An Interesting Case Study on Black Hat Tactics

Click our blog post title to view the site that we will be talking about or visit it here at www.Mag-Gro.com. This site has been poorly treated by a number of professional webmasters. The client has a nice product, but has simply not been able to get the web exposure that he really needs. His site has been managed by at least two other webmasters before the client came to us.

The first and most severe issue that we uncovered when we analyzed the site on the server was then unbeknown to the client one of the previous webmasters had created over 100 doorway pages and had even installed them in a directory on the server in a directory called Doorway. Ouch, search engines really hate that. Clearly much time and effort had gone into creating these pages which consisted of line after line of on topic keywords some even linked to his website but in no order or with formatting. There was not even an effort to create keyword dense content, just gibberish on a page.

Many of these doorway pages pointed to the client’s website and some to his MySpace site all in an effort to try to drive traffic. Additionally over 10 pages resided in the root of the server with keyword dense names that had been connected to the doorway pages or to the MySpace site. His real website consists of only ten pages but there were several hundred pages actually sitting on his server.

On top of that, no sitemaps had been created and conversion tracking for his pay per click program had not been installed.

Yikes, I am talking about not taking care of business for a client. We now have this client under our wing and are working to remediate the problems and to drive legitimate traffic to the site. We’ve already cleaned up the server and now our next step is to clean up the pages which we will be working on over the next several days.

Click into the site to see what you think and let us know your comments below.

Welcome to Design-World Watch

Welcome to Design-World Watch a new blog from Nancy McCord owner of McCord Web Design. We post to this blog every Thursday.

You’ll want to check out our other great blogs for more informational content, tips, tools, and best practices at the addresses below:

Web-World Watch

This is our main blog and updated on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It is our oldest and most developed blog. Topics discussed are pay per click marketing, search engine optimization, best practices, Internet marketing, podcasting, using video, and other Web worthy information.

Blog-World Watch

This blog is fairly new for us and we update it on Tuesday. Topics are focused on the blogosphere and include blog widgets, blogging tactics, blogging for search engines, blog practices, writing for your blog, and how to use a blog to garner website traffic.

 We hope that you’ll choose to subscribe and check back each week for new information and interesting tips.

Blogging for Business

I just had a client call me about their blogging services being done by another firm and he mentioned that the blogger was doing social network blogging and what did I think about that. The client is in a high tech market and the topics of the posts were things like: Little Norrie, Corrie, A New Car For Graduation, Daddie Finds a New Love. Good grief who was writing these posts a high schooler?

Blogging for business is just that serious business. Readers on a business blog want to read blog posts that speak to their interest and reason for visiting in the first place. Blogging is not about attracting the MySpace generation who doesn’t have money to pay for the products that are used by fleets and courier services in this case.

My rule of thumb has been that business blogging should be on topic for the industry, be written in an engaging style, offer a reason for people to subscribe or visit again, and build authority on the product or service for the client for Google and other search engines.

Blogging is serious business! By the way, we got the job and the client fired their social networking blogger.

Top Blog Mistakes

Here’s our short list of errors and common mistakes that blog owners make. Take a quick look to make sure that you are part of the “club”.

1. Forgot to integrate the blog site into the main website. You can’t get cross site traffic if you don’t link! Make it easy for website visitors to read your blog and make it easy for blog visitors to find out more about you.

2. Don’t forget to add the one click easy subscribe chicklets. You know the little icons that say “Add to My Yahoo” or “Add to My Google”. Many blog readers do not understand the world of XML or RSS news feeds or even that the news portal that they are already using is feed enabled. Make it easy with a one click solution.

3. Make sure to add a Feedburner “get posts by email”. This is the same issue as above, to syndicate your content and get readers, you need to make it easy. Some people want to get posts the old way by email. Feedburner makes it easy by setting up a subscription service that allows your reader to get your posts in their email box complete with pictures. It is very easy to use and another way that you can encourage regular readership.

4. Keep your posts on topic! Keep your readers interested by offering something helpful or newsworthy based on your industry. People do not go to a GPS blog to read about teen angst or about their Daddy buying them a car! Social blogging should stay in the social arena on forums and on personal websites, these type of posts simply do not have a place in the professional business blog.