Got this from a SEO company i hired - opinions please

[deadgoodundies]

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I hired a SEO company called Koded several months ago but unforutnatley even though they were highly recommended even they weren't able to get us a decent ranking on google (fair play to them i know they did try)

On and off they do keep in touch with me as they are just as perplexed on why nothing worked.
They just sent me this email this morning with some info, so if anyone has any opinions on what they state in it let me know, does it make sense what they are saying about the awin link or is it not possible.

Hi Adam,

Hope you're well.

I am fairly certain that the problem with justhom not showing in google is because of the affiliate window tracking urls, e.g.
www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=1195

We're having a similar issue with another client and noticed the afiliate window tracking URL's. It was a real fluke finding this out, nothing is being mentioned about affiliuate window in any of the newsgroups/forums

The Af link has been deactivated now but it used to contain a 302 redirect which allowed it to steal your ranking in the search engines. Google is yet to revisit this link and remove it from the index. This is why you're still not showing when you type 'justhom'

I've alerted googles bots and told them to go and look at the page but they could take a while. The fastest way of getting google to look at it would be to place a link to this URL from a high pagerank page. Google will soon go and have a look at it, realise it's a dud link and remove it.

Cheers

Matt

[anshul123]

The fastest way of getting google to look at it would be to place a link to this URL from a high pagerank page. Google will soon go and have a look at it, realise it's a dud link and remove it.

well is that has to be a case, what are SEO for then..

having a affiliate like can be a issue while submitting to directories but not while getting indexed... both are seperate things.

[THiNK]

I just did a search for 'justhom' on google and on the very first page every link was an affiliate type/cash back site link.

I'm sure a decent company would be able to get you on top rankings for 'justhom'.

302 redirects mean nothing - its 301's you need to watch out for.

[markzz]

well is that has to be a case, what are SEO for then..

having a affiliate like can be a issue while submitting to directories but not while getting indexed... both are seperate things.

i think he recommended a high PR site because they tend to get crawled more often.

[cyberbird1]

This is a fairly common occurrence and it is due to Googles duplicate page handling.

Google will list only one url and chooses the one with the best reputation. This is usually the page that has the highest PR.

Matt's instructions on what you can do are correct, but you don't know how long it will take to resolve. Another way would be to ask Affiliate Window to point their link to a page that tells Google not to index the page (meta name robots with content 'noindex' or use robots.txt), then instruct Google to remove the page by filling in their remove url form.

[D-Mac]

I am surprised that they haven't placed 'justhom' between the <TITLE> tags. True, it shouldn't be necessary as it is your domain name, but then again, you do have a PR showing as 0.

You may want to read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/302_Google_Jacking

[deadgoodundies]

They did originally put in justhom in the title tag BUT I took it out because i wanted the title to concentrate more on the words HOM and underwear (type in HOM underwear into google and you will see it is the same for our top competitor)

We did have a PR of 5 up until the update a couple of days ago, the update before that we were 0 (and then went to 5) and then back down to 0 this time.

I'll speak to AW about getting that link removed

[deadgoodundies]

I just did a search for 'justhom' on google and on the very first page every link was an affiliate type/cash back site link.

I'm sure a decent company would be able to get you on top rankings for 'justhom'.

302 redirects mean nothing - its 301's you need to watch out for.

I went with these guys as they came highly recommended (phoned other companies that had used them) and were featured several times in .net magazine but as time went on things just got worse with google.

[ash]

I can't believe they hav'nt got you no.1 for justhom.

One problem you may have is it appears that your site is hosted in the USA and with a .com domain name this is bad news for good rankings on Google.com.

Try moving to a UK host or set up www.justhom.co.uk as a basic optimised landing page and host it on your US server.

[deadgoodundies]

No we are hosted in the uk (have a dedicated server with www.donhost.co.uk).

I'll set up the .co.uk on a different server and see if I can get some people to link to it.

[Nosmo_King]

There's something radically wrong here. I'd be inclined to ask exactly what SEO was carried out. Looks like a flag has gone up at Google for some reason.

If too much was done to quickly... that can have a bad effect.

[Ste]

I agree with that, it looks like your domain has some sort of penalty attached to it, like mine has!

I was in the top three for that, even though I never targeted it but now have dropped down quite a few pages. This has happened across the whole shopping portal. This happened on the last round of updates about 2 weeks ago.

There is no reason why you should not be number 1 with that search term, its not exactly a popular search term with only 48K of results returned. In fact, if you have the domain name, a few decent key terms you should get to the top spot without any SEO at all!

Just done a quick check and my site is higher than yours, and I have a definite penalty attached.

[Elaine]

Just done a site:www.justhom.com and everyone of the pages have gone supplemental - 2 reasons I know of are -

there's some sort of redirect going on which is simply going round in a loop - happened to my daughter in law

or, duplicate pages - which happens to me when I rename a page (I use Dreamweaver) and forget -doh!! - to remove the original from the host server.

there are probably other reasons - but I'd get your SEO company to investigate this - you might, also be able to get GG to comment on this - they did introduce a service where they did tell some webmasters when sites had breached the guide lines.

[deadgoodundies]

There's something radically wrong here. I'd be inclined to ask exactly what SEO was carried out. Looks like a flag has gone up at Google for some reason.

If too much was done to quickly... that can have a bad effect.

We might of originally had a penalty because we had a little bit of hidden text (hidden using CSS) as the site is table based and I wanted to push some of the content up the page in the code, but as soon as that was pointed out to us we removed it.

From what I know most of the cash we spent with the SEO people was spent on link building and there was a few tweaks to copy to make it more keyword rich and the same with page titles so that they were more targetted other than that im not sure what else they did.

[deadgoodundies]

I agree with that, it looks like your domain has some sort of penalty attached to it, like mine has!

I was in the top three for that, even though I never targeted it but now have dropped down quite a few pages. This has happened across the whole shopping portal. This happened on the last round of updates about 2 weeks ago.

There is no reason why you should not be number 1 with that search term, its not exactly a popular search term with only 48K of results returned. In fact, if you have the domain name, a few decent key terms you should get to the top spot without any SEO at all!

Just done a quick check and my site is higher than yours, and I have a definite penalty attached.

To be honest im not overly bothered about it because i always spend more time trying to work google out than I should and we all know time = money and on the good side if we perfom badly organically then it means our affiliates have a better chance of getting their sites above us

Just when I do get emails like this from the SEO company that we used to hire its interesting just to find out a bit more about it.