10 year+ old Forex site that got hammered on April 24th (what many seem to think was the Penguin B-day). Now looking for SEO firm to 1) begin taking corrective action in order to get rid of Penguin "penalty" and 2) provide valuable SEO services and value on an ongoing basis to our business. That was the summary. Now for the boring explanation. Sorry...
We are a small firm now looking for either a one time or ongoing SEO company or expert to work with. We are what is called in the Forex industry, an Introducing Broker, which basically means that we work with one or more licensed Forex brokerage firms where our clients open accounts and we get compensated for their trading volume. We also provide unique services to our clients and our unique content. Our site has been around since 2002.
In mid 2011, the site was moved completely to Wordpress CMS, a blog was added, and during the last 12 months, we have added Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ accounts.
Between 2002 and 2006, we had a link exchange page where we exchanged links with industry related websites (that page was no longer used and removed from the site's navigation at least 3 to 4 years ago).
Other than that, the only SEO efforts we have engaged in or paid for in the past took place for around 6 months in 2004-2005 when we hired an SEO firm from India who was writing articles to create back links, etc., and in September of 2011, we paid for a few fiverr link building gigs (which I don't recall were so "aggressive"), which we could provide details on if you need. Between February through April of this year, we also hired an SEO rep to build back links, after we saw that a lot of the sites in the SERPs that were outranking us just had a bunch of inorganic/irrelevant backlinks pointing to them. Good that did us!
In the past, we were not affected by Florida or Panda, but on April 24th, we were crushed by Penguin, basically disappearing for our most important money keywords like, "forex demo," "forex managed account," "introducing broker," etc., and losing considerable ranking (to page 2 or so) on other important, related keywords like, "forex introducing broker," "forex ib," "forex white label," etc.
Current Objective: bringing back our lost rankings for keywords associated with the services we provide. Obviously, the most important thing is to attack the likely culprits first, which are now reverberating across pro SEO forums, blogs, etc:
Get harmful (unnatural or inorganic) external links removed (we took the entire list from WMT and started emailing webmasters already and around 15 to 20% of the ones contacted so far have removed them) and clean up our link profile (which would probably require an anchor text/link study like Microsite Masters originally referred to on their post or the one Modesto Siotos of iCrossing did on this post) . We actually stopped sending out link removal requests around 2-3 weeks ago because without having the time or knowledge to run a link profile and pinpoint the "bad" links which should probably be removed, we were swimming in the dark. We also got a new subscription to Ahrefs, but it's been a daunting task trying to do all of these things while trying to run a business;
Tweak on-page factors such as, making the content sound more "natural" with some LSI, look at site structure elements like footer text links, blog category links, etc. that might be causing problems and to prevent future ones.
Whether this is a one time thing or ongoing depends on the effectiveness of the campaign. Let's just say that we don't have a very good taste in our mouths regarding SEO in the past, but it's also our fault for buying some cheap services.
The problem with an ongoing campaign is that since Google is obviously trying to combat a lot of the SEO strategies that worked before and many SEO firms recommended, we wouldn't want to do many of the things SEO "experts" used to focus on. It seems that now, one of the important things is to focus on social media, but it takes a lot of time. It also takes industry knowledge to write content, so most SEO firms I don't think could do that (but we can). In conclusion, an ongoing campaign would be considered if a valuable proposition was made.
We were in the process of releasing a unique 26-page, 12,000 word guide related to our industry right before this algo change went into effect. A second, industry specific guide was also in the works. We were also planning to issue some PRWeb press release associated with these guides, etc., as well as start using Press Releases on an ongoing basis, but all of that was placed on hold after Penguin.
Please let me know what you think about the above info and what you propose.
Yesterday, we signed up for SERPBook to track all the keywords we used to track with Traffic Travis in the past. For most of these keywords, we had always ranked on the 1st page of Google (for many, #1 and #2). We could also provide you with a link to this SERPBook data.
We have also contacted some SEO firms through SEMPO and are now beginning to receive some proposals. We also know that there's a lot of talent in Black Hat World, so would not mind to work with one of you guys if the proposal is sound. Even though we are a small firm, we recognize the importance of coming out of this penalty/filter and working with a reputable group on an ongoing basis. Thus, we can both grow together.
