The Google “bot” was visiting the domain so what was the problem?

Turns out the hosting company had a global robots.txt file in their httpd server configuration with told Google and all other search engines to not index ANY website pages. Because there was no ‘robots.txt’ file in the root directory of the domain, the server’s ‘robots.txt’ file was being served up every time Google and any other major search engine visited.

To solve the problem, we created a ‘robots.txt’ file and placed it in the website’s root directory. The contents of the file are:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

This over rode the global configuration which was:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

How can you tell if your hosting company has a global robots.txt file? Simple. See if you already have a robots.txt file in your website root directory. If you don’t, type your domain name and then /robots.txt and see what comes up like:

http://yourdomain.com/robots.txt

If you see some text (and not a “missing .404″ page), then it is likely your hosting company has configured a global robots. txt file.  If it says “Disallow: /” then your site is not being indexed by major search engines that respect what is written in the robots.txt file.

You will need to create your own robots.txt file and upload it to your root directory to solve the problem, using the example of what we did, above.

Why would a hosting company have a default global robots.txt file? It’s a sneaky way of saving on bandwidth. Search engine spiders can use up a lot of bandwidth, especially on large websites where it downloads all the files and images from a website on a regular basis. Telling search engines not to index websites on a server will prevent bandwidth consumption.

But it doesn’t do you and your business much good.

No, it’s not ranked for “muscle medications,”  “saltwater fish grand prairie” or “herbal fish medicines” – but it is very well ranked for a huge number of search terms that people actually search on.

In the spring, summer and autumn, it gets tons of traffic, with an Alex global traffic rating of below 300,000 world wide and below 35,000 in Canada.  It has a Google Pagerank of 4. Pretty darn good. It gets tons of traffic in those three seaons, and the ad income is .. well… pretty good.

How is that some spammy search engine company can send me an email to tell me that it is not “ranked?”

Look, just about every business and their website needs ongoing search engine optimization, but not by businesses like tnlr.net (who don’t even have a website).

I hope you would trust a business that has been doing this since 1997 and is transparent about their work! Give me a call if you need some help.

When purchasing a new domain, you should always check to see if it might have been registered before and the previous registrants let it drop. Why? There are a few reasons and we’ll look at two of them – how previously expired domain could help you, and how it could hurt you.

How It Could Help:

A previously registered domain name may still rank well for some keywords and phrases. Even if it has been years since the domain name expired.  I had a blog with a domain name that ranked very well for my name, ‘Ian Scott’,  some years ago.  Just over 4 years ago, I removed the website (although I kept the domain).  Last week, I decided to put the domain name live again, and noted that when I did, a few days later my “new” website was ranked on page 2 for for my name, on Google. Previous to putting the domain live, it did not rank because the website had not existed.

Today, just a week later,my relaunched website is ranking on page 1 of google.COM (not .CA).

So, a previously registered domain name may already rank well for some keyword phrases that you might want to rank for, once it goes live.

How It Could Harm You

If a domain name was previously associated with a “bad neighbourhood,” Google may have de-indexed it. Perhaps the previous owners of the domain engaged in shady SEO practices like cloaking in order to try to game Google. If this is the case, it is quite likely you are going to have to do a lot of work to get Google to notice you again and to begin ranking for keywords you want to be ranked for.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll show you some ways you can research the domain names you are interested in using.

Are you finding it frustrating to get ranked in the search engines? Are you trying to find out how to drive more traffic to your website? You have a website, with lots of content, but no one is visiting.  Your site could be lost down the many results pages for important search keywords and phrases relevant to your business’ services and products.

Are there technical issues with your website perhaps? Maybe you need a Website SEO Audit completed. You’d be amazed at what we find sometimes during one of those audits and can pinpoint some reasons why your site is not even indexed. Are you getting frustrated seeing your competition take away all the traffic that you could be getting?  Maybe you’ve got a hefty Adwords account that keeps generating a huge expense but  clicks you’re paying for that aren’t converting into sales.  You think you need Adwords because you’re just not getting the rankings. And here’s one of the problems too: A recent report that crossed our desk indicated that web savvy searchers are skipping over the ads and going right into the search results.

