Oct 09
20

Does ReachLocal effect your websites SEO rankings?

10 Comments

Is your websites search engine rankings at risk when you deal with ReachLocal?

I recently heard that a independent SEO / SEM talking to a ReachLocal Advertiser who claimed that a recent drop in search engine rankings from a ReachLocal advertisers website was the direct result of a ReachLocal campaign and swore that it was a result of a duplicate / mirrored website.

It’s time to put on the Shakes detective hat and finally give the ReachLocal SEO horror stories a rest while providing a helpful insight on why ReachLocal.com won’t effect your SEO stratedgy…

First let’s talk about the advertisers concern with ReachLocal. Prior to ReachLocal serving as this clients SEM company they contracted with a independent search engine marketing and search engine optimization specialist. The advertiser bought into ReachLocal’s pitch and decided to sign up… Shortly after that the client / advertiser noticed a significant drop in their organic or SEO rankings and was advised by his prior SEO/SEM provider that this was a direct effect from ReachLocal SEM Campaign and went on to say that ReachLocal clones websites – but is this the true reason?

I looked further at the advertisers website and noticed first off that the SEO tactics that were performed were very outdated, tacky and reckless a direct indication that ReachLocal was not to blame- this most likely was a direct result of poor SEO and Google Penalties.

I gave the SEO/SEM specialist the benefit of the doubt and decided it was time to see if ReachLocal was to blame for the recent SEO drop…

First – here is what I found:

  • ReachLocal applies a Meta No Index, No Follow Element in their headers
  • ReachLocal applies a Robots.txt file that bans Search Engines from Indexing.

I decided to use the standard site: attribute to see if in fact that specific site was cloned or indexed in Google – it was not. Next I contacted  the  company to see what  I found stakes up with their technology.

Dear Sean,

When ReachLocal configures campaigns, clicks are provisioned to a tracking entry URL, which may be either a simple redirect page or a frame-set referencing an advertising banner & a reference to the proxied website URL. These entry URLs are of the form customer_name.reachlocal.com. Proxy versions of actual customer web sites are always referenced as customer_name.reachlocal.net (or alternatively customer_name-px.rtrk.com)

So in the case cited, there are two domains involved. companyname.reachlocal.com and companyname.reachlocal.net

If you examine the page contents of companyname.reachlocal.com it is a pure redirect to companyname.reachlocal.net. There is no customer website content on the page associated with the URL companyname.reachlocal.com.

If you examine the URL companyname.reachlocal.net it has a very strict robots.txt file which prevents any search crawling. In this case if you check
http://companyname.reachlocal.net/robots.txt , you will see:

# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Our contacts at Google have assured us that they do not crawl any domains with robots.txt files configured in this way. Because search engines do crawl the initial redirect pages and see the target URL links, they may be aware of companyname.reachlocal.net/ link names, but as shown above, they are definitely not allowed to crawl any of the content on those pages. When you see the links in your example, there is no content or cached information because they did not actually read any contents on these target pages.

So the simple answer is, no, SEO is not affected by advertising with ReachLocal. We don’t duplicate. We don’t mirror.

Ok – so I’ve cleared up that there was NOT a duplication / mirroring issue does that knock out ReachLocal as a reason for the recent drop in rankings? Yes it does.

The original SEO/SEM that claimed that ReachLocal was the reason for the recent drops in search engine rankings is DEAD WRONG, in fact the timing of Google penalties in conjunction with the ReachLocal campaign going live was impeccable leaving the advertiser to believe it was ReachLocal when it wasn’t.

The SEO performed on this specific businesses website was poor, outdated, careless and reckless. There was a combination of Keyword Stuffing, Links that blended in with the background, links that blended in with the background after being clicked, link farms, domain farms and so on.

SEOs & SEMs get your fact straights and understand the technology before you drop defamatory remarks.

Advertisers - I will let you off the hook because many of you don’t know a lot about internet based technologies and how website crawls, indexing and rankings of sites work – that’s SEOs & SEMs jobs, all I ask is to be fair. Don’t base your decisions off of what you hear until you know and understand the facts behind how the technology works.

