Search Engine Optimization

[BearState]

Having a new 1st time web site, SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) is a topic which very much interests me at the moment.

I'd like to get some feed back or ideas from BlueHost members as I'm sure most of the veterans here have had to jump through this hoop.

There's much to discuss, for example,

Google PR, rankings, improving rankings, Alexis Tool Bar, Press releases, sharing links, and so on ...

If I were to brainstorm some ideas, the following are intriquing to me ...


1) Doing Press Release Listings

I note a lot of sites do this to be found more frequently on search lists.

2) Link swaps of course,

3) Doing Forums

People come to trade ideas. Is it viable to attract people to a site?

4) Manipulation of Content, Keywords, Title Info and page names for better
visibility.

5) Adwords and other programs? DO they help?


I also would like to get some understanding of how the big search engines index.

Feel free to comment. I'm open to anything this thread produces that can help me achieve my goals.

[troy]

Ill be waiting to see some of the pro's responce to this.

[troy]

Just saw this on 101 top ranking site
Link Exchanges And Farms

Link farms are networks of heavily cross linked pages on one or more sites, with the sole intention of improving the link popularity of those pages and sites. Many of the major search engines consider such links as spam, do not use links from link exchange sites and link farms.
Incoming Links Mistaken As Link Popularity Boosters

There are two types of incoming links that some people mistake as links that will boost their link popularity;

Pay per click links, such as Overture.
Affiliate program provider links, such as Commission Junction & BeFree
These links do not link directly to your website, so they will not help your link popularity rating. These links actually point to their own website, then redirect to your website.

Here is an interesting site
http://www.addme.com/index.htm
Read about the ROR Sitemap Generator located here http://www.addme.com/ror-sitemap-generator.htm

[BearState]

Sounds like a trap to me! Link Farms?

This guy that came through here harping Gimme Clicks got my interest, but I tried his 'free' offer and haven't got a click out of that site and probably won't unless I pay. Sounds like a click farm!

Honestly, I think I got more clicks from people right here in this forum.

[BearState]

I have started to get some more info on SEO, in particular, the great mystery that lies behind why new sites must wait up to 90 days before being crawled or listed properly.

There's a theoretical thing called a 'sandbox' which appears to be a security box, as comparable to, but not the same as the Java JVM Sand Box implemented in Apache or Tomcat, if you know what I am talking about.

Google in particular, is associated with this Web Page submission sandbox in the great web mythology or hidden truths of internet culture and infrastructure. It is ( and no one will confirm or deny its existance ) in effect an algorithmic quarantine of all new sites until they are proven clean, an effort to eliminate spammers. It builds new sites up for a couple weeks and then obscures them for the remainder of that 90 day period, supposedly giving the site owners time to clean up the sites, build public visibility through press releases and other PR, tease out their keyword, content and title relevance and so forth.

So in fact, new sites are not even nearly, in the same ball park with sites that have been out there for a while, even if they are showing up in the listings. They get a different treatment. So patience is a virtue, TO BE SURE!

In association with this, it does appear that using Adwords or Adsense will get your site beyond the quarantine quicker as Google will give your site a more immediate Human hands on inspection instead of the colder, inpersonal, algorithmic eventuality.

Anyone wanna go play in the sandbox? It's been about 50 days now for me.

Go tell it to the Marines and they'll tell you that if you want sand, it's time to hit the beach.

[troy]

I can believe the sandbox myth
Out of the 10 or so websites I have built over the years I never had any luck with search placement (except one site) I payed a company to get it listed.
To much money lol

[BearState]

I guess you're saying it's not a matter of luck.

You must inteligently plan for it and make it happen.

:eek: Who me?

[duesouth]

This is how I do it. I have a few "bot pages" that the bots find. I also post at forums of others. Just google giganticusfemalus or giganticusart and you can see. Another thing is that in MS Publisher you can add "meta"tags that the bots find. I'm at the top for the dim witted people that look for me. :rolleyes:

[BearState]

You know, I think that helps, visiting and participating in forums as I've seen a lot of hits come from this BH Forum.

Blogs are also recommended as are 'certain' news groups.

[some guy from mars]

I am also new to web design and learned a great deal about SEO through reading a book called Search Engine Optimization For Dummies (Peter Kent). Basically, the author goes into detail on how to create search engine friendly pages and to avoid the things that search engines hate.

The first thing I did after launching my site was to register with the two major search directories - the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project - and started to exchange links with other sites with a subject matter similar to and or relevent to my own.

