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Hello Mozzers!

Our company (FindMyAccident) is an accident news site. The goal is to roll our reporting out to all 50 states; currently, we operate full-time in 7 states.

To date, the largest expenditure is our writing staff. We hire professional
journalists who work with police departments and other sources to develop written
content and video for our site. Our visitors also contribute stories and/or
tips that add to the content on our domain. In short, our content is original.

A site that often appears alongside us in the SERPs in the markets where we work full-time is accidentin.com. They are a site that only syndicates accident news and offers little original content. (They also allow users to submit their own accident stories, and the entries index quickly and are sometimes viewed by hundreds of people in the same day. What's perplexing is that these entires are isolated incidents that have little to no media value, yet they do extremely well.)

The link profile is virtually non-existent. There are approximately 6 linking domains.

I don't rest my bets with Quantcast figures, but accidentin does use their pixel sourcing and the figures indicate that they are receiving up to 80k visitors a day in some instances. Not too shabby for the Flying Dutchman of accident news sites.

I understand that it's common to see news sites syndicate from the AP, etc., and traffic accident news is not going to have a lot of competition (in most instances), but the real shocker is that accidentin will sometimes appear as the first or second result above the original sources. What the...!?

The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well?

While looking at their model, I'm wondering if we're not silly to syndicate news in the states where we don't have actual staff? It would seem we could attract more traffic by setting up syndication in our vacant states.

Should the Panda updates have any effect on their site?

Thanks, gang....

Wayne

Hi Shara!

Good question, and it's my opinion that this is not a good idea.

A more practical approach would be to optimize individual landing pages for specific keywords. If it sounds like more work, it likely will be, but done properly you'll increase the user experience, Google will favor it, still be able to achieve desired organic listings, and hopefully see an improved ROI with regard to your SEO efforts.

Can you give a specific example of a product that needs 15 keywords? It might help to examine this a bit more closely.

Thanks,

W

Sounds like you might be sweating a bit too much.

Also sounds like you're thinking with the right intentions: keep close tabs on your competitors; eek out the links that they have garnered from "good neighborhoods" and make sure you're using best practices with regard to anchor text.

I can tell you from experience, if you continue to stress over the "unexpected" in the SEO world, you may find yourself drooling into a paper cup at your local mental health facility!   It's actually what most of us (the good ones, anyway!) thrive on with regard to SEO: THE RAPID CHANGE!

The entire premise of SEO, at least for me, has been about rolling with the tide and realizing you'll never be ahead of the curve, or even caught up. It sounds as if you aren't a coder, etc., so just do your best to recognize the standards and best practices set forth in Webmaster Guidelines, and you're going to be ok.

Now, quit losing sleep

Hi there, Catherine!

What about your traffic? Have you seen any reduction in organic since the "slump"? This might tell you a bit more than your Domain Authority (DA). (Not dismissing DA by any means, but sometimes it's not a clear-cut indicator of how well/poor you're doing in the SERPs.)

I wouldn't remove the footer links if the sites are reputable and its done in an honest/non-spammy fashion. I'm sure you can look at it and determine if it's "creepy" or not Keep in mind though, footer links are certainly not given the weight they perhaps once carried! Also, if you're asking whether or not to keep building links from the same two sites, my suggestion would be to set your sights on different domains.

Glad to help....

With regard to rel="nofollow", you'll likely find people divided on this issue.

I personally believe it is worth gathering these links if they are offered to you, as I believe they do hold value. In other words, Google may not count the nofollow link as a weighted backlink, but your anchor text and the domain and page authority of the site you acquired the link from is not being ignored by Google. (And rel="nofollow" will certainly never hurt you if all the other standards are acceptable and in line with good practices.)

That said,  I'd certainly target the sites that pass value before I concentrated all my efforts on a link from a site that uses rel="nofollow".

No problem, Gareth.

Yes, Domain Authority is certainly an important element when targeting links, but you also want to keep in mind:

• Make sure there is a defined relationship between the person you are requesting from and your business vertical. In other words, if you sell Accounting Services, don't go after links from  a gambling site. It just looks fishy. 

• Look at the Page Authority. You want to make sure your link is coming from a page within the domain that also has appeal.

• Check to see if the page has a rel="nofollow" tag associated with it.

• Ensure that your target source is not plagued with a lot of links from questionable sources. (remember, just becuase you see a domain with high authority, something questionable could still be occurring to which the engines haven't caught up yet. rankings are not necessarily reflective of day-today activity.

Ultimately, there are always exceptions of which you want to be aware, but if you stay on the straight and narrow, develop a good acqusition strategy, and target reliable sources, you should do just fine.

It's a lot of hard work, so don't get too discouraged if you find yourself not getting responses from a high ranking site

Gareth,

You've asked a fairly general question, but I think the best place to start would be familiarizing yourself with a reliable tool such as Open Site Explorer.  This tool is going to allow you to research a websites backlinks, explore reputation in terms of "trust," aas well as the types of neighborhoods the site is assoicated with. It also gives you additional linking targets based on who is linking to your competitors.

