked, the pay per clickers were prepared to pay £10 ($17.50) per click to secure that one.

[Steve W]

Thanks for the tip - the site is very new and we were disappointed to have been robbed of what we had achieved so far. The site had also received a contact us enquiry about stopping a repossession, the prospect stating he had found the site through a search engine - not sure which one - so we were keen to promote / hang on to top slot even though it is not a commonly searched phrase.

Something I've been meaning to ask is where can I find lists of search terms as you quoted - is the only way to look at who's bidding for what?

Cheers
Steve

[brian.mark]

You could try www.wordtracker.com for one. We use that one regularly when deciding between a few phrases. Of course, just because it is a heavily searched term doesn't mean it'll convert into business for you.

Brian.

[jawn_tech]

Normally I would have recommend this link --

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

but it doesn't seem to be working at the moment.

It normally compares Wordtracker results with Overture. At present, it is showing the Wordtracker results as "faultcode" -- perhaps a move by WT due to not having an agreement to have their database used freely by Digital Point, but I'm only speculating.

However, the idea is to find these types of tools to get an idea of search phrase popularity shown on a given daily basis. Wordtracker itself has a free demo you can try (wordtracker.com), which is based on MSN search results. Though not a comprehensive tool in demo form, it still gives you an idea of what's out there, and other plausible combinations. The paid version is worth the money and is much more comprehensive across the major search engines, imo.

But you're right, the search phrase you mentioned doesn't seem to have any substantial yield. A suggestion is to look for more densely searched combinations of keywords that would reflect your site, and optimize for those.

Hey, best of luck! Beat those spammers.

[brian.mark]

Originally Posted by jawn_tech

Wordtracker itself has a free demo you can try (wordtracker.com), which is based on MSN search results.

Oops.

Originally Posted by wordtracker.com

Taken from all Dogpile & Metacrawler queries over the last 110 days.

Not MSN, but some even smaller players. That's why the numbers are much lower than anyone expects. It still has "relative" value for comparing terms to each other, though.

Brian.

[jawn_tech]

There's no oops. When you take the trial, it says MSN everywhere. Can't miss it.

Originally Posted by Wordtracker in Step 4 of free trial

We will now compare each of these keywords with MSN, a major search engine. In the full subscription you may access all major engines.

They tell you this after you check the keywords, click on the words to put them in a "basket", and proceed through each step until they give you the final comparative results at the end. In step 4 (the end), it reads the above, that it compares the keywords with MSN.

[Steve W]

Thanks guys, great feedback.
Cheers
Steve

[brian.mark]

The paid stuff says exactly what I had posted. That's really misleading. I see nowhere that I can choose an engine, other than for keyword popularity where it just tells me # of results in each engine for the phrase (gee, I can find that myself). The number of searches for a phrase doesn't give that option and gives the text I quoted above about Dogpile and Metacrawler.

Maybe I need to cancel our paid subscription and get a trial so I can get more useful data.

Brian.

[jawn_tech]

That's really misleading.

I hear ya. It could be they're not really using MSN in the trial data (and the text on that page is out of date, very possible), or the paid version isn't as good as what they claim. I had the paid version before but haven't needed it in a while, so I'm not able to read what they're saying about it these days. Based on what you're saying though, it does seem something is fishy somewhere on the site. Ah well, the point is, it's a good tool -- I don't know of others quite like it to compare it with, so at least it's a start for our fellow poster Steve. :)

Maybe I need to cancel our paid subscription and get a trial so I can get more useful data.

I have the trial bookmarked, and it never expires so if you ever want to test compare trial / paid results and see what the data shows, let me know what you want to look up and I'll check it out on the trial for you.

[Steve W]

Thanks for the links guys, I tried both and found them very useful.

CTABUK has accepted my site under his wing for some SEO in the marketing forum, so I'm waiting to read his report before I change anything, but great tools nonetheless - at last I have some data on which to judge keyword selection!

Cheers
Steve

[lastcraft]

Hi...

Originally Posted by brian.mark

That's really misleading. I see nowhere that I can choose an engine, other than for keyword popularity where it just tells me # of results in each engine for the phrase (gee, I can find that myself).

Sadly the reason for this is much more mundane than any attempt to deceive. It's simply bad wording from the very early days of Wordtracker. The counts (the demand data) is from MetaCrawlers, not MSN, and we have always tried to be as open as possible about this.

This misconception has been noted at our end. We are working to overhaul the entire web site over the coming year. Hopefully this and other glitches will gradually be ironed out. My apologies for any confusion.

In the trial the competition search is limited to MSN, and yes, it does just return page counts. Although not useful in itself, it does give a way to quickly rank search terms at a glance. Wordtracker is in part a brainstorming tool. We expect you to combine the results with other systems to create the maximum value for your clients.

Regarding DigitalPoint being down on Friday until Monday, this was a purely technical problem caused by a mismatch in messaging tools.

We have been carrying out extensive infrastructure work of late to speed up the system and fix bugs. A side effect of this is that some of the protocols have become more strict. After a frantic piece of detective work we were able to roll out an API patch at our end (mid monday our time) which immediately bought the site back to life. There shouldn't be any further problems.

yours, Marcus

[brian.mark]

Originally Posted by lastcraft

Hi...

Sadly the reason for this is much more mundane than any attempt to deceive. It's simply bad wording from the very early days of Wordtracker. The counts (the demand data) is from MetaCrawlers, not MSN, and we have always tried to be as open as possible about this.

This misconception has been noted at our end. We are working to overhaul the entire web site over the coming year. Hopefully this and other glitches will gradually be ironed out. My apologies for any confusion.

In the trial the competition search is limited to MSN, and yes, it does just return page counts. Although not useful in itself, it does give a way to quickly rank search terms at a glance. Wordtracker is in part a brainstorming tool. We expect you to combine the results with other systems to create the maximum value for your clients.

Regarding DigitalPoint being down on Friday until Monday, this was a purely technical problem caused by a mismatch in messaging tools.

We have been carrying out extensive infrastructure work of late to speed up the system and fix bugs. A side effect of this is that some of the protocols have become more strict. After a frantic piece of detective work we were able to roll out an API patch at our end (mid monday our time) which immediately bought the site back to life. There shouldn't be any further problems.

yours, Marcus

Thanks for the insight and clarification, Marcus. You're obviously watching what people say about WordTracker very closely, and that ranks you very well in my book.

Brian.