The goal is to increase your pages Page Rank- a value Google gives to a page based upon the number and types of links to it. Links are valuable: Not only do they bring a searchbot to a page, but they also bring people.

There is a literal wealth of material about the subject available online. My advise would be to type either search engine optimization or search engine optimization forums into the Google search engine. Good luck.

[dvessel]

Here are a few things I ran into.. Still learning so please correct me where I'm wrong. It seems -to me at the moment a lot of the ideas behind SEO are redundant and it exists because site operators never got the point of what the web is all about. Some aspects don't even need to be thought of in light of SEO if you stay inline with Tim Burners Lee's original idea behind the WWW.

When you create a hyperlink to another site, the context of that link should have some relevance. The more relevant, the better..

Lets say a respected site on cooking links to your own home made apple pie recipes. The page is all about apples and recipes and there you are smack in the middle. You get a big vote from them and your Google rank goes up. Yay! But what if this respected site links to another but it's on loosing weight. ..Hmm. tough call on this one. Is it relevant? It would seem to be in one sense and depending on the immediate context ,i.e. topic of the page it could turn out to be a strong vote as well but maybe not as strong as a link from a respected weight loss site -again, depends on context.

How about if the site on cooking links to a site on automobiles? Something totally unrelated. It could be an ad on the page or perhaps they have comments turned on and it goes off topic. Does it get a vote? It might get something but it wouldn't be nearly as strong as the vote made to your apple pie recipe.

This is why link farming doesn't work. Links intermingled with complete nonsense makes it very obvious that the page is trying to deceive. You deceive then you'll eventually fail. If you have an overwhelming need for page views but have content that no one cares to look at then it will be an exercise in frustration. Just be very careful if you have useful content and try to join these farms. They will flag you as being part of the problem and not get listed at all.

How about link exchanges where each site has their own legitimate content? Let's see, if site A is about cats & dogs and site B is about apartment listings can they bring each other up? Not likely unless they talk about apartment listings that accept pets. Of course, it depends on what they are ranked at to begin with to have any rank changes.

Another aspect is how the bots see your pages. Do your pages depend on the fact that javascript must be turned on? Or maybe the whole thing is done up in flash. Load up a text browser like Lynx and look at your site. How messy is it? If Lynx can't make heads or tails of the page then the bot will barf on it as well and move on.

There is this whole thing on the 'semantic web' and it goes very deep -another idea from Tim Burners Lee. It can be applied in a limited way on html pages. You want to quote someone then use the blockquote tag or 'q' tag. Use descriptive titles and headers. It's all part of the W3C's xhtml standards. The page structure also plays a part. Again, use heading tags correctly and use it to outline your pages. There is this whole thing on accessibility for braille readers and others. Most developers won't care but it will get you into the habit coding your pages in a clean way, it can lead to better indexing.

Taking about what could be happening with sandboxes is fruitless. This topic has been beat over countless times. Search what's already out there and then take your next step.

Mr. Mar's recommendation on submitting to Directories is a good idea. There are some others in the links below.

http://www.w3.org/
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters

[dvessel]

In association with this, it does appear that using Adwords or Adsense will get your site beyond the quarantine quicker as Google will give your site a more immediate Human hands on inspection instead of the colder, inpersonal, algorithmic eventuality.


Sites using Adsense do not get different treatment from Google. Look in their help pages. It's in there somewhere.

[BearState]

What I've come accross is that if you use Adwords, you get someone ( a person ) from google looking over your site instead of the algorithm and that like in all things has better determinate power.

My site shows every symptom of being in the sandbox.

1) I can only search on google by my site home page name.
2) I can not search for pages by phrases in my home page or content or keyword meta tags.
3) Rarely, I can combine words from my title and find my site.

No, I don't think the sand box is a myth. It makes sense even. To become viable, you have to persist and endure that initial wall. In the leasing business, the same thing is sometimes done, demanding a big deposit and the first FULL month payment up front, pro-rating the 2nd month.


But 'nuff said on that. This is about the 3rd or 4th time that dummies book has been mentioned and maybe I'll give it or a similar book a read.

[BearState]

When you create a hyperlink to another site, the context of that link should have some relevance. The more relevant, the better..



Mine is a special flavor of relevance. My site is an advertising site.

Not just a specific category advertising site, but an international any product, any service ad site.

Right now, I'd like to concentrate on real-estate industry promos, so I have added some links for real estate agents, etc.

