Advice for newbie

Hi everyone

I've been reading the forums for a wee while now, and I have some questions

Background. I am taking care of SEO/online marketing for a company with a high value product (average price is about 2k+) The product is not a commodity, but it is a competitive market.

In the past, the SEO strategy seems to have consisted of generating hundreds, maybe thousands of thin websites (blogspots etc), with links to what I conclude are buffer sites, which in turn link to our main site. Links are also from forum profiles. The person doing this earlier on was well versed in the dark arts. Me, not so much.

My question is this: Is this a risky strategy? I'm nervous that eventually Google will catch up with us, and we will get smacked down. The issue for me, is that given our website is the key (only) sales channel that I can't risk anything happening to it, because we can't just start up another site and keep selling.

Should we stick to pure white hat techniques?

Panda/Penguin did have some negative impact on our SERPS, but we are heading back up, and sales were not significantly impacted.

Any thoughts are appreciated!

thanks

You need to Focus on Good Content , High Authority Link building , Niche relevant Link builds ,Some diversification and drip feed of social signal..Social Signal is working very powerfully.. also you can check some thread in SEO section there ppl post the strategy after Latest Penguin Updates/.

You should follow the White hat SEO techniques and with this you can achieve results that last for a longer time. White hat SEO practice doesn?t need to be maintained through money as black hat techniques and it is a safe method and if you continue to follow this legal method , then there will be improvement in ranking of your website.

melanienash said:

I agree that you should focus on good content.Building niche related backlinks is also very important.

Click to expand...

You mean building my own sites, and backlinking, or getting 3rd party niches sites to link?

True that - black SEO got very risky. I would suggest you to switch you attention to on-page SEO also. Because you may have some good content, but it's worthless without a good page optimization. Find the right keywords, improve your site, and after that you'll be ready to work on the off-page SEO (by this I mean 'white SEO').

I use XRumer (blackhat) and I haven't been hit hard by Google. It's all about quality backlinks.

I'll keep digging around here and other forums, but at this stage there is too much to lose. The domain is the brand is the business. No domain means no business, means people are out of jobs

I'll be shiny white from now

If this is an "actual business" you will probably want to focus your efforts either on paid links or link outreach (ie reaching out to others in the same industry for links).

Quality before quantity bro. Better go white. Or go black and if you get slapped build a new site

In the past I've now discovered that the 'buffer' sites are not actually 2.0 sites . .they are EMD's
So spammy links pointing to EMD's pointing to the money site

Sounds like trouble around the corner?

How many links are pointing to the Web 2.0 sites? Might be a tiered approach the previous guy was using.

On the EMD buffer sites, do these only have OBL to your primary site, or is the diversity and links to other relevant sites?

The EMD's only have links to the primary (money) site
I'm not to sure how many links are pointing to the 2.0 sites. In fact from what i've seen the links are coming from 2.0's to the EMD's

In this case the 2.0s are blogspots and forum profiles etc

hope that makese sense

cheers

Also, I've just had a look in WMtools and it shows our search impressions are down 50% since Pengiun 4.

Is removal of the buffers a decent tactic here, to help recover

As well as this, I'll be doing a bunch of white hat stuff.

Doesn't work too effectively anymore in my opinion. You need to spend more time on backlinks that have quality content on the page (I'm not talking specifically quality content on your site, but also on the backlink page)