The 'Blackhat seo for e-commerce' thread

[ThopHayt]

I wanted to make a thread for those of us who also wear out black hats for use on e-commerce websites as well

There is a lot of chatter on these boards for other schemes, but very little talk geared specifically for e-commerce seo. So I wanted to make a thread where we could trade ideas, strategies, and stories on this specific topic.

So I'll start the ball off: A couple things that are general thought on doing seo for e-commerce is that you want to be a bit more conservative than with most "money sites" you might have. Most people I've talked to are VERY careful about the quality of links that point directly to their page. I personally have had a lot of success with using a high degree of VARIETY in my links, but I've heard of people who only like to point web2.0's.

So lets start with this question... how do you handle the links directly aimed at your e-commerce page. Are you one of the cautious ++quality only types or do you use a more aggressive style? And have any of you ever had any negitive experiences with G sandboxes etc while doing e-commerce seo?

Share! :hot_dog:

 

[ThopHayt]

Anybody??? If any of you have any experience doing seo for ecommerce pipe in!

 

[DustinX]

i used low quality links for a while and couldn't get past the bottom of the first page. used a high pr homepage link service and have focused on high pr blog comments. now i'm floating between 1-2 for my main two keys and #4-5 for a third one

 

[Dan Da Man]

I use autoblogs and blast the shit out of those. I also use tons of high PR blog comments and web 2.o sites. I think interlinking is huge. If you have hundreds of products, I like to interlink to category pages or other valuable pages

 

[ThopHayt]

I use autoblogs and blast the shit out of those. I also use tons of high PR blog comments and web 2.o sites. I think interlinking is huge. If you have hundreds of products, I like to interlink to category pages or other valuable pages

So you internally interlink your high pr pages to one another? More so than just the header navigation or are you actually slipping in little links?

 

[Dan Da Man]

So you internally interlink your high pr pages to one another? More so than just the header navigation or are you actually slipping in little links?

Pretty much whatever makes sense. Lets say category page is red shirts, I would slip in links on each product page like " check out more red shirts" or something like that. I have not tested it conversion wise but if you have hundreds of products then your getting a lot of links. You can kind of fool around with this and test to see what works best

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Good idea for this thread looking forward to some replies!

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

To me ecommerce is hard! Lots of competition with affiliate programs and thousands of high pr back links! I am working on getting backlinks myself through blog comments in related forums and blogs. I also am adding my link and coupon code on coupon code sites. Its slow going and I am very new so any good info is appreciated! There is a thread here about link pushing which is article submissions with your link in it. Sounds good in theory but I womder how google perceives your link in hundreds of non contextual blogs? If I could find a service that allows me to target my niche I would feel better!p

 

[ThopHayt]

To me ecommerce is hard! Lots of competition with affiliate programs and thousands of high pr back links! I am working on getting backlinks myself through blog comments in related forums and blogs. I also am adding my link and coupon code on coupon code sites. Its slow going and I am very new so any good info is appreciated! There is a thread here about link pushing which is article submissions with your link in it. Sounds good in theory but I womder how google perceives your link in hundreds of non contextual blogs? If I could find a service that allows me to target my niche I would feel better!p

Have you seen much of a jump in traffic or sales from using those coupon sites? Or are the people there just bottom feeders who will not turn into return customers?

 

[Dan Da Man]

To me ecommerce is hard! Lots of competition with affiliate programs and thousands of high pr back links! I am working on getting backlinks myself through blog comments in related forums and blogs. I also am adding my link and coupon code on coupon code sites. Its slow going and I am very new so any good info is appreciated! There is a thread here about link pushing which is article submissions with your link in it. Sounds good in theory but I womder how google perceives your link in hundreds of non contextual blogs? If I could find a service that allows me to target my niche I would feel better!p

Well it is hard because even you said your yourself, your a newbs. Jk, but there are so many factors that really go into an E commerce site. The niche you choose, the products you sell, etc.. I have two sites that are less then three months old and both are getting about 1,500 UVs a month. Not much but it is slowly growing and like anything good, it takes time and patience. E commerce is a longer process then CPA and adsense but the rewards are great! Find a niche where all the sites selling products are mom and pop stores. There are way too many niches and far not enough IMers

