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Doesn't it annoy you when you spend a lot of time and hard work optimising pages on your website that you have put your heart and soul into only to have some crappy website come along and knock you off the top spot. Wikihow.com is the website I am referring to. It's not as if the page in question has been optimised that well. There isn't even a meaningful description, yet they are still able to get themselves to the top.
#frustrating
  • Profile picture of the author robert5000
    Pagerank 7 means something for you?
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by Oscarfishlover View Post

    Doesn't it annoy you when you spend a lot of time and hard work optimising pages on your website that you have put your heart and soul into only to have some crappy website come along and knock you off the top spot. Wikihow.com is the website I am referring to. It's not as if the page in question has been optimised that well. There isn't even a meaningful description, yet they are still able to get themselves to the top.
    You don't need a meta description to rank a page.

    If your keyword phrase includes the word how, wikihow will eventually be all over it like a spider monkey.
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    • Profile picture of the author TheTrafficOutlet
      wikihow has a strong pagerank so keep getting good backlinks.
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      • Profile picture of the author Oscarfishlover
        I'm not disputing the fact that a website like this is able to obtain the back links they do, Wikipedia is exactly the same. All I'm saying is that you can have a website like this that often contains dubious information that completely wipes out websites that have much better content.

        Because Google especially are trying to make it harder for you to rank highly, we have got to put more effort into our websites. When you look at one of these wiki how sites, it's almost as if no effort has really gone into the article, it's just because they have always back links they are able to rank highly. So those of us who have smaller sites have to work that much harder to compete with these sites that seem to get it easy. A good example was one of my pages, I spent a lot of time writing the article covering everything people needed to know, then a wiki how article came along with the very basic information and managed to gain top spot. I'm now at number nine while I was at number one. Get good job I enjoy the challenge

        What I hate about this is that people are able to edit the content. So somebody could write a great article, if somebody doesn't like what they written they can come along and edit it. I've looked at some of the articles on wiki how and this absolutely nothing special about them whatsoever, in fact many of them are very basic and don't give you some relative information. They are almost like one of these shops that sell absolutely everything and can out price everyone else, but they don't particularly specialise in anyone given product. I just hope people can see through it and not think that they have all the answers just because they are number one.
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        • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
          Originally Posted by Oscarfishlover View Post

          Because Google especially are trying to make it harder for you to rank highly, we have got to put more effort into our websites.
          Let me fix that for you: it's competition that's trying to make it harder for you to rank highly. It seems to me that Google is just trying to keep the search relevant and good enough. If your page doesn't happen to get the top spot it doesn't mean that there's a conspiracy somewhere.
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          • Profile picture of the author Oscarfishlover
            Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

            Let me fix that for you: it's competition that's trying to make it harder for you to rank highly. It seems to me that Google is just trying to keep the search relevant and good enough. If your page doesn't happen to get the top spot it doesn't mean that there's a conspiracy somewhere.
            It does puzzle me as to why one day a page that has been at number one for at least two years and gets hundreds of hits each day can suddenly dropped right down to number nine position. I simply don't understand why this can happen.

            It's definitely true what they say about getting your site ranks in the first three positions. It's all very well sitting on the last position on Google, but it doesn't get you an awful lot of hits. I would say that 90% of people will probably choose the first couple of results they find.
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  • Profile picture of the author SlfMastery
    Originally Posted by Oscarfishlover View Post

    Doesn't it annoy you when you spend a lot of time and hard work optimising pages on your website that you have put your heart and soul into only to have some crappy website come along and knock you off the top spot. Wikihow.com is the website I am referring to. It's not as if the page in question has been optimised that well. There isn't even a meaningful description, yet they are still able to get themselves to the top.
    Just got done watching one of Alex Becker's webinar and he made just this point...Google LOVES these MASSIVE sites with all the interlinking and pages, i.e. WikiPedia, Amazon, etc. And, these sites rank withOUT back linking. For $297/mo or $697/month they (sourcelandlord.com) will build and rank you a bunch of pages that you can rent out to local clients.

    -Charlie
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    • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
      Originally Posted by SlfMastery View Post

      . For $297/mo or $697/month they (sourcelandlord.com) will build and rank you a bunch of pages that you can rent out to local clients.