We can help. Contact us today by email or phone.

SEO Companies – Are You Frustrated Because …

… they promised you page one rankings, and sure – you’re ranked for some obscure term that no one searches on? Ah, there is a lot of that going around these days! We get the spam messages ourselves, “You’re not ranked for grand prairie saltwater fly fishing or some such thing but we can get you on page 1 of Google!” As if anyone is actually going to be searching for saltwater fly fishing in grande prairie in the first place, and your site has very little to do with it.

No, you want to be found on searches that real people actually search on. We understand that. And yes, we also understand you don’t want to be banned by Google because some company promised you page 1 search engine rankings, got them for you, and then you later discovered the company you hired had used what are called in the business, “blackhat” techniques.  We won’t do that.

If this is you, again – give us a call or send an email. We’ll talk. We’ll talk about what we can do to help you.

A Little About Our SEO

We’ve been doing it since 1997! Not only for local clients here in Orangeville, but we’ve been providing search engine optimization (SEO) to clients throughout North America. Why have we been so successful at this? A few reasons:

• 1. We study SEO techniques on a regular basis, closely observing changes and using some of our own sites as our “experiments” to discover what works and what does not, before we apply techniques to our clients’ websites.
• 2. We don’t engage in blackhat SEO techniques – while some so-called SEO “experts” will promise you great rankings on a variety of search engines, many of their methods are questionable at best. We’ve seen some of our clients come to us after they’ve used another firm who ended up getting them de-listed from Google.
• 3. Our multi-years of experience is beneficial to our clients.  We love doing this stuff! We love seeing our work paying off for our clients and enjoy hearing our clients talk about how well they are now doing. Because we love doing it so much, we tend to overdeliver.
• 4. Our methods are holistic in that we use a variety of methods – not just one, to ensure that our efforts actually work over the long haul. If you’ve only done one kind of SEO optimization, you’re at risk of losing your rankings if that one method happens to become less important due to an algorythm change that Google makes.

These are just some of the reasons why our SEO services work. Take a look at some of our case studies which show just a few of our past successes.

Although we are located in Orangeville, ON, we have worked with clients from all over Ontario including Toronto, Richmond Hill, Guelph, Brampton and Ottawa. Going further, we’ve worked with clients throughout the rest of Canada as well as United States in a variety of States and cities.

If you’re looking to increase your own search engine rankings for your website, or need some help with some other aspect of Internet Marketing, give us a call at (519) 940-3504 (Toll Free at 1-877-966-3436).  Alternatively, you could also send us an email at info@pairowoodies.com.

Anyone who makes guarantees to you about being “#1 in Google” or promises you the moon will likely end up delivering a load of mushrooms to you.  We’ll take a good look at your present website, do some keyword research (there’s no point in having great rankings for search terms that no one searches on!), and let you know what we think we can do for you.

Search engine optimization is a process – something that needs to be maintained and managed over the long term as well.  We’ve been doing it since 1997, and it’s one of our favorite things to do!

In some jurisdictions, not only is this considered unethical and a very poor way of conducting business, it’s also against the law. If you’re dealing with an SEO company or are using the services of an on-line reputation management firm and they are suggesting they can help you obtain positive reviews and post them on various review sites like Google Places, Yelp, and others, be very very careful. In fact, walk away.  It could cost you far more in the long run.

In New York State, a cosmetic surgery business called Lifestyle Lift has been left with a $300,000.00 fine in a settlement with the State, according to this New York Times article.  The article states:

“The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites, according to the attorney general’s statement. Lifestyle Lift also created its own sites of face-lift reviews to appear as independent sources.

[…}

Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, said in a statement that Lifestyle Lift’s “attempt to generate business by duping consumers was cynical, manipulative and illegal.” “

There are ways to get legitimate positive reviews that are real. And of course, there are ways to deal with the odd negative review that might pop up on Page 1 of Google that is equally not a legitimate review but someone attempting to smear your reputation.  Choosing other methods which may seem “easy” at the time could very well come back to haunt you, however.

There are all kinds of people who are willing to take what seems like a small amount of money to post fake reviews on your behalf. Don’t do it. It’s not worth the temptation in the long run, and in the end, your repuation may become so besmirched, you will never recover.

