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These cases are generally the result of bad linkbuilding. There are so many varying opinions and resources for linkbuilding that as a novice web marketer, you can easily travel down the wrong path. The problem with all of the advice you find across the web, is that most of it is outdated.

For example: A year ago, it was extremely popular for marketers to try and use deep-linking (linking to pages inside of their site instead of the homepage) as a means to boost the rankings for those particular pages. Well.. this became common knowledge, spammers took advantage, and now that tactic raises red flags. If you are a blogger reading this, you know that more often than not, when you link to a website, you reference the name of the site, and link to the homepage ( e.g. Fermentation Wine Blog ).

Here are some more linkbuilding concepts that you should avoid:

1. Reciprocal Linking – Yes.. it is great for cross promotion and comradery among bloggers and other sites, but it serves very littly, if any, purpose for SEO. If I give you an apple, and you give it back to me, we net 0.
2. Directory Submissions – Unless it is a high quality directory, you’ll most likely be establishing a relationship with spammers, and do much more harm than good.
3. E-zine articles – If you want to write content to increase your SEO, write it for your own site. The rss feeds from E-zine articles get scraped by spammers, and duplicated thousands of times across the web. Next thing you know, it looks like YOU duplicated the same article and put it out everywhere, and YOU are the spammer.
4. Excessive Submissions to Social Bookmarking Sites, Commenting on Blogs and Forums – ONLY do this if you have legitimate comments and stories. Otherwise, your site is reported as spam.
5. Links that cost less than $10 – If someone tries to sell you links for less than $10, they are most likely going to do all of the things that I just said not to do, and charge you for it. Then you have to hire someone to clean it up.
6. Rapid Linkbuilding – If you are using legitimate means to linkbuild, but do it too quickly, the search engine Gods feel cheated, and you will get banned from the search engine.. (your site doesn’t even get indexed anymore)

Obviously the overarching concept here is that if you want to do linkbuilding, you should do it legitimately by having a great site with great content. If you need some help, let us know.  If you want to try linkbuilding on your own, we recommend Blogsvertise… please be sure to use this affiliate link so we get credit for telling you about their great service!

Click here to read about our SEO Services

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Keyword Discovery and Analysis:
This is the first step to a proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Campaign.  The goal of the Keyword Discovery and Analysis is to determine the keywords that will provide the best Traffic on Investment.  We start off by developing a list of “seed” terms, which are the words/phrases that best represent the results you wish to optimize your site.  We use these “seed” terms to generate a comprehensive list of alternatives which may also be used by your target audience in searching for your site.  After developing this list of keywords, we analyze them individually to determine not only the quantity and quality of the traffic they currently and historically generate, but also the competitiveness of these terms.  We conclude by providing you with the list of Keywords, and our recommendation on those we feel would provide your best return on investment.

Onsite Performance:
How your website is designed and deployed plays a large part in how well your site ranks in the search engines.  When conducting our Onsite Performance Analysis, we evaluate your site from a search engines perspective and provide you with specific recommendations on how to correct the problem areas.   Our Onsite Performance Analysis addresses the following major areas of your website:

• Meta Information
  • This is the descriptor information that you are able to give to the search engines.  It is important that the Titles and Descriptions you provide are concise, unique, relevant. This is one of the most common starting places for onsite SEO.
• Site Content
  • How well is the content of your site written?  Is it unique page to page?  Is it unique to your website? Do your pages contain the best keywords, proper density, and best placement?  Are you using the image descriptions in your site as a means to further provide “guiding” information for the search engines?  We answer all of these questions and more.
• Current Incoming Links
  • It is important to understand what type of links are pointing to your site.  There are many types and qualities of links that can benefit, or even sometimes hinder, your search engine rankings.  We evaluate the number and source of the incoming links to your site, including the anchor text currently being used.  This helps in obtaining a greater understanding of your current situation, and provides insight for linkbuilding.
• URL Structure
  • How are your URL’s formed?  Do they include random strings of text, and characters that would be meaningless to any human reader?  This portion of the analysis addresses URL canonicalization issues, query strings, and other items that will help your pages display as more relevant to particular terms.
• Server Settings
  • This analysis takes a close look at your DNS settings to ensure you are using the proper CName and A records for your domain and subdomains (www.), MX records, and similar items.

Offsite Performance:
There is only some much that you can do onsite to optimize your search engine rankings.  The final, and one of the most crucial tool for SEO is linkbuilding.  If done properly, it can be a valuable tool for increasing your search engine rankings.  If done improperly however, it can be extremely detrimental to your rankings, and possibly even cause permanent damage to your domain name.