      -Charlie
      Sounds like another dreadful idea to separate people from their money. The fact that huge sites like wikihow, answers etc rank does not mean if you generate ton loads of crap you will have the same success
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  • Profile picture of the author malakadabra
    This is hard to understand, but i guess is just lucky and some link building work.
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  • Profile picture of the author blackli0n
    First, you should share YOUR link if you want advice about what you can do. I've come to get annoyed by these giant link sites as well like WikiHow that offer only generate re-written information. But they're aren't that hard to beat.

    Instead of spending all your time to "optimize" and "seo" your website, you really only need to create more and more quality content. After a while you'll take back the rankings for sure. Don't worry so much about the keywords for now. Create and useful related content that fit well with your keyword theme/niche and stick to it for some time. If you have less than 20 pages on your website that are dedicated to the keyword, I would definitely say it's hard for you to beat somebody like Wikihow.
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    • Profile picture of the author Oscarfishlover
      You
      Originally Posted by blackli0n View Post

      First, you should share YOUR link if you want advice about what you can do. I've come to get annoyed by these giant link sites as well like WikiHow that offer only generate re-written information. But they're aren't that hard to beat.

      Instead of spending all your time to "optimize" and "seo" your website, you really only need to create more and more quality content. After a while you'll take back the rankings for sure. Don't worry so much about the keywords for now. Create and useful related content that fit well with your keyword theme/niche and stick to it for some time. If you have less than 20 pages on your website that are dedicated to the keyword, I would definitely say it's hard for you to beat somebody like Wikihow.
      I tend not to include my link willy-nilly in case people think I'm spamming. However, this was the page I was talking about. This page in particular has a PR2, I noticed the wiki how didn't have any PR on that particular page. I suppose it's the main site that carries the weight?

      On this particular page, the keywords so I decided to keep the title fairly short. I know the description doesn't carry much weight, but I rewritten that several times, will probably dear together at some stage. I've also rearrange some of the text of the page, I gave whether that makes any difference I really don't know. Just wanted to get some of the keywords near the top
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      • Profile picture of the author robert5000
        The page is very slow to load.
        Moreover, the title is different from the name of the url and the h1 tag.
        This generates a confusion to Google.

        And, most important:

        Don't try to compete with wikihow, they buy hundreds of high quality backlinks with the anchor text "how".

        Google is not semantic, for the same topic an article written by an international scientist on a website with pagerank1 will be not ever read, an article written by a monkey reviewed by a seo on pagerank 7 will be in the first positions.

        Forget all the stupid theories about quality content and keep attention on:

        HIGH QUALITY BACKLINK
        HIGH QUALITY BACKLINK
        HIGH QUALITY BACKLINK
        HIGH QUALITY BACKLINK
        HIGH QUALITY BACKLINK
        HIGH QUALITY BACKLINK
        HIGH QUALITY BACKLINK
        HIGH QUALITY BACKLINK

        Did i forget to say quality backlink?
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    • Profile picture of the author AffiliatingAlan
      Originally Posted by blackli0n View Post

      First, you should share YOUR link if you want advice about what you can do. I've come to get annoyed by these giant link sites as well like WikiHow that offer only generate re-written information. But they're aren't that hard to beat.

      Instead of spending all your time to "optimize" and "seo" your website, you really only need to create more and more quality content. After a while you'll take back the rankings for sure. Don't worry so much about the keywords for now. Create and useful related content that fit well with your keyword theme/niche and stick to it for some time. If you have less than 20 pages on your website that are dedicated to the keyword, I would definitely say it's hard for you to beat somebody like Wikihow.
      This is nonsense white hat talk.
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  • Profile picture of the author jackrice
    continued link building is the key
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  • Profile picture of the author koubain
    if you wanna beat the wikihow you must build a huge PBN with high PR >6
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  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    Search results are bit of a beauty contest. Google may rank the other articles above yours for whatever reason, but one of their factors is relevancy. As far as I know the clicks from search results have an effect. If users are clicking and thus "liking" the other articles more, they may get better positions than yours.

    If this is cycling thing is typically a new owner's problem, you might want to have "new" or "beginner" in the title, as many of your competitors do. I've got no idea what "oscars" (in the meta text) are, which might make me prefer the other links. (Don't know jack about aquariums.)

    One of your competitors is a YouTube video. That's something Google will often do, add one video among the other results and quite high on the page.

    I'd format the article a bit differently. Split the longest chapters of text to more digestible pieces. Maybe add some more pictures to the page.

    Server is slow, which is something you might want to look into.
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    • Profile picture of the author ScrooG
      I agree with the last couple of threads.