Business Name: Britannia Printers Inc

Location: Toronto, ON

Service Area: Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and North America wide.

Products & Services: Full commercial printer including book printing, magazines and journals, business forms,  school year books, promotional and marketing material, business cards and more.

PairoWoodies and Britannia Printers Inc have enjoyed a very long lasting relationship. Since 1998, we have used this great Toronto commercial printing company for a variety of products including printed material for both our own business and our clients.

One of the challenges for Britannia was to obtain superior search engine results for a variety of search phrases and keywords. We began working with them on this in October of 2010 and within a few short months, we  had Britannia ranking highly on Page 1 of Google.ca for a number of those search terms.

President of Britannia Printers, Les Saunders wrote this to us:

“January 6, 2012

Britannia Printers has had a close working relationship with PairoWoodies since 1998. We have collaborated on a number of projects together and have enjoyed working with each other.

In the autumn of 2010, we took advantage of the skills in search engine optimization that PairoWoodies has. When they began working on our behalf to get our website to appear higher in the search engines for words and phrases related to our business,  it was very hard to find our website with any search terms
aside from our business name.

Just a few short months later, PairoWoodies had us ranking much higher in both the organic and “Local Places” search results. In fact, for some search terms, we are ranking in the top three positions on page 1 of Google.ca.

As a result, we have noticed an increase in new business at our already busy shop as new potential clients discover us when searching the web.

I would highly recommend the services of PairoWoodies if your website is lagging in the search engine results and could use a boost in rankings.

Les Saunders”

Thank you so much Les! We enjoy working with you and we have really enjoyed helping you obtain better search engine rankings that have been valuable to your business and that have actually helped increase the number of new customers and clients!  We look forward to a long lasting relationship with you.

I just created ours for PairoWoodies. The process was a bit “clunky” and at this point, Google isn’t really allowing the creator to put as much information or have as many features as a Facebook page but that will likely change if they really want to compete against Facebook.

I have not looked at everything that an administrator of one of these pages can do; as mentioned above, in my opinion the back end is a bit clunky and unwieldy.  Uploading our logo and some images which are screen shots of websites that we’ve created was fairly simple though. If you’d like to see the first version, you can see it here: https://plus.google.com/105535220273747673431

When I have a chance, I’ll take a longer look at the whole thing and offer you any tips that I might find. Apparently, there are analytics that Google will provide about your business page. But so far it’s not obvious from my first time visiting and checking out their “back end” as to how to locate this information. I do believe Google has some work to do on the interface.

One of the things they have provided are several icons of different sizes that you can put on your website with a link to your Google+ page.  We’ll be adding one soon! In the meantime, I’ll keep looking around – one of the other things that Google will need to do is make it easy to assign administrative rights to other people. When I learn more, I’ll be sure to let you know!

Maybe one of your employees simply had a bad day at work, and said something they shouldn’t have to a prospective customer – and now that prospective anonymous customer is writing terrible things about you on various internet websites. You cringe every time you “google” your business name – right there in the results are the websites where the complaints are that are harming your reputation. Makes you sick to your stomach. You could be losing a ton of money because of them.

Maybe an unethical competitor is trying to steal your business and has made up some up things about you to make you look bad on the internet.  It’s sad, but this kind of thing can happen.

If you’re a good business, and you’re a victim of this type of activity against you, we can help. We should have a private conversation and take a look at the situation. We can’t work miracles and make it all go away tomorrow, but there is an awful lot we can do to help you clean up this situation. You don’t need to continue to lose money and business due to anonymous cowards or unethical competitors.

Online reputation management is one of our specialties and has come about because of our expertise in search engine optimization.  We’ve heard the pain of a few of our clients that have had false or misleading things said about them, and those things have shown up on the first page of Google when a search was done on their name. We helped them make the pain go away.  We can help you with that pain too.  Call us and we’ll talk.

You don’t need to suffer with the thought of losing clients because of negativity about you that shows up right away on the search engines when a potential customer or client searches for you.