• The Logic of Linkbuilding
  • Modern search engines place extensive value on the quantity and quality of links to your website for several reasons:
    1. Each link provided to your site acts as a vote of credibility.
    2. The anchor text used for that link gives contextual reference to your site
  • Some types of Links are better than others:
    1. Links that come from sites relevant to yours
    2. Links that are used in context to your site
    3. Links that come from higher PR sites
    4. Links that contain anchor text relevant to your site
    5. Links that can be followed by the search engine crawler
    6. Links that come from .edu or .gov domain names
  • Some types of Links can hurt your website:
    1. Links that come from link directories
    2. Links that come from penalized sites
    3. Links that appear to be spam (no context)
    4. Links from sites associated with spam
    5. Links that are built to quickly
• Our Method of Linkbuilding
  • GrapeThinking has developed a large network of bloggers across many industries who write about lifestyle, travel, wine, technology, products, financial advice, family, holistic health care, and more.
  • When we are contracted for linkbuilding, we check the bloggers in our network against the criteria mentioned earlier to ensure that we build only the highest quality of links.
  • We then pay these bloggers to write articles/reviews about your products or website, using specific anchor text (determined through Keyword Discovery) for their links to your site.
  • This method not only generates the links that we need for SEO, but can also generate traffic and clients to your site from the articles.

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For more information and a FREE quote, please fill out this form:[contact-form]

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There is no better way to gauge public interest online than to look at the web and information provided by Google Insight, Google Trends and Google Analytics; there are obviously more advanced tools such as Hitwise and Comscore – but for directional information something like Google Insight is good enough: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

‘Porn’ is just in because of the old Avenue Q song ‘the internet is for porn‘ – and it’s an authoritative bench-marks for public interest considering the recent court case where a high-court used Google as a measure of common values and interests. The interesting trend we see is that online there is demonstrably more interest in wine than in beer over the last 12 months. As a bench-mark of public interest – oddly enough at the time of the Iowa caucuses both Obama and Porn see a simultaneous spike in interest, which is the first time that Obama becomes more popular as a search query than both beer and wine combined. Disturbingly, porn becomes increasingly more popular throughout 2008 – and encouragingly Obama’s popularity online remains ahead of both beer and wine; whilst McCain’s only ‘More Popular than Beer and Wine Combined’ moment is only for a brief time at the end of January and then for a little tiny bit in August.

So it stands to reasons then that outside of a presidential year, politics takes a back seat and all people are interested in is porn, beer and wine… you animals!

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One of our most commonly requested services is web site optimization. Unfortunately (and fortunately) web developers are just now starting to implement a better practice of building sites to be search engine friendly. As web development continues to be outsourced, many developers just don’t feel like putting in that little bit of extra effort that truly does go a long way.

You may be familiar with some of the following issues, as I’m trying to keep this list simple, but hopefully there are a few gems that may help you on your way to the top. If you have any questions, don’t be shy to comment and we’ll help in every way we can.

1. 301 Redirects - With almost every customer of ours, the first thing we do is set up a redirect to or from the ‘www.’ sub-domain. If you fail to do this, the search engines may determine that you have 2 websites (http://www.grapethinking.com and http://grapethinking.com) and split your ‘google juice’ between the two of them. The fix is really simple if you have an apache server with a hosting company that provides htaccess and mod_rewrite.
2. Dynamic URLs – Which is easier to interpret? grapethinking.com/a-few-tips-for-climbing-the-search-engines OR grapethinking.com/?p=4586 It shouldn’t be that difficult to make your url structures dynamic so you have ‘pretty’ links. This will not only help your search engines, but also make it easier for your visitors to browse your site.  It is generally a good practice for your url’s to include your page title.
3. Site Map – If you want to make sure the search engines crawl all of your site, you should place a site map .xml file and point to it within the robots.txt file. The more friendly your site is to the search engine, and handing it a map the second it gets to your site is pretty nice, the more friendly the search engines will be to you. If you don’t have a site map, there are plenty of sites that will create one for you. One I recently used was XML-Sitemaps which was much simpler than downloading google’s python script, even though I am a fan of Google Webmaster Tools.
4. Dynamic META info – This topic has been beat to death across the internet, but with good reason… it IS important. Make sure you use dynamic information for creating your meta titles. If they are all the same, your just telling the search engine that every page in your site is the same, AKA: you are boring. The meta descriptions aren’t as important because the robots can generally determine the more important content of the page (see next). The meta tags, while extremely valuable about 5 years ago, are now pretty much irrelevant.
5. Content Placement – When you buy a magazine, book, or newspaper, the most relevant information is on the front cover. It’s the first thing you see. Search engines seem to think right along those same lines. The closer the information is to the top of your page the more important and relevant that content must be. If you haven’t specified meta information, and you haven’t effectively used CSS to layout your content, you may even find Google putting your navigation menu as your site’s description. You don’t necessarily have to have the relevant content displaying at the top of your page, it just needs to be first in the HTML file.
6. Your Hosting – That’s right… your hosting can play a large role in your search engine rankings. If you have shared hosting, you might be on the same server as one of those nutsos blowing viagra and cialis all over the place, or even worse, a porn site. Even though you may have a different domain name, your IP address will still be the same, and you will be punished. It’s worth the extra cash to get a designated IP. If your bootstrapping, you can always choose a hosting company that makes it tough for spammer to create accounts via call to verify or requiring one year upfront payment instead of month-to-month.
7. AJAX – Ajax is great for forms and images, but don’t try to “AJAXify” your whole site. This wonderful technology can provide great UI, but search engines are blind when it comes to javascript, and the fact that your site sits under 1 never-changing URL does not help much either.  Believe it or not, a relatively large percentage of users (~10%) have javascript disabled, and would not be able to use your AJAX heavy site.  Most large companies have JS disabled by default for protection, and a lot of users typically turn it off to speed up their browsing experience, and eliminate pop-ups(unders,overs,etc..).  JS and AJAX can greatly enhance your site, but should not be required.