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This entry was posted on October 20, 2009 at 6:41 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Uncategorized by admin 10 Comments

10 Responses to "Does ReachLocal effect your websites SEO rankings?"

  • Marc C says:
    October 20, 2009 at 8:58 pm

    I was under the impression they did – thanks for this it really helped with my decision.

    Have you noticed all of the horror stories out there?

  • Palapple says:
    October 20, 2009 at 11:04 pm

    Thanks for sharing. Search engine optimization is indeed one of the most crucial areas in Internet marketing, it is a perfect bridge between technology and business….

  • Ben says:
    December 15, 2009 at 1:33 pm

    sorry – your review is flawed. You assume that the Google bots work perfectly with robots.txt and unfortunately that is simply not the case not matter what the folks at Google say. And if you were any good at SEO you would know this.

    I have personally seen way to many of these ReachLocal affects to accept your erroneous conclusions. You sample one site and state that it was the SEO consultants work. while that may or may not be the case, this has happened on hundreds of sites. Could it be that you are a ReachLocal rep and thus the reason you are willing to only work with one example to reach your conclusion?

    Ben

  • Natalie says:
    December 15, 2009 at 2:46 pm

    LMAO ‘if you we’re any good at SEO.’ I think Ben is a disgruntled ex-employee from RL what do you think Sean?

    Ben good post… I am a fellow SEO and your ridiculous outrageous post was at the very least humorous.

    I don’t want to speak for Sean but yes you are correct .htaccess if flawed that’s why they (ReachLocal) from what I can see takes the extra step and adds a Meta No Index file as well.

    Thank you,

    Natalie

  • admin says:
    December 15, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    Hey Ben thanks for stopping by:

    First – your post seems a bit disgruntled, is there something going on that we don’t know about? Are you an ex-employee of ReachLocal?

    Your assertion that I am an employee couldn’t be any more far fetched.

    ReachLocal obviously doesn’t affect SEO rankings and any true SEO will know this. Besides robots they in most cases include a Meta No,Index element.

    It’s pretty easy to see what websites make it by Google (this is the one semi-intelligent suggestion you made) with a simple site:reachlocal.net. (http://www.google.com/search?q=site:reachlocal.net&hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS309US309&filter=0).

    I have seen a few websites that have been indexed by Google from ReachLocal and have also seen the duplicated page was removed and had to affect on the advertisers website.

    If you would like any further information about results, they will be posted on the SEMShowdown.com results page.

    Best of luck!

  • internet marketing search engine specialist says:
    December 20, 2009 at 12:09 am

    Thanks, this is very informative since my goal is to get higher rankings and not to fail my clients. But we must also consider that SEO is somehow a trial and error practice in order to see the best result. thanks – Robert

  • Davin says:
    December 29, 2009 at 5:36 am

    found your site on del.icio.us today and really liked it.. Your peice on reachlocal was helpful for my decision.

  • How to Become an Expert - I am a spammer! says:
    January 2, 2010 at 5:48 am

    This is such an important topic, I wish more people would write about it, and not just spam other people’s ideas. Researched content is hard to find on the Internet these days.

  • beez says:
    January 22, 2010 at 5:10 pm

    This post is in support of Ben above. Beyond the fact that your logic is flawed, people should know that their natural search results are at risk if you create a proxy for your site for SEM purposes. It’s a fact. I have seen it happen. That is the important issue. People are placing faith in a Yellow Pages type mentality here: pay get listed…but what you should consider is IF a natural search provides a significant part of your business you should consider this carefully.

  • Gary Kawesch says:
    February 7, 2010 at 12:06 am

    I apologize if this is slightly off-topic, but it speaks to what may be ethical problems with RL.

    For about a year and a half, I was using ReachLocal for SEM. My in-house internet marketing director was handling this. Unknown to me, ReachLocal was commissioning him on my buys. I learned of this after my marketing director was let go. I suspect ReachLocal may know of situations like this, and simply may just look the other way. They claim they are unaware of any other situations like this ever occurring. With their enormous outside sales force, I doubt this is the case. I would love to hear from any other advertisers who have found out they have been paying either an employed or contracted internet marketing person or firm who in turn has been commissioned by ReachLocal.

    Incidentally, our organic results did drop while using RL, and our PPC ROI was MUCH IMPROVED after dropping them and doing it in-house.

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