REMEMBER: finding trusted sites is not the challenging piece. You need to develop a sound strategy for obtaining these links in an honest, respectful, time efficient manner. I think you'll find that to be your struggle, as we all do

More specifically, can you tell us what type of industry with which you are associated? There are a lot of variables that you'll want to define before you just begin pursuing a link from a website.

In short, start with OSE, it's going to give you a lot of trusted information on potential link sources.

Best of luck!

Wayne

Mark, are you hosting the vids on your site, or are you referring to tagging on sites like YouTube,/Vimeo, etc?

Gareth, I think that the hyphenated URLs have been commonly associated with spammers for so long that Google, more or less by default, wised up to the game. Our personal site findmyaccident.com is without hyphens and we've managed to rank rather well, yet when we did A-B testing with a subsite that had hyphenated URL, the results were not as promising. Granted, all the variables were not the same, but it was enough evidence to persuade us to avoid hyphens, if possible. Hope this helps!

Echo, this won't be a problem at all. There will be no penalty, etc. In a perfect world it would be great to have unique video for the releases, but you should be fine. By chance, are you using PRWeb or PR Newswire?

Hi Marc,

I'm a bit confused by your post. Are you stating that you believe your membership to SEOMoz would increase your rankings based on membership alone?

You're right in that creating authority, building links, and gaining knowledge will take time. It takes lots of time! In short, it's my opinion that SEOMoz is intended to supplement your efforts, not be an elixir.

Unfortuantely, if you don't believe you have time to do the work to get rankings, there's not much that SEOMoz or anyone can really do to help you achieve same. If that's the case, I would suggest hiring a third party or reputable consulting service to do these tasks for you. It'll save you a lot of frustration!

I hope everything works out!

Best,

Wayne

mulith,

ask to see a listing of current and former clients. if they give you a name or two, do a quick backlink check on them. you should be able to discern a couple of things rather quickly:

1. if they don't provide a list, well, could be reason to be suspicious on its own merit.

2. if they provide a list and the backlinks are full of zero value directories, blog spam commenting, and other low-levle link schemes, you have your answer.

By and by, it sounds suspicious on the surface. I've learned one thing for sure, link building usually sucks, is tedious, completely un-sexy, and can be downright frsutrating. With that said, get out there and build some links!!!

Best of luck,

W

Hi Paul,

I'm not 100% on the actual "size" of the image having any negative effects. In my experience it's directly related to how well the image is optimized. Yes, load time ABSOLUTLEY has an effect on rankings, and while some will say that it's a small effect, I contend that it's an important consideration.

While Google may not give it primary consideration in their algorithm, it can drive your users away as they wait for a page to load. People are going to wait a mere second or two before they back out of a page that is not loading. So bounce rate is the factor you need to weigh with regard to image size.

Other tips to optimize your image properly include, always add height and width to the image for faster loading, always add an Alt-attribute to the IMG-tag, always add a Title-attribute to the IMG-tag, etc.

Best of luck,

W

Hey Chris!

Great question, and since I work for a news organization, I'm happy to answer!

The good news is, depending on the stories you're covering, there may not be a lot of competition for your keywords. For instance, if it's primarily local news, you may only be competing with 3-4 major players, and at that point it really just comes down to the strength of your link profile, the unique content, and title practices (by title practice, I mean making sure your keywords are located in the title, etc.).

If you are working for a media source like the NY Times, the hard work is already done. The NY Times is a recognized authority and is included as a source by the aggregator monsters suich as Google news/blogs, Yahoo news, etc. The only issue you'd fac ein this instance is keeping up with best SEO practices and maintaining the site.

I guess the question is: are you working for an established source, or is this a new site? Is it a global news source, a national news source, or a local source?

Best,

W

Hi David,

Taking a shot in the dark here, especially without seeing your backlinks, etc., but is it possible that some of the previor link building tactics have been dragging down the rankings/traffic that you are trying o supplement with by using honest, more effective white-hat tactics?

Best,

W

A couple of obvious ones that folks sometimes forget:

1. Update your XML sitemaps and resubmit to webmaster tools through Google, Bing, etc.

2. Update all your internal links! (This one can be a pain in the...)

Best of luck!

W

Richard, here is a document I would check out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls. It's from the man (Rand) himself and much of what is stated holds true today.

Hi Richard,

The short answer is, yes, domain names and URL structure are certainly key to positive ranking for particular keywords. Some would argue that domain names carry too much weight (I personally think so!), but it's a fact, so be careful when picking your domain name and also be sure you are properly formatting your URLs.

If you have specific questions regarding either, I'm happy to try and help.

Best,

W

Hi Steve,

With regard to your meta description:

<meta name="description" content="Fight a Denver Traffic Ticket. Ticketvoid fights your speeding ticket with the best Colorado Traffic Attorney. Beat traffic violations with a Denver Lawyer." />

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that Google will use the meta description that you specify. While it's frustrating, I have seen several instances where Google selects alternate text to use in place of the specified Meta description.

Best,

W