      1) Get high pr backlinks - that's way more important than content, to get ranked. Content is good for getting people to actually spend time on your site and share it, but you've got to get them to your pages first and that takes either backlinks or advertising. But it's backlinks that will get you traffic for long term without $.

      2) I agree with the person that said your site title and home page do not match your keywords. Google thinks that the important keyword is "oscarfish" due to your title, I would say. If "oscarfish" is not your main keyword then change the title, at least put your keywords in the first H1 title, and in the first line of that paragraph, and a few more times on the page.

      Otherwise, make a different page for your keywords and use that title and that H1 tag on that page, and then get high pr backlinks for that page.

      As to the site loading slow, it does not load too slowly for me at this time. Personally I don't think Google puts that much emphasis on the time it takes to load as long as it's not TOO long. Your site pages loaded for me in under 2 seconds each so I'd say that's not so bad. I have had sites on p1 of google that were taking 4-5 seconds to load.

      So get backlinks and make sure you use your keywords in your H1 title, H2 and H3, first line and last line of the page, then get high pr backlinks to the page, some with the keywords as anchor text, but not all. Some "raw" url backlinks and some variations of keywords or long tail keywords as anchor text.
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      • Profile picture of the author Oscarfishlover
        I've done a little bit of optimising. I recreated a link on the home page pointing to the page that had dropped to the bottom of page 1 on Google. I also created A direct link from my homepage on my personal website which also has a page rank of 4. I've done some testing, and on Google.co.uk the pages now moved to number two position. I had a chat on his computer and he had the same search results. Problem is, I don't know what the results are on Google.com. If you type in [B]B], may be you could give me the first five results you get on Google.com, I'll then see if my optimisation has worked
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        • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
          Originally Posted by Oscarfishlover View Post

          If you type in how to cycle a fish tank, may be you could give me the first five results you get on Google.com, I'll then see if my optimisation has worked
          You can try to add &gl=us to the google.com search URL.

          You're second in the Finnish search after that dreaded Wikihow. Sorry, that's the most research I'm willing to do right now.
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          Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
          Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

          What's your excuse?
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          • well wikihow is sharing site, without ads ? maybe google do an exception for that ?
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  • Profile picture of the author Kevin Maguire
    I care not for such pages, just as much as any searcher with real commercial intent will care not for such pages.

    After they have skimmed through the how and what of their content, they will <<back back and move onward to pages selling the product. If it's information they seek, I care not for their visit.
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    • Profile picture of the author Oscarfishlover
      Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire View Post

      I care not for such pages, just as much as any searcher with real commercial intent will care not for such pages.

      After they have skimmed through the how and what of their content, they will <<back back and move onward to pages selling the product. If it's information they seek, I care not for their visit.
      Who are you referring to?
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      • Profile picture of the author Kevin Maguire
        Originally Posted by Oscarfishlover View Post

        Who are you referring to?
        Wikipedia
        Wikihow
        Yahoo Answers etc etc

        If the searcher is looking to buy something, I'm pretty sure hes not going onto wikipedia to look for a buy button. So you might as well be 1st, if your second to one of these sites. The only traffic you're losing to those sites are what I like to call "tyre kickers".
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        • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
          Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire View Post

          If the searcher is looking to buy something, I'm pretty sure hes not going onto wikipedia to look for a buy button. So you might as well be 1st, if your second to one of these sites. The only traffic you're losing to those sites are what I like to call "tyre kickers".
          I think OP isn't really selling anything either, so it's a competition between informational articles.
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          Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
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        • Profile picture of the author Oscarfishlover
          Originally Posted by Kevin Maguire View Post

          Wikipedia
          Wikihow
          Yahoo Answers etc etc

          If the searcher is looking to buy something, I'm pretty sure hes not going onto wikipedia to look for a buy button. So you might as well be 1st, if your second to one of these sites. The only traffic you're losing to those sites are what I like to call "tyre kickers".
          Yes, my website is purely informational and not commercial. Having said that, I do have Google AdSense so the more people that click on the articles, the more chance I have of making some money.

          I think it's always helpful to watch somebody who doesn't necessarily use the computer for anything more than to look for information. For instance, my mother just uses search engines to look for things like wine articles etc. I've watched the way she uses the search engines, these people Tend to go to the first link they see containing Any keyword that relates to what they're looking for. In many cases that is the top paid links. The amount of times I have had to tell my mother not to click on the top paid links because they don't often have the information she is looking for. So being first Organically on Google is absolutely paramount in my opinion because you will lose a lot of traffic if you've got people like my mother searching for information that is contained on your website.

