Details on sites reviewed - Pubcon 2006

Various sites were reviewed by the site review panel of 6 members along with Matt cutts. Each and every site was thoroughly analyzed by the site review panel. Then provided with explanations on the issues (details on the drawbacks of the site, where the sites are lagging behind and the areas neglected by the site owner) and suggestions on how to fix the issues and improve the site performance and ranking. The details of each site review and suggestions given are as follows.



1. The promotional gift company

The promotional gift company site had 20+ other sites running simultaneously with the same content overlapping one site content and pages to each other resulting in the confusion of various sites having same content for few words selected for discussion.

Suggestion: Include user feeds back such as comments, suggestions and forums rather than adding extra sentences, jumbling the existing words or changing the presentation to avoid duplicate content detection.

2. The Dollar Stretcher site

Issue: Doing well in Google but is banned in Yahoo

Reason: The site maps had hundreds of good articles all linked in the same page as the site was started in 1996. Next the site showed case mismatch in title displaying upper case URL titles to the user and lower case to Yahoo crawler and was banned in the suspect for cloaking. But the site had nothing to do with cloaking it was an issue of the site explorer.

Suggestion: Break up the site map chronologically, alphabetically or by topic and link to the site.



3. Real estate site

Real estate site had hundreds of pages where all the pages were in the format of about us or contact us.

Suggestion: Include lot of articles survey's and construction happening of the state, province or locality.

4. Chiropractor site

The Chiropractor site was good but had no pages with keywords. They wanted to rank for a particular keyword which did not appear any where in the home page of the site

Suggestion: Think of the keywords that the user would use and use the key phrases appropriately in the home page for which you want to rank. Rewrite each and every page with suitable key phrases that you wish to rank.

5. Real Estate licensing

Real Estate licensing site had 100's of varied topic domains under one person.

Comment: Running numerous sites doesn't get the attention got from the person running single site and hence doesn't show well.

6. Computer peripheral site

Issue: The computer peripheral site, a real good site with good content and unique back links but had long URL's of about 14 to 15 words of description along with the session id.

Suggestion: The URL's was asked to be shortened with 4 to 5 words and drop the session id if they possibly could.

Issue: The site had various categories whose URL's were "/s-subcat-NETWORK~.html".

Suggestion: Better if the category URL's were in the folder format as /network/...

7. The HiFi store also had 40+ varied sites as the real estate licensing site. As discussed earlier it will not obtain the attention that is required to do well in search engines.

8. Spa site

Issue: The Spa site had problems accessing the pages of the site hence she loaded her home page with loads of content. Even though it had problems the site was doing well in Google and Yahoo as it was a real good one. She specified that she was in search of a good seo for a long time.

Lot of people willingly agreed to do seo for this site for free and the site owner choose the right convention required for her site.

The topic that evolved through out the discussion was link exchange and its impact. There were lot of sites which had done excessive reciprocal link exchange which was of no use.

Suggestion: Instead of wasting lot of time in exchanging links one could concentrate on making the site more attractive and well marketed that would truly help in the site betterment.