[RedStateGreen]

When I first made my website edible-landscape-design.com, I was so proud of it that I put a link to it everywhere. One of those places was here -- a forum that I have been a member of for five years. I put a link in my signature file, and that link went on every single post I had ever made.

Well, Google changed the rules last week such that -- according to their software robots -- my site is trying to be shady somehow. This forum in their eyes is unrelated and had so many hundreds of links to Edible Landscape Design that it looked bad to them.

Which is why I wanted to log on the other day, to remove that link from my signature file ... my website went from over 600 unique visitors a day to less than 100 a day in a 48 hour time period, and it hurts. I was just starting to make good money from the site -- if you've been following me over on the Preparing for the future board this has been one of my income diversification preps.

It's just now starting to sink in and I feel sick over this.

I guess the take-home message is not to rely on any one thing for income (not that I am - my husband still has his job - but you know what I'm saying).

Here's how - if you want to - you can help:

If you like my website, would you share a link to edible-landscape-design.com (or better yet, the link to a page on that site that you particularly like) with your friends and family? Even if you don't like it and want to poke virtual holes in it (in another venue!), go for it ... they say there's no such thing as bad publicity

I don't care if you post on Facebook, Twitter, send an email, or post about it on your blog. Just nothing spammy, please!!

Thank you so much.

[Lore]

Looks like you got the Google slap. Ever since their Panda update they've been hitting links from non relevant web sites. This also takes a whack at all the spammers that show up here. Back links are not what they use to be. You're better off right now just concentrating on quality content and getting cross posts for that.

[RedStateGreen]

*sigh* ... I just feel tired right now.

Yes, that's pretty much been my strategy, but in the meantime I'm losing money until my pages get back to where they should be.

I guess they're calling this new algorithm change Penguin.

[steam_cannon]

Yep boiled down google changed their algorithm and announced their specification changes in 2011 and started enforcing it this year.

Google wants links to be relevant to specific content. Footer links in a blog post don't meet that criteria and have lost their weight because they are a shady advertising practice. Further throwing in a url 400 times on an energy website looks like link farming, which is now a bad practice. Another thing, peakoil.com is a blog and even if this site doen't add the "nofollow" tag to links, links in discussions on peakoil.com shouldn't have much weight because it's just a discussion not a structured website.

If you like my website, would you share a link to edible-landscape-design.com (or better yet, the link to a page on that site that you particularly like) with your friends and family?

This can help, if they are writing a description of the page they like and linking to deep internal pages. But spamming the url for the homepage won't help as much.


Some strategy:

0. Fix any problems google says your website has.

1. Know your market. Define a list of 50 to 500 keywords or sentences that people type in when searching for your site. Research what keywords other. Look at the access logs and what visitors are searching to get to your website.

2. Market for those keywords.
a. You need more internal links linking to your own content.
b. When you make blog posts, make the links so they highlight keywords that link to your site. Make links 80% that highlight sets of keywords and 20% of the time link up full sentences. Don't just put your site url in the post because that's not informative.
c. Make high quality blog posts with text that links keywords back to your websites.
d. Write articles in a news section of your website, the articles will have links to content in your website and link to these articles on your twitter, facebook and blog or blogs.

3. Sure have your friends post about yourwebsite in facebook and twitter. But ask them to post links to internal pages, not the index page.

4. Set up pay per click for some of your keywords. Google want's your money, even five dollars a month will make you look better to google. Google never says this, but they seem to manually reviews and rates sites that are worth their time. They don't rank them better, but your chances of getting ranked well by a human are better then if no human is involved.

5. Pay for some marketing once in a while to help fill in the gaps of what you're missing. Captain Marketing is a pretty good company and I can research other options if you feel you want to go in this direction.

6. Create location pages for cities and content related to those places. Google likes to send people in New York looking for Garden info to New York Gardening or New York Plants guides. Google is getting very granular, but if you have content related to a specific area google will send people from that area to you.

7. Add a news page to your website with clips linking to the latest interesting news articles on your Edible Landscapes.

8. Get your website into a more modern html version. Google won't downgrade you for your websites use of tables, but google does rank on user experience. Your template is getting old and your menu is not very easy to use, so at some point you might think about a site upgrade. If this website is generated by the webservice provider you use, you might move away from them and move to a faster server. Though this is the least of your concerns.


Quality issues and things you are failing to do:

- Flash toolbar

- No blog, make a free blog or hosted blog and post content to your blog daily or weekly with focused backlinks.

