YourAmigo - Advantages / Disadvantages ??
Sep 252007
I have a potential client that is currently using the YourAmigo search engine optimization spider linker. Until now this has been completely off my radar.
I am hoping that someone will have experience of this technology/service and be able to let me have a brief list of the advantages/disadvantages. How does it compare with having a more standard SEF structure and traditional on page optimisation?
Thanks in advance.
Today is July 6, 2008
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Ok well i havn’t used it before, actually never heard of it until now. With that said i checked out the site and can’t say i’m too impressed.
Firstly if you do a site:www.theirdomain.com you will see the whole first page has duplicate Meta Descriptions. Actually nearly all pages do, then if you go over on to results pages 3,4 & 5 they have a few dozen pages with both identical Titles and descriptions which all say “About Us”
Having duplicate Titles, and Descriptions is SEO suicide. Also on the unique Title’s the prime Real Estate area (the far left or first words of the Title) they have their full domain name.
This is also really bad, you will naturally rank for www.yourdomain.com without having to put “www.yourdomain.com” as the first words of every page Title.
To have your company name on the end of your title such as “Bobs Meats” yeah no probs, but having the “full” URL first thing of every page is pretty bad.
I also randomly went to 2 of their clients and same thing, pages of duplicate Titles and Descriptions. One had dozens identical descriptions that were:
Skip to Content (Key ‘c’); Skip to Site Navigation (Key ‘n’); Skip to Local Navigation (Key ‘l’); Skip to Search (Key ’s’); Skip to Footer (Key ‘f’) …
So for me personally, i would most definately have to say i’ll pass thanks.
Another thing too Gary, i just Google searched my name here “SEO Carly” and another site came up first place with my comment above scraped from your Feeburner feed.
I hate these people. I have written to the contact email address with a polite request to stop scraping. Will see if that has any effect. Thanks for letting me know.
No probs Gary, they are a pain and alot of the reason i don’t worry about RSS.
Lets hope he has the decency to take your content down.
I agree with SEO Carly, their site really is pretty shoddy considering the services they supposedly offer.
It would be really interesting to see if their client list is real, I cant imagine that is, but who knows! I would also love to hear some real reviews from clients, but personally I would steer clear!
Just on the RSS Scraping issue, here’s something i whipped up you can do to stop/deter a site scraping your feed.. Although i don’t think it will work if your running Feedburner (i havn’t really used them) but it’s good for your own blog feed.
First you need to go to command prompt on your PC and type: ping rssthief.com
Obviously replace rssthief.com with their domain name, and the IP will be output so jot it down. Next add the following rule to your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^123.123.123.123
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://rssthief.com/feed
Replace the 123.123.123.123 with their sites IP you got from command prompt. Now one sneaky move you can pull is add the Rss Thiefs own feed URL to the second line.
What this will do is, each time their IP pulls a request for your feed your server will redirect their request to their own feed which will pull content they have already published from their own blog and repost it resulting in them publishing their own duplicate content.
Yeah i know sneaky but hey! You could also add the feed of a porn or pharma site to the last line (with the owners permission of course) which will throw adult content on the RSS Thiefs site.. Not a good look if they are running a blog on non-fiction books.