Greetings All~
I've been reading the forum for several weeks, and wanted to wade in with a first question - please excuse any obvious blunders. I think I may have an interesting challenge for you, a sort of reverse-engineering of SEO.
I help run a small family business. Nine years of online presence and lots of simple, quality content has kept our site at the #1 spot in our category on most SEs just about since the time we started - no tricks, no ads, no link farming or exchanges, and we've never even submitted our site to any directories - just the best content we can produce. We're happy and very thankful.
Over time, we've gained a lot of positive online reviews and citations. We've also, unfortunately, gained a lot of negative hangers-on: malicious websites that post mean-spirited spoofs, and shady businesses that cite our name but have nothing to do with us. One such black hat, a porn site, actually ends up outranking a genuinely informative article on our work published by Georgetown University.
We don't mind giving legitimate businesses a boost, and we have no intention of directly contacting or discouraging the predator sites, but we'd like to find a way to harness our #1 ranking to "bless" the productive sites and help lift them up above the nastier ones on the SEs.
Here's the challenge: our site has always been extremely simple and clean. We've never had a links page and we'd very much like to keep it that way. Is there any way for us to make a hidden/non-published links page that the SEs can view and use, but that is not publicly viewable? We don't want to alter the established structure and image of our site - its longstanding simplicity is essential - so we would need to find a way of keeping these links out of sight. Would such a non-published page be of any use? Alternately, does anyone have any other recommendations?
Thanks for any insight, and keep up the great work on this highly interesting forum!
-Linus
I've been reading the forum for several weeks, and wanted to wade in with a first question - please excuse any obvious blunders. I think I may have an interesting challenge for you, a sort of reverse-engineering of SEO.
I help run a small family business. Nine years of online presence and lots of simple, quality content has kept our site at the #1 spot in our category on most SEs just about since the time we started - no tricks, no ads, no link farming or exchanges, and we've never even submitted our site to any directories - just the best content we can produce. We're happy and very thankful.
Over time, we've gained a lot of positive online reviews and citations. We've also, unfortunately, gained a lot of negative hangers-on: malicious websites that post mean-spirited spoofs, and shady businesses that cite our name but have nothing to do with us. One such black hat, a porn site, actually ends up outranking a genuinely informative article on our work published by Georgetown University.
We don't mind giving legitimate businesses a boost, and we have no intention of directly contacting or discouraging the predator sites, but we'd like to find a way to harness our #1 ranking to "bless" the productive sites and help lift them up above the nastier ones on the SEs.
Here's the challenge: our site has always been extremely simple and clean. We've never had a links page and we'd very much like to keep it that way. Is there any way for us to make a hidden/non-published links page that the SEs can view and use, but that is not publicly viewable? We don't want to alter the established structure and image of our site - its longstanding simplicity is essential - so we would need to find a way of keeping these links out of sight. Would such a non-published page be of any use? Alternately, does anyone have any other recommendations?
Thanks for any insight, and keep up the great work on this highly interesting forum!
-Linus