We are not looking for "tricks" or "spammy" solutions, but nowadays it is difficult to differentiate whether something is black, grey or white when it comes to SEO anyway.
Sorry for the long explanation and I look forward to your proposal and feedback.
We are a small firm now looking for either a one time or ongoing SEO company or expert to work with. We are what is called in the Forex industry, an Introducing Broker, which basically means that we work with one or more licensed Forex brokerage firms where our clients open accounts and we get compensated for their trading volume. We also provide unique services to our clients and our unique content. Our site has been around since 2002.
In mid 2011, the site was moved completely to Wordpress CMS, a blog was added, and during the last 12 months, we have added Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ accounts.
Between 2002 and 2006, we had a link exchange page where we exchanged links with industry related websites (that page was no longer used and removed from the site's navigation at least 3 to 4 years ago).
Other than that, the only SEO efforts we have engaged in or paid for in the past took place for around 6 months in 2004-2005 when we hired an SEO firm from India who was writing articles to create back links, etc., and in September of 2011, we paid for a few fiverr link building gigs (which I don't recall were so "aggressive"), which we could provide details on if you need. Between February through April of this year, we also hired an SEO rep to build back links, after we saw that a lot of the sites in the SERPs that were outranking us just had a bunch of inorganic/irrelevant backlinks pointing to them. Good that did us!
In the past, we were not affected by Florida or Panda, but on April 24th, we were crushed by Penguin, basically disappearing for our most important money keywords like, "forex demo," "forex managed account," "introducing broker," etc., and losing considerable ranking (to page 2 or so) on other important, related keywords like, "forex introducing broker," "forex ib," "forex white label," etc.
Current Objective: bringing back our lost rankings for keywords associated with the services we provide. Obviously, the most important thing is to attack the likely culprits first, which are now reverberating across pro SEO forums, blogs, etc:
Get harmful (unnatural or inorganic) external links removed (we took the entire list from WMT and started emailing webmasters already and around 15 to 20% of the ones contacted so far have removed them) and clean up our link profile (which would probably require an anchor text/link study like Microsite Masters originally referred to on their post or the one Modesto Siotos of iCrossing did on this post) . We actually stopped sending out link removal requests around 2-3 weeks ago because without having the time or knowledge to run a link profile and pinpoint the "bad" links which should probably be removed, we were swimming in the dark. We also got a new subscription to Ahrefs, but it's been a daunting task trying to do all of these things while trying to run a business;
Tweak on-page factors such as, making the content sound more "natural" with some LSI, look at site structure elements like footer text links, blog category links, etc. that might be causing problems and to prevent future ones.
Whether this is a one time thing or ongoing depends on the effectiveness of the campaign. Let's just say that we don't have a very good taste in our mouths regarding SEO in the past, but it's also our fault for buying some cheap services.
The problem with an ongoing campaign is that since Google is obviously trying to combat a lot of the SEO strategies that worked before and many SEO firms recommended, we wouldn't want to do many of the things SEO "experts" used to focus on. It seems that now, one of the important things is to focus on social media, but it takes a lot of time. It also takes industry knowledge to write content, so most SEO firms I don't think could do that (but we can). In conclusion, an ongoing campaign would be considered if a valuable proposition was made.
We were in the process of releasing a unique 26-page, 12,000 word guide related to our industry right before this algo change went into effect. A second, industry specific guide was also in the works. We were also planning to issue some PRWeb press release associated with these guides, etc., as well as start using Press Releases on an ongoing basis, but all of that was placed on hold after Penguin.
Please let me know what you think about the above info and what you propose.
Yesterday, we signed up for SERPBook to track all the keywords we used to track with Traffic Travis in the past. For most of these keywords, we had always ranked on the 1st page of Google (for many, #1 and #2). We could also provide you with a link to this SERPBook data.
We have also contacted some SEO firms through SEMPO and are now beginning to receive some proposals. We also know that there's a lot of talent in Black Hat World, so would not mind to work with one of you guys if the proposal is sound. Even though we are a small firm, we recognize the importance of coming out of this penalty/filter and working with a reputable group on an ongoing basis. Thus, we can both grow together.
We are not looking for "tricks" or "spammy" solutions, but nowadays it is difficult to differentiate whether something is black, grey or white when it comes to SEO anyway.
Sorry for the long explanation and I look forward to your proposal and feedback.