A warning though: We will not work with businesses or individuals that deserve that bad reputation! We are going to do our own research as well, before we determine if you are a good fit for our business. If you really do trash your customers and have a lousy business, we’re not going to help you.

But.. if you are a good business that is suffering and losing sales due to negative stuff someone has written about you, and it’s showing up when you’re name or business name is searched, we can help!

Often, the response is a blank look. Every business owner has been told they need a website (and they do), but it’s also important to clarify what the aims and goals of the site should be.  When providing consulting, it helps us to help you when we know what your goals are – and we can better give you a return on your investment.  Sometimes, the consulting process is used to help the business owner define their goals and expectations.

Our experiences since 1997 (which is longer than most people have even been on the Internet!) have enabled us to provide a variety of services and programs – perhaps some of them you haven’t even ever thought about. But that’s our job, to let you know what is available to you and how it can help your business.

 Online Reputation Management

Flash web design is pretty much dead. I know there are many web designers out there who spent a lot of money to learn how to program in Adobe’s “Flash,” and I feel sorry for them.  I’ll admit that when I first saw a website done in Flash, it was pretty cool – and it was tempting to learn some advanced Flash programming skills. However, we decided to refrain due to some of the inherent problems with Flash.

Up until just recently, a website done completely in Flash didn’t get indexed very well by search engines.  It is true that about a year or so ago, Adobe provided information to search engines on how to index the text within a Flash website, but it was a little bit too late for that.  This was the biggest reason we did not get heavily involved in Flash programming – what’s the point of spending money on a website if no one can find you??

And now, Adobe has killed flash development for mobile devices as of November 9th, 2011.   What does that mean for you, if you’re a business owner who’s website is all in Flash? Well consider that Google is reporting that more and more searches are done on mobile devices and in fact, using a mobile device for search is expected to widely exceed searches from laptops and pc’s.  So even if a searcher does locate your site, they won’t be able to see it.

Seriously.

You are going to be losing out on tons of sales, walk-in customers – and money.  Your Flash website is becoming extinct. I have been predicting this for over a year now, as the local mobile search revolution started to be realized.

If you have a Flash website, grab your mobile device and type the url into the browser. What do you see? Likely it’s something like this – here’s a photo of a Flash programmed website on my Blackberry Torch:

  I just randomly found a Flash website, http://bellamystique.com and loaded it.  The website detects that the browser I am using isn’t capable of viewing Flash, and gives me the message:

“To enjoy this site you’ll need to update your Flash Player. It’s easy, painless and will take just a moment…”

Then there is a prompt with a clickable button to download a Flash Player… trouble is… it’s not easy, it’s not painless, because there simply does not exist a Flash Player for Blackberry Torches, I-Phones and other mobile devices (there may be for a very few Androids). And with the news that Adobe has stopped development, it means there never will be one available.

Take a look at the photo again and then a wild guess at how much money that business is making with mobile searches?

The grand total of zero dollars.

I feel sorry for both the website owners of Flash sites as well as Flash web developers.  The website owner has likely spent good money for a website that they had hoped would do them for a good long time and help them market their business. The Flash developer has either paid good money for training or has spent a great deal of time learning Flash development – and now it seems to them as if Adobe is abandoning them – the anger and bitterness that I’ve read on the blog of the Adobe website speaks volumes.

Here’s what we’re going to do to help. For a limited time, we’re offering a $200.00 discount on a mobile website of up to 10 pages to those businesses that have Flash websites. Our normal price for this is $697.00 but if you act quickly and get in touch with us (email is fine – info@pairowoodies.com with the subject of “Special Mobile Deal”) or call us at 519-940-3504, we’ll build you a mobile site for only $497.00.

You do have to act quickly though. Hey, I’d like to help everybody out if  I could, but we don’t have time to do that unfortunately.

This is the perfect time to get a mobile enabled website. Those who get in on the new mobile revolution now will reap the benefits before those who are slower to do so.

Isn’t it time you stopped losing potential customers and their dollars?  Just like those businesses that waited to get a website when the Internet Revolution began the late 90′s regretted their decision to wait, those who wait too long before having a mobile website built will also regret their decision.

Why would you want to lose potential new customers and not be able to communicate your message to existing ones? Send that email now or give us a call.