So there you have it… 7 of the more common SEO mistakes made by web developers. Granted, what you do on-site is only the foundation of optimizing your site, the off-site is what really provides the most weight in search engine rankings.

Grape Thinking is a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO). If you are interested in having a professional provide you with an analysis of your site (with detailed instructions on how to fix the problem areas), request a free quote.

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UPDATE:  Vinolin has taken steps to remedy the problems that were caused.  If you feel your site is being affected by duplicate content, and would like an analysis, please visit our SEO Services Page.  Thanks!

I’m not sure how many of you are aware, but there is a website in the wine industry that claims to be an blog aggregator for the purpose of “content analysis”. Here is what they say about themselves – Vinolin’s justification for being thieves. To make matters funnier/worse, the layout of their site looks like a slight rip-off of cork’d's.

I noticed Vinolin was aggregating our content when I discovered this post on their site about a year ago. In all honesty, it didn’t really bother me all that much, as they were just displaying the excerpt, and I saw there was a back-link to our site.

Now… just take a look at this page: Vinolin’s Rip-Off of our last post. This link takes you to google’s cached version, I did this in the event they pull down the page after this article goes public. On this page, you see they didn’t limit themselves to an excerpt, they blatantly copied the entire post and displayed it on their site. The audacity is unbelievable, especially considering they are aware that people have a problem with it(as people should).

So, not only do I discover that they are stealing content from our site and others, but as an even further sign of disrespect, they have not managed their robots.txt file so as to keep those articles from being spidered by the search engines. For those of you who are unfamiliar with search engine optimization, most search engines exact a penalty for duplicate content. It is not uncommon that an original creator of content can lose page rank, and even their indexed version of a page if the spider crawls the the duplicate first. The fact that they are providing a back-link doesn’t help anything as they would lead you to believe, because they are not linking back to the original content, they are just linking back to the main page of (y)our site.

In some cases, duplicate content is going to happen, such as occurs with content licensing, and between blogger friends. The simple solution is to use meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow” and place this in your page’s header so the search engines know the content isn’t for them. If you do it this way, google will ignore the content, but still give credit for any links on the page. Unfortunately, Vinolin didn’t get the memo, and seem to be doing it exactly backwards.

I did a quick whois search (here) for Vinolin.com and discovered very little, as the owners seem to be covering their tracks pretty well. So what do you do? First things first, file a DMCA infringement request with Google, with Yahoo!, and with MSN. Another option, which is always on the table, is to file suit. Generally, if the site stealing your work has an owner in the US (which all information points this is the case here), the suit is the most effective means of recuperating your damage, and you can force the violator to shut down their website. Most people recommend sending a friendly letter before calling in the Attorney’s, but hell, we didn’t get a friendly letter from them asking if they could use our content?

Fortunately, one of Grape Thinking’s fields of expertise is Search Engine Optimization, and web marketing. Unlike many others who have probably been damaged by Vinolin’s blackhat tactics, we know how to handle the situation and ensure any damage done is restored. Granted this will take some time and consequentially money, the fun we get out of exposing Vinolin everywhere using our marketing savvy will more than make up for it.

Here is a list of some of the more popular sites being ripped off by Vinolin (here is the full list of the 1,050 blogs and wine industry sites):

Vinography
Good Grape
Lenndevours
Catavino
Fermentation
ReThink Wine Blog
Wine Spectator
Wine Library

If you found this article helpful, please write about this situation, and link back to this post, as it will help us to recoup some of the google rankings we may have lost. If you have any questions, or need any help with your SEO, feel free to request more information.

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