Question: A client of mine wanted to target high traffic terms in his industry. His industry was not very competitive, and some of the target terms were competing trademarks. We rank top 5 for them in Google, and now legal troubles are occurring. We removed all references to the competing trademark on our site, but still have some rogue inbound links that we can't get removed that have the anchor text which targets the competing mark. What should we do?

Answer: There are four options which can help get you out of this situation.

Work With the Competition

If you have a nepotistic relationship with the competitor and recommend them then perhaps you can both be strengthened as category leaders.

Is the Lawsuit Cheap Marketing?

Anything involving Google and search is still a ripe field for media exposure. If you think your chances of winning are good enough, and the potential return is much larger than the risk of losing consider letting them sue you. It is probably not your fault that Google ranked you, but also seek legal advice outside of reading this post... I am not a lawyer.

Tank Your Rankings for that Keyword

If the links point at a page other than the homepage, consider removing the URL from your site, and then use the Google URL removal tool when the 404 error shows.

If you bought those links cash usually works to help remove them. Use their on site contact information and the email in their whois. Call the number in the whois data. Pay them to take down the links.

Improve the Rankings of Competing Pages

The tips offered in my search engine reputation management post work here as well. Follow the tips in that post to help make other competing pages rank better.

You can also work on improving the rankings of other competing pages while lowering your rankings. Feel free to push a couple strong pages if you are just trying to end the confrontation, but if you feel they are dirty you may also want to help surface some ugly news that was ranking on page 3. Do that and they may care less about your rankings, and shift their focus to those other sites.

SEO Question: My site is focused on a small niche and I can't find any related keywords to write content about. How do I optimize my content? What should I do?

Answer: Track what you are ranking for and look for meaningful patterns and descriptive related keywords in that data.

If few people are searching for something, but you are in a growing field, then that might be great market timing which helps makes you a market leader. Make sure you create things like an industry glossary, and actively participate in communities related to your topic so you have top of mind awareness to people in related fields. Research why people are linking at competitors, and what is missing in the marketplace.

If you are already in an established field, then use keyword tools to look for broader keywords or parallel keywords. Observe what descriptive modifiers people are using for higher volume keywords. The odds are pretty good people will use those same type of modifiers when searching for your topic. You can also use this cast a wider net concept by bidding for related broader keywords on AdWords and track the referrals.

SEO Question: Some prospective customers have offered to pay me on a performance basis. Should I consider providing search engine marketing services for these types of clients?

Answer: There are many ways to structure these sorts of deals, but generally I would probably avoid most of the offers because a lack of willingness to pay until results are achieved is often an indication of a lack of trust.

Trust and Toxic Customers:

If a customer does not trust you enough to pay you until after you show results they may not trust you to access their site or implement your suggested changes. This lack of willingness to consider optimization elements away from search is the single common problem associated with most toxic customers.

It is easier to push your own good idea than to push a bad idea owned by a person who is rigid and hard to work with.

Selling All Traffic as PPC:

If they will not give you access to the site you can still give suggestions that you hope they will implement, and you can still build links. Selling traffic as PPC minimizes the upfront commitment on both sides, and allows the SEO to still get paid even if their site can't convert. These deals can be structured in many flexible ways:

• set minimum and / or maximum spend caps

• set contract term length and opt out clauses
• set price as being flat rate per click, or allow both partners to adjust rates when it makes sense
• do not charge for brand related searches
• specify what traffic sources are valid (ie: pay for Google searches and traffic from other engines, but do not pay heavily for a Digg homepage story)

As an SEO, selling traffic on a PPC basis protects you from conversion errors on their site, and may make them more likely to listen to your conversion advice. A good SEO should be able to sell traffic for less than comparable PPC traffic.

If you set your price point high enough you can start off by selling them relevant PPC traffic and then easing off the PPC spend as your organic optimization gains traction. Some SEO companies may set up third party sites to drive traffic, which protect them if a client decides to cut their budget.

I believe Barry Lloyd was one of the first to sell SEO services on a per click basis, but I believe he has since moved on to selling PPC management software.

Pay Per Ranking:

Some clients think they need a few certain trophy phrases even if that is not the case. Some deals with a single trophy phrase or wide related keyword nets can also be sold on a pay per ranking deal, with so much being paid for ranking in different engines for different keyword phrases. Make sure both parties have the same idea as to what the goals are and how long a page must rank to receive payment, and when the payments are due.

Affiliate Websites:

If a merchant reveals an appealing vertical, but does not want to pay enough to make it worth your time, consider setting up an affiliate website marketing related offers. This allows you to chose whatever affiliate programs pay the most, while ensuring you get paid recurring revenues even while you are not actively promoting your site.

Sites Worth Partnering on a Pay for Performance Basis:

• Related Sites: If you already have a related site that can drive significant traffic a partnership makes sense, but probably as an affiliate rather than an SEO. But if you help them on their site it should be easy to provide value if you already know their site well.

• Large Brands: If you see structural errors that are holding back large brands AND they are willing to act on your advice they may see significant upside so will the SEO, but most large brands will be adverse to these type of deals.
• Small niche players: (perhaps even local niche sites) that take limited time to work on are also nice to work with, but be careful not to do too many projects like these or they can weigh you down during shake ups. Algorithmic shake ups are periods of opportunity if you have free time to roam, but may be periods of hurt if you have too many clients.

Sites Not Worth Partnering On:

• New Sites in Competitive Fields: If you have to go through all the work to build up a new site you are probably better off building up your own site than building up someone else's site from scratch. The one time these types of deals make sense is if you really believe in the upside potential of an idea and can get an early equity stake.