 

[mdsurf]

Well it is hard because even you said your yourself, your a newbs. Jk, but there are so many factors that really go into an E commerce site. The niche you choose, the products you sell, etc.. I have two sites that are less then three months old and both are getting about 1,500 UVs a month. Not much but it is slowly growing and like anything good, it takes time and patience. E commerce is a longer process then CPA and adsense but the rewards are great! Find a niche where all the sites selling products are mom and pop stores. There are way too many niches and far not enough IMers

1500 UV's a month, in just a few months nice! you guys must be makin some decent money

 

[phpbuilt]

I pretty much only do ecommerce. Most people dealing with ecommerce are getting boiler-plate stores with duplicate content product descriptions. I have a horrible time trying to rank these types of pages (and don't even try anymore).

I make blogs and create pages describing the products or categories, and then rank the blog. However, the ecommerce store converts sales a million times better than the blog. So once they are on my blog, my goal is to get them to the store ASAP. Just about any click they can make on the blog has around a 80% chance of getting them redirected to the ecommerce store.

I cloak the links through a redirect.php page which is off-limits to Google in the robots.txt, with nofollow links. (Google just drops internal nofollow links from their link graph, whereas you lose PR over external nofollow links -- so make sure you're nofollowing an internal link to preserve PR).

Ecommerce is great, typically it is harder to get visitors, but the visitors you do get convert for far more money than you get with general adsense type sites.

 

[subster]

I pretty much only do ecommerce. Most people dealing with ecommerce are getting boiler-plate stores with duplicate content product descriptions. I have a horrible time trying to rank these types of pages (and don't even try anymore).

I make blogs and create pages describing the products or categories, and then rank the blog. However, the ecommerce store converts sales a million times better than the blog. So once they are on my blog, my goal is to get them to the store ASAP. Just about any click they can make on the blog has around a 80% chance of getting them redirected to the ecommerce store.

I cloak the links through a redirect.php page which is off-limits to Google in the robots.txt, with nofollow links. (Google just drops internal nofollow links from their link graph, whereas you lose PR over external nofollow links -- so make sure you're nofollowing an internal link to preserve PR).

Ecommerce is great, typically it is harder to get visitors, but the visitors you do get convert for far more money than you get with general adsense type sites.

This is really a great adivce! I will definitely give that a try - Thanks!

 

[phpbuilt]

Oops posted in the wrong thread (deleting).

 

[Dan Da Man]

I pretty much only do ecommerce. Most people dealing with ecommerce are getting boiler-plate stores with duplicate content product descriptions. I have a horrible time trying to rank these types of pages (and don't even try anymore).

I make blogs and create pages describing the products or categories, and then rank the blog. However, the ecommerce store converts sales a million times better than the blog. So once they are on my blog, my goal is to get them to the store ASAP. Just about any click they can make on the blog has around a 80% chance of getting them redirected to the ecommerce store.

I cloak the links through a redirect.php page which is off-limits to Google in the robots.txt, with nofollow links. (Google just drops internal nofollow links from their link graph, whereas you lose PR over external nofollow links -- so make sure you're nofollowing an internal link to preserve PR).

Ecommerce is great, typically it is harder to get visitors, but the visitors you do get convert for far more money than you get with general adsense type sites.

\\

Question: So, you are trying to rank your blogs instead of your store because it is that much easier to rank a blog? Why is that so? Also, your internal links are no follow? Can you explain this a little better? Your blogs are still passing PR to your money site, or are you trying to not pass PR through your blogs?

 

[phpbuilt]

Question: So, you are trying to rank your blogs instead of your store because it is that much easier to rank a blog? Why is that so?

You can be penalized for duplicate content on your website. Even if that duplicate content is located in a completely different area of your website. That is what Panda is about -- the more poor quality pages on your site overall, the worse your good pages will rank.

Additionally, when you're dealing with a store that has many thousands of products, some of the descriptions on those products are going to be horrible. All of this bad content is affecting whatever good content you have on your site.