          So having the best description and heading is so important, you've got to get that person's attention straightaway because they will click on the first link they see
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  • Profile picture of the author Oscarfishlover
    According to Rankerizer I have now moved up to #2 position on both Google.com and Google.co.uk so I am extremely happy about that. If I can get to number two, then why not number one? watch this space :-)

    Obviously the two extra links coming from the two homepages made a bit of a difference, as well as rewriting my description. I know that a lot of people say that the description doesn't carry any weight, however I think it does. I've often had pages that only contain the keywords in the description and they have ranked highly.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jeffery Moss
    Google places great value on authority sites such as Wikipedia, WebMD and Wikihow. These sites have expert opinions, in depth articles, credible sources and plenty of daily traffic as well as love and support of fans who gladly share and link to the content. It will be difficult to compete against an authority site unless you become an equally great authority site with tens of thousands of pages of indepth useful content.
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    • Profile picture of the author Oscarfishlover
      Originally Posted by Jeffery Moss View Post

      Google places great value on authority sites such as Wikipedia, WebMD and Wikihow. These sites have expert opinions, in depth articles, credible sources and plenty of daily traffic as well as love and support of fans who gladly share and link to the content. It will be difficult to compete against an authority site unless you become an equally great authority site with tens of thousands of pages of indepth useful content.
      I don't want to sound arrogant, but the people who are writing these articles that relate to the content on my website don't have any more knowledge than me, I been doing this for many many years and have written the article based on my experience. Anyone can go on Wikipedia and write an article. Many articles found on the Internet have quotes directly taken from my own articles on Oscar fish lover. I'm not sure whether I would go as far as describing my site as being an authority site, but it is the most popular Oscar fish website on the Internet at the moment and has been for nearly 10 years. We have over 11,000 members of our forum and according to Google analytics, are getting approximately 3000 hits every day. Okay, it's not as many visitors as big websites such as monster fish keepers will get on a daily basis, but the last time I checked, my page rank was one above them, plus we are niche concentrating on just one fish in particular. Most of the other big websites cover all tropical fish.

      Like I said, I'm not trying to show off or anything, but just put my point across
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      • Profile picture of the author Samuel Adams
        Originally Posted by Oscarfishlover View Post

        I don't want to sound arrogant, but the people who are writing these articles that relate to the content on my website don't have any more knowledge than me, I been doing this for many many years and have written the article based on my experience. Anyone can go on Wikipedia and write an article. Many articles found on the Internet have quotes directly taken from my own articles on Oscar fish lover. I'm not sure whether I would go as far as describing my site as being an authority site, but it is the most popular Oscar fish website on the Internet at the moment and has been for nearly 10 years. We have over 11,000 members of our forum and according to Google analytics, are getting approximately 3000 hits every day. Okay, it's not as many visitors as big websites such as monster fish keepers will get on a daily basis, but the last time I checked, my page rank was one above them, plus we are niche concentrating on just one fish in particular. Most of the other big websites cover all tropical fish.

        Like I said, I'm not trying to show off or anything, but just put my point across
        You seem to have impressive site stats from all you've described. And, if that is the situation, then I'm sure it is very frustrating to be knocked out of your position in Google search by a mega article site that covers every topic under the sun. Just seems these huge article factories are being favored now by Google as the authority on every subject.
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        • Profile picture of the author Oscarfishlover
          Originally Posted by Samuel Adams View Post

          You seem to have impressive site stats from all you've described. And, if that is the situation, then I'm sure it is very frustrating to be knocked out of your position in Google search by a mega article site that covers every topic under the sun. Just seems these huge article factories are being favored now by Google as the authority on every subject.
          I've now got the page in question to #2 on Google, so obviously I'm getting a few more clicks on it now. And actually, I've earned a few quid today from the Google AdSense units on that page, so things are looking up.


          I'm assuming it was as simple as creating a couple of back links, one from the homepage, and one from the homepage of my personal website, I can't think of anything else that has made such a dramatic difference.
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  • Profile picture of the author Oscarfishlover
    I can't quite remember if I've asked this question somewhere, anyway.

    Most of you will have a Google account, I certainly do. If I search my own website whilst signed into my Google account, I get biased results to if I search when I'm not signed in. I am pretty sure that I get accurate results if I sign out of my account. Do any of you get the same results?
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