• Thin Content Sites: If their site is already doing exceptionally well, but has serious issues and is just waiting to get nuked then they may blame you for the fault that was just waiting to happen. Stick clear of thin content sites and sites that are designed more for bots than for humans.

Question: I recently purchased a website at mydomain.somecompany.com as a store to sell somecompany.com's products and was wondering if the site had any value, and how I could do SEO on the site if I couldn't change the content?

Answer: Many companies sell the right to resell their products online, but most of them that require you to use their domain or subdomain for your stores are probably selling junk. Truth be told, I have got similar questions from other people who told me that customer support at some of these firms charged for site customization, and even started off many question sequences with how much room is left on your credit card.

The idea of paying for the ability to sell someone else's stuff online is a bit absurd. Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo! and thousands of other sites all have affiliate programs. Some of the better opportunities with product catalogs also have fairly open API programs that make it easy to integrate their data into your site.

There are many problems with trying to market a site that you can not touch

• if you can't change a site then it is hard to create something remarkable that people would want to link at or share with friends

• if someone's marketing is so closed off that they don't even allow you to change anything then their marketing is probably missing out on many other great feedback points as well
• if you can't change a site then it is hard to get past duplicate content filters (good search engines will only want to rank 1 of these subdomains for any query which means that the rest of the affiliates are out of luck)
• It is important to build up your own doman name if you are serious about building something of value. If you are stuck on someone else's subdomain, then if they ever dislike you or if their business fails so does yours.

Ideas and pieces of software are recycled all the time. This site uses Apache, MySQL, and MovableType on the back end, but the front end design is unique and these words are things I typed. There is nothing wrong with using pieces, but if someone wants you to use their entire system then they are probably going to hold you back from your full potential.

People buy packaged solutions for the same reason they buy diet pills and exercise programs that work while they sleep:

Why do you think there are so many diet pill, fitness equipment, workout 10 minutes a day, crap commercials selling billions of dollars worth of solutions that don't work? The reason is people want to believe they work, they are unwilling to do the things actually required to successfully loose weight and be in shape (diet AND excersize regularly at least 30mins a day)

So instead, they buy the marketing because they'd rather lie to themselves and believe a pill / fancy ab equipment and 10 minutes will work.

Instead of starting from some boxed in, closed off opportunity someone else offers you, I think you would be better off to start with something you are interested in and go from there. It costs under $200 a year to register a domain name, host it, install Wordpress and start writing. And if $200 is more than you have then Blogger.com allows you to custom map a Blogger blog to a URL of your choice for only $10.

Blog Indexing Question: My ranking for my core keyword went up, but most of my site was recently put in Google's Supplemental Index, and I saw my income and traffic drop sharply. I have not built any links recently or made any changes to my site. How can I fix this and get my site top rankings again?

Answer: Google has been tightening down on their duplicate content filters. They have also been using PageRank scores to determine whether to index a page, if they should stick it in their supplemental results, and perhaps how strongly they should apply various filters (such as duplicate content filters).

Between slightly lower internal PageRank scores (minor issue) and increasingly aggressive duplicate content filters (major issue) and significant duplication from page to page on your site (major issue) much of your site is in Google's supplemental index.

Get Real Links:

Google's Matt Cutts stated:

In general, the best way I know of to move sites from more supplemental to normal is to get high-quality links (don’t bother to get low-quality links just for links’ sake).

Since you said you have not built links in a great deal of time and few people are talking about your site in the active parts of the web the key is to write more about things that people are talking about or would comment on. Great content helps build links. You have to keep blogging if you want to keep your mindshare up.

Others pointing more link equity at your site from external sources should help improve your PageRank scores. PageRank is a large part of what is used to determine if a page is of high enough quality to stay indexed (or put in the supplemental index), and how aggressively duplicate content filters (and other filters) should be applied against it.

If you get strong editorial deep links from other bloggers that should also help search engines crawl that portion of your site better to make up for any information architecture related issues that may be causing certain portions of your blog to be inadequately crawled.

Make Longer Posts:

Since your posts tend to only be a sentence or two long, most of the pages are rather similar to each other. You may want to post more text in each post, and turn comments on to have more unique text on each page.

Reduce Sitewide Repetitive Features:

You need to make your page titles and meta descriptions unique on each page.

You may also want to resort your code order to put unique content higher in the page content and have duplicated and sitewide template related issues occur later on.

Don't Link at Garbage:

Since your site has a rather low PageRank you may want to only list your blogroll on your home page instead of every page of your blog. Take out other parts of your site that heavily duplicate each other from page to page. Also consider removing your sitewide links to some of the unimportant pages on your site to flow more of your link equity throughout your site.

I would also recommend removing the tagging pages on your site as your site is already navigable via your categories, and the tags create low value noise pages that reduce your link equity distributed on the quality pages. I also think it is foolish to link at all those auto-generated Technorati pages...that wastes a lot of your link authority. I would also recommend not linking to some of the pages you don't want Google to index, such as those printer friendly pages. You may also want to block those printer friendly URLs using the Robots.txt protocol.

You have canonical URL issues which can be fixed. If www.mysite.com and mysite.com are showing different PageRank scores 301 redirect the less popular version of your URL to the more popular version.

You also have a few broken links on your site that could be fixed.

All these changes should facilitate better indexing of your blog posts.

Issues for Commercial Sites:

Many commercial sites (especially thin product database sites) also fall into the Google Supplemental index. The above examples all apply to those types of sites, but in addition you could consider the following

• add an editorial element to your site to improve your sitewide authority score

• enable customer feedback and reviews to get more unique content on your pages

Keep in mind that if you do not do any offline marketing or much marketing outside of search, your site is more prone to large swings from search related fluctuations than some other sites which have more brand equity and/or do other forms of marketing.