- No seo chaining, as in making a blog post then posting about it on twitter and other social media

- No instruction site accounts like instructables, deviant art...

- No youtube, make a youtube account and post videos that link back to internal sections of your website.

- Bad menu

- Limited content

- Lack of internal interlinking

- You don't have contact information on your website.

- You don't have a contact form.

- You don't have any disclaimer

- Geolocation settings?

Since you're a peakoil member, feel free to PM me if you want a to talk on the phone or if you'd like more instructions.

[RedStateGreen]

Some strategy:

0. Fix any problems google says your website has.

1. Know your market. Define a list of 50 to 500 keywords or sentences that people type in when searching for your site. Research what keywords other. Look at the access logs and what visitors are searching to get to your website.

2. Market for those keywords.
a. You need more internal links linking to your own content.
b. When you make blog posts, make the links so they highlight keywords that link to your site. Make links 80% that highlight sets of keywords and 20% of the time link up full sentences. Don't just put your site url in the post because that's not informative.
c. Make high quality blog posts with text that links keywords back to your websites.
d. Write articles in a news section of your website, the articles will have links to content in your website and link to these articles on your twitter, facebook and blog or blogs.

3. Sure have your friends post about yourwebsite in facebook and twitter. But ask them to post links to internal pages, not the index page.

4. Set up pay per click for some of your keywords. Google want's your money, even five dollars a month will make you look better to google. Google never says this, but they seem to manually reviews and rates sites that are worth their time. They don't rank them better, but your chances of getting ranked well by a human are better then if no human is involved.

5. Pay for some marketing once in a while to help fill in the gaps of what you're missing. Captain Marketing is a pretty good company and I can research other options if you feel you want to go in this direction.

6. Create location pages for cities and content related to those places. Google likes to send people in New York looking for Garden info to New York Gardening or New York Plants guides. Google is getting very granular, but if you have content related to a specific area google will send people from that area to you.

7. Add a news page to your website with clips linking to the latest interesting news articles on your Edible Landscapes.

8. Get your website into a more modern html version. Google won't downgrade you for your websites use of tables, but google does rank on user experience. Your template is getting old and your menu is not very easy to use, so at some point you might think about a site upgrade. If this website is generated by the webservice provider you use, you might move away from them and move to a faster server. Though this is the least of your concerns.


Quality issues and things you are failing to do:

- Flash toolbar

- No blog, make a free blog or hosted blog and post content to your blog daily or weekly with focused backlinks.

- No seo chaining, as in making a blog post then posting about it on twitter and other social media

- No instruction site accounts like instructables, deviant art...

- No youtube, make a youtube account and post videos that link back to internal sections of your website.

- Bad menu

- Limited content

- Lack of internal interlinking

- You don't have contact information on your website.

- You don't have a contact form.

- You don't have any disclaimer

- Geolocation settings?

Since you're a peakoil member, feel free to PM me if you want a to talk on the phone or if you'd like more instructions.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I have over 100 pages of content, a contact form, a disclaimer, internally link every page multiple times, and am fully involved with social media. I have a FB page with over 250 followers, am on Twitter, have a YouTube account, two blogs, etc.

I feel as though you didn't actually look at my site, because all that is obvious just by visiting the home page.

Or did you just cut and paste these tidbits from somewhere?

I don't have time to get into an argument here. Some of your suggestions are fine, and I thank you for them. But next time actually go to someone's site before you start trashing what they've done.

[steam_cannon]

I certainly did look at your website.

I have over 100 pages of content

That's not much and blog content doesn't count. The main menu on the left looks like 26 pages of content.

a contact form, a disclaimer

Chill out Red I gave your site a one minute look over and you are correct, below the fold if I read though every item in that hard to read 1998 button list on the left there is a contact link. That's bad navigation. Ideally, those should be in your footer and that left menu is it's own issue.

internally link every page multiple times

I saw one or two internal links per page. One or two per paragraph would work better.

and am fully involved with social media. I have a FB page with over 250 followers, am on Twitter, have a YouTube account, two blogs, etc.

Cool but I don't see the links on your website. It's great that you have some facebook followers, though there is always more you can do. For facebook y=ou might consider adding some content such as iwipa pages in your facebook. That way people can browse and search some of your website while in facebook

Also looking at your website, I suspect it's not compatible with mobile web browers. A mobile css version might be able to fix that. Mobile makes up 1/6th of the market now. Has 1/6th less traffic been going to your website in the last year?

Or did you just cut and paste these tidbits from somewhere?