With a blog, you are 100% in control of your content. You can make it all unique and top-notch, high quality. You won't get any penalties from poor content on other parts of your site then. I disassociate the blog from the store, Google doesn't even know I have a separate ecommerce store, they see the buy-now and more info buttons but they're all internal nofollow redirected through blocked by robots.txt.

And then I have more no-follow links. The whole top half of my page are all links to the various categories of my store ... but they are all nofollow and redirected through redirect.php (so Google drops them all from their link graph). Again, the goal is to get them off my blog and onto the store asap.

Then, the remaining internal links I have within the blog itself are all do follow. My categories are do follow, my YARPP links to other related pages are do follow.

Your blogs are still passing PR to your money site, or are you trying to not pass PR through your blogs?

In regards to SEO, my blog IS the money site. I'm not passing any PR or links to the duplicate content stores provided by the company I'm representing.

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Good post, I too have created a blog but it is still new and not even showing on google for the keywords I targeted. I have to no follow those links like you said!

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Have you seen much of a jump in traffic or sales from using those coupon sites? Or are the people there just bottom feeders who will not turn into return customers?

I just started that method and it is more for links but no real traffic jump n the 2 days since but google already sees the link on the page.

 

[radeon011]

this metod is not for trafic ... i know it

 

[tgpycq]

I am also someone only doing e-commerce site. Well, thats because I manufacture what i sell on the e-commerce site. We've had that site for many years now and am lucky enough to have made money from the first day we started. Just went to some forums and introduced our site and the first sale came in. This was of course at a time where the niche was just starting to get noticed. But I started out without knowing shit about SEO and still managed to make money from it.

Started the site just to get some end user sales, in order to get the attention of businesses. The main aim was still to get wholesale orders, since we are a manufacturer. The website is now a very good income generator for both retail and wholesale orders. Of course, our customer service plays a big role as well. So remember, when you are first starting out, pay attention to your customer service. Not just on SEO. Word of mouth is important and can take precedence over other forms of promotion.

Started learning and applying SEO only early this year. Joined BHW and purchased almost anything and everything on the shelves that looked good. I would not recommend this at all to anyone else...LOL. But it was a good lesson for me to get acquainted with the many SEO & BH techniques. I also got first hand experience in seeing how various techniques performed. Of course, some common sense were included. I was definitely not gonna do something like 1 million SB & Xrummer blast to my site overnight and then waiting for results, while not doing anything else!

I must have bought like close to 30+ services and stuff from BHW. Most of the services I purchased did not do much. A lot of them were very much overpriced. Some had good service and some were from total asswipes! I guess I can now monetize from my experience by offering a Fiverr in exchange for my recommended BHW gigs....LOL.

With some trial and error, I eventually got smarter and more picky with what I do to my site. I now have a pretty good idea of what it takes to rank my site. I don't have even a hundred products so its not a complicated e-commerce site to rank. I just have a set of targeted KWs and decide my strategy for each one/group of them, based on various factors of the KW.

Its a good time for me to get acquainted with BH and SEO as my niche is getting insanely competitive now. The site is doing very well in terms of SERP. I have many Top 5s from 3k to 10k exact searches. I have several Top 10s from 10k to 50k searches. Many more that I am still working from getting them from Top 20 into the Top 10, which has searches up to 200K+. I expect to see results soon.

I have since started doing some of the linkbuilding myself. Purchased some good tools and am producing some pretty good results on my own. Am definitely not a full fledged SEO pro, so i'm still outsourcing when I need to. I see link Variety as being something important. When I check myself against competitors, I see myself having the least number of backlinks. The difference is huge but i still rank ahead of them. It turns out that their link variety is rather limited.

Next is to get my website design a major overhaul. The design is terribly outdated and outright pathetic at the moment so I imagine conversion to affected greatly. Got myself a highly recommended designer on BHW and should be completing the new design in 2 weeks (hopefully).

After being on BHW for a few months, I am now really itching to follow the crowd with CPA and PPC. Am in the process of getting some MNS done along with other stuff. Its not really about the money but about proving to myself that I can do it. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love $$$ and can't get enough of it! It just seems that in IM, money is the absolute yardstick in which success is measured upon so thats how I'm gonna measure how successful i get with this.