Thanks John!

Thanks Chris! I think as of now Google has turned back the dial enough to keep the abusers at bay. I’ve noticed several times where my various experimental schema has stopped appearing as much in search results.

– Chris

Thanks for the website design suggestion. I took you up on it and increased the font size and line height to make it easier to read.

1) Make sure in the by-line, your author name exactly matches the name on your Google Plus account.

2) In your Google account, add the website where you contribute.

3) https://plus.google.com/authorship verify an email address using the domain from the website where you contribute (greg@domain-where-I-contribute.com)

At the end of the day you always get what you pay for and you can ask our community, 99% of our members love blog engage and if you actually gave it a try without putting “thumbs down” you may find as well we are awesome people.

So for future reference, before you “review” a service, make sure you actually use it. Doing reviews like this tarnish your name as you clearly have no idea the value of benefit of Blog Engage without purchasing an account and using it for three months.

It’s like doing math in your head, which is great, but there comes a point when you can no longer reverse engineer the formulaic changes.

If you pride yourself on reactive strategy… no bueno amigo. One day you won’t figure it out.

Using the notes that Greg shared from Eric, Erin, Loren (and me!) is the way to go. Build relationships, help each other out, create and share value with your target audience… They’ll come knocking when they’re ready to buy.

Oh come on! Comment spam link building on a blog post on PANDA? What irony!

If I have a page that is an item list, is it just bloating my code to put the property “itemlistelement” in each line?

Mr. Free, its not any worse than using commenting for link building. You just have to be careful. If you make sure you submit to relevant directories in a way that would be useful for users, then you’re fine. Just like your comment – crafted with good enough English to almost pass for sloppy typos, somewhat on topic. If this blog wasn’t human moderated and I just let any comments through, I would get a penalty for linking out to anyone and so would your client who apparently sells voice over IP. The same would go for a directory – you would both get penalized for building links carelessly and for giving out links carelessly. You better be careful comment link building using your exact keyphrase for anchor text. People are saying Google is acting out against repetitive keyword anchor text links. You better be changing up the anchor text keywords you use for your commenter name as much as possible if you don’t want to get your client penalized.

yes, we’re on the case with this and the work should be complete fairly soon.

In terms of your accuracy question – it’s a slightly difficult one to answer directly. No keyword research tool (even the ones delivered from major search engines for PPC research) can deliver results that can be described as pin-point accurate. There’s no ‘gospel truth’ available to SEMs

Any tool used for keyword research is intended as a guide. We do recommend to all of our users (whether for the free or subscription tools) that it’s better to look at the relationships between the keywords rather than the raw numbers themselves (although the numbers, particularly the competition figures, do give a deeper insight) – it gives a much clearer overview – and that applies to using any KW research tools, not just ours.

In terms of Wordtracker’s accuracy, though, we have a representative sample of US searches that thousands of customers and free tool users have found helpful over the years.

I haven’t spent a huge amount of time recently researching other platforms, but I do know that many of them rely on data from Google AdWords, which, while it’s useful in many respects, has a heavier emphasis on PPC research than organic search, which is where Wordtracker’s strength emerges, particularly in terms of providing access to the long tail of organic search – the very language that real people use to find solutions to their web questions, be that as part of a buying cycle, or just a search for information.

Do let us know if you have any other questions.

All the best,

Mal

Hi Mal. Thanks for letting us know you are cleaning up this spam from WordTracker results. How would you say your accuracy compares to other platforms out there?

I’m Mal and I work with Wordtracker.

It’s certainly an interesting set of keywords you’ve found here – and you’re right, it’s clearly spam. Deeper analysis shows that it’s largely the same string of text that’s being used, prefixed by a different word each time.

We do have a ten-stage filtering process which is remarkably effective at removing most spam, but it is true that sometimes things do slip through. We’re not able to manually test every keyword that comes through our system, so it’s a good thing that we have diligent users who let us know when situations like this do arise.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that while SEO Blogger (the free tool you’re working with) is affected by this, our subscribers are able to easily filter out these offending keywords and still have just under 1,600 search terms available to assess.

The phrases you’re seeing in the database are there as a result of someone external to Wordtracker setting up a script and pointing it at the keyword entry field of one of our partner search engines and the keywords the script is using being passed on to us. The likelihood of it being the result of a virus in our own data chain can be ruled out through our own monitoring and analysis services.

I’ll be looking at cleaning these phrases from the database – it’s an unusual set of unwanted keywords, and it’s rare to come across a niche that’s so heavily spammed – this could easily have happened over the course of a couple of hours.

In terms of your comment about search volumes not comparing across different tools, this is normal and to be expected – every keyword research tool (including Google’s) uses a sample of data, and so those samples will vary from tool to tool. As you’re undoubtedly aware, they’re there to provide insight and guidance rather than gospel truths about search behaviour – so you’re exactly right to use multiple data sources for comparison.

Do feel free to contact us directly if you have any other questions about this – you can reach us at support@wordtracker.com

All the best,

Mal

Whatever is creating your title tag is probably appending the blog title to the post title tag. Troubleshooting how to remove it may be tricky. You can first check your SEO plugin configuration (if you are using one). You may be able to remove the name of the blog in your general configuration as well. If that doesn’t work, next, look at the template. You’ll have to dig through the template to find from where the post title tag is being pulled in order to remove the part that pulls in the blog title.

You can see if Google crawls any particular page by checking if it is in the Google index by searching site:www.website.com/category/subcategory/. You can also check the PageRank and cache date of that subcategory page. If you can find a subcategory page that does not have a lot of outbound links where your listing would work, you’ll get more of whatever PageRank is passing from that page.

Not having tried to use microdata tags in a forum setup like you see in classifieds like Craigslist, I assume you would not be able to add all the code for microdata. Generally, I think most community websites that allow users to create content don’t give the freedom to write any code you want, but only a few limited tags.