You're so ignorant about web marketing you think I'm making this up. That's funny. Your website is chump change compared to the sites I work on. I wrote up all of those suggestions specifically for you, if you don't like them then don't take them.

I don't have time to get into an argument here.

I think you should apologize to me. I said nothing insulting to you and I am not arguing with you.

Here's reality, you're website uses html tables and image buttons for navigation a technology from 15 years ago, your you have a blog stuck onto your main domain which was cool 10 years ago, and your marketing consists of spamming blogs which has been going out of style for the last 5 years. This isn't an argument, this isn't an insult, you are simply getting obsolete. Deal with it.

Here's a website you should check out: websitesthatsuck.com. The web is changing, try not to be insulted by that fact.

[davep]

RSG, he's actually being quite helpful. I guess you're in a bit of a pickle right now and are maybe slightly over-sensitive. But if I were you I'd listen to what he has to say.

[SeaGypsy]

The advice by Steam is probably about what you would get for several hundred dollars from a networking consultant, in about 1 hour, with about 5 minutes preparation. I would not be concerned about mannerisms, grateful for the free advice.

[MD]

yeah RSG I think you might have just shot a very good messenger.

But no worries,I think if you back up a bit with eyes open you might find some real value there.

[autonomous]

Your site keywords appear to be "edible landscaping" and you rank #5 in search results for that term, which is great. However, a query with google adwords reveals that only 14,800 search queries are made per month for edible landscaping. One hypothesis is that prior to the update made by google, people were reaching your site through other search terms, and now these queries no longer rank your site well in search results. I see you use google analytics, so I would run some time-based analysis in google analytics before and after the update, with a focus on the search terms that were used to reach your site.

I would look into improving page titles which is ranked near the top of the 200 or so parameters google looks at. Even with a low page rank, you can do better than others if your page title and first sentence is captivating and contains search terms near the beginning. Think of the page title as a headline for a news article or advertisement. You are essentially writing ads for your site with the page title and first sentence or two of content. I noted that some of your page titles are being chopped off, so I would keep the titles to 70 characters or less, and pay extra attention to the first 156 characters in the page text.

Since the 6000+ links to your site seem to not be forwarding much traffic, and are thus placed in locations irrelevant to the subject of edible landscaping, I would give it a break and stop asking people to link to your site. It is not working for you at this point. I would focus on making your content more "authoritative" on the subject of edible landscaping. I would include more references on the subject of edible landscaping from "authoritative sources". A search in google scholar will reveal these sources, and if you quote them and link to the source in a references section you should receive a higher page rank.

Advice from google's search blog: "Our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics."

[RedStateGreen]

LOL pstarr ...

Steam_cannon, I'm sorry that I snapped at you. I know better than to do that.

Gotta take the kids to school, brb.

[SeaGypsy]

The other half and my alloted replacements are 1.1 & 2.5 I can't wait to take them to school. If there's still a school. Otherwise there's the internet?

[PrestonSturges]

Oh man websitesthatsuck.com! i haven't thought of them for years!

And I like that they featured ClassicArms.us, where I bought my Yugo Mauser. They changed hands a couple years ago when some yankees bought the company. I told them to NOT change the crappy web site, keep all the Jesus fish jpgs, and find a church to join pronto in their hick town. It was probably a culture shock.

[PrestonSturges]

OK, well let's compare to www.ediblelandscaping.com, which is a butt-ugly web site but it is clear what he does - he sells plants. I mention that because I'm sure you've seen it. Since you have "blog" in your url, you might want to put "blog" in your title banner.

For a similar site with simpler navigation design, check out
http://davesgarden.com/guides/terms/
It's nothing special, but the tabs bring up selected links on the left margin.

However you do it, your links need to be sorted so that the number of top level links are reduced to 10 or fewer categories.

[Expatriot]

I like your website - it's visually appealing.
I don't agree that the button bar is 1998ish. It's fine. Better than links at the bottom, IMO.
I DO agree that the buttons appear to have a ghost-shadow appearance, which makes them look out of focus. Minor detail however, and that won't affect your traffic.

Regarding help, officious help, helpful help, supportive help . . . whatever. Getting google hits, which I assume corresponds to traffic, which corresponds to ad revenue, is the goal, right?

Ok. So do whatever stupid s---t is required to get that. Back-page links, upside down cites, blogs, twatter, farcebook, whatever.

I guess what I'm saying is that the content of your website seems quite alright to me. If people want to learn about the topic, your site will do dandily. So I wouldn't worry too much about the content. Worry about jumping through the hoops to make sure that you are getting the google hits you want.

Hate google. It's evil.