WMW Las Vegas Organic Site Reviews Panel

On this pannel sites are reviewed for what they could do to improve their SEO.

ArtInternationalWholesale.com

  • use specific page titles on deep pages

  • Tim Mayer recommends optimizing for image search since it has lots of traffic and few people optimize for it. Use proper file names, alt tags, and link at the images.
  • duplicate content issues (individual product pages are so similar)
  • Matt says they need to look harder at link quality
  • has the site duplicated on the .co.uk

OnlineHighway or InformationHighway...something like that...I so could not see the URL

  • 50,000 to 5,000 visitors per day on update Allegra

  • using popunders is just as evil as popups
  • unsure purpose of site by looking at a page
  • used to have multiple location based URLs...301ed to one central domain. Matt Cutts recommended that.
  • Baked Jake said it can take 2 weeks to 6 months for 301s to take effect

TicketsToGo.com

  • TicketsToGo seems penalized in Google since October 2004

  • also created TicketsToGo.net because
  • duplicate content issues
  • Jake recommends starting from the bottom up. Building links into some of the subject specific pages and then working your way up.
  • target Geo specific concerts
  • Matt Cutts said "tell me about your backlinks" ... uber spammy reciprocal linking campaign. said good news is no manual spam penalty, but few of the low quality links this site has are doing it any good.

BargainTravel.com

  • Tim Mayer asked what is actually unique about your domain?

  • Yahoo! looks to ensure that with travel that the travel box is owned by the domain, not an affiliate form. Would not recommend submitting to Yahoo! paid inclusion
  • Matt pointed out bad cross industry linking between his own site (like mortgage and credit sites), but said there were some good links
  • Tim recommends making the site more unique from page to page and cleaning up the navigation links. He thinks the site navigation being at the footer and the page content existing primarily of wildcard replace duplicate content makes him think the local pages are for search bots instead of users
  • not only link to related pages about immunization, etc., but also create tables of the locatin based related information, etc.

MicroMatic.com

  • home page title nice

  • site looks good
  • individual product pages have good data
    Matt Cutts calls some of their paid backlinks "painfully obvious" to most any search engine. Matt said those links are not hurting them, but they are not helping in Google.

  • could probably be rather easy for a site like that to get many links from beer hobbyist sites

LendingTree.com

  • question about looking at their sitewide links to IACI partner network

  • instead of looking to rank for mortgage Matt recommends looking for 20 year mortgage loan, etc.
  • Jake recommends geo targeted pages
  • Matt recommends maybe adding more text, but they are already looking at ROI testing and that is why there is limited text
  • internal links can help reinforce topics
  • Matt said their cross network linking seems pretty organic / not with intent to spam. Note that in Google's spam review guidelines that IACI's travel sites were ones that were whitelisted examples for remote quality search raters

  • mortgage calculator link on LendingTree built for a manipulation test on Google...that was the reasoning the guy said and Matt Cutts made a funny face
  • Matt Cutts said the partner links section on IACI properties as a technique do not work in Google.
  • Matt said the goal of engines is to detect and count editorial quality votes.
Published: November 16, 2005 by Aaron Wall in conferences

Comments

December 10, 2005 - 2:18am

Aaron - Second site above is "OnlineHighways.com" or OHWY.com. You've done a nice job here with the recap.

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