Even that category is big, land development, mortgages, home equity loans, real estate brokers and agents, time shares, property management, construction, land scaping, contractors, insurance and on and on.

And they are all relevant to each other, but DIVERSE. And they are all relevant to my service, but only one diverse sub group.

Further, I can't just look for advertisers! No way! To be successful, I have to look for 2 sides of a coin, shoppers and advertisers.

It is all relevant, but again, DIVERSE!

So what am I up against, search engines defining me as a spammer because my site's subject matter is DIVERSE?

Variety is the spice of life my friends. It's the only thing my old man ever said the ever made sense to me.

Google has DIVERSE content. Are they spammers?

Vitality in anything requires a good dose of DARWINISTIC diversity.

Try to stuff everything into one neat little labelled container and you've got extinction headed your way.

Are you trying to say that survival on the web is the antithesis of common sense?

[dvessel]

What I've come across is that if you use Adwords, you get someone ( a person ) from google looking over your site instead of the algorithm and that like in all things has better determinate power.

My site shows every symptom of being in the sandbox.


There might be something called a 'sandbox'. It took about a month for my site to be fully searchable and I've heard about others taking the same amount of time. But what does this have to do with adwords? Can you prove that adwords will get you listed sooner in Google searches? Google claims the two are completely independent.

And I'm all for diversity and the web has it. Google can take care of it.

Taking your example, yeah... nothing is isolated. If one thing doesn't connect to another in some beneficial way then there's no reason to have these connection at all. It would be plain chaos and things just wouldn't be as they are.

[BearState]

Ok, so it seems to be established that search engines love to see links pointed in to your site and preferably, the links should be relevant to your site content.

I've finally put up a links page and have requested some link exchanges through by SEO submission provider.

It appears that another important aspect of links to your site, for Google at least, is the Google PR for the site linking to yours.

I'm told in other words that for Google, the return is greater if you have a PR6 site linking to yours than if you have a PR3 linking in.

So OK, I ran a press release with PRWEB ( 2 actually ) and those boys have got to have a PR up there near the clouds somewhere. I don't notice that it helped, except that the press release itself generated traffic to my site.

I think the return is greater not because anything Google does, but simply because a PR6 site is visted more and if they link to you, you have greater chances of getting hits from them, than from a PR3.

BTW: I suppose, let me add ... anyone want to exchange links with my site? Click my profile and send email to request.

[dvessel]

I just checked my page rank for the first time and it's ranked at 6. Totally unexpected. The only thing I was concerned about was document structure and the content. Look at it in Lynx if your curious. It's still slim on the content but what I have Google seems to like. The only thing I submitted was a a Google sitemap.

[dvessel]

I think the return is greater not because anything Google does, but simply because a PR6 site is visted more and if they link to you, you have greater chances of getting hits from them, than from a PR3.


My site is very low traffic and it's PR6 so go figure. I've read some exchanges on people getting huge hits when they pay for the listing. About $200 and it get's handled better and ends up spreading to other sites. It could be true or a total baloney. Time will tell.. but unless you are gaining revenue on a page view basis it doesn't mean much unless the content people are searching for is inline with the ad. That's why adwords succeeded where random banner ads failed.

[dvessel]

I found this very interesting. Take a read. (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/01/the-roundabout-seo-test)

Bunch of test performed on rankings. It gives a pretty good idea on what's affecting search results.

[Vladd44]

dvessel,

If you don't mind me asking, did you buy your domain name for 5 years?

I have been debating purchasing my domain's from now on for a full 5 years. I have been renewing it annually, but every indication is it plays a factor worth at least 1 point of pr.

I cannot seem to get past pr5 even though I get tolerable traffic.

Also regarding the sandbox, While it is not substantiated, I have little doubt that it exists. However there is a way to work around it. Set up content as a subdomain of an established domain with pages already indexed. Link to the subdomain from your domain and let google spiders do their work and index them. Google doesn't penalize the subdomain in any sandbox manner. After a week or two (Depending on how frequently google comes to your site and whether you do google sitemaps or not) the new pages will be indexed.

Then simply do a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file to the other domain name for the subdomain. Google will then take a couple weeks to update to the new location and your new domain will now be out of the google sandbox.

I have played around with this and was pleasantly surprised at the result.

[BearState]

I found this very interesting. Take a read. (http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/01/the-roundabout-seo-test)

Bunch of test performed on rankings. It gives a pretty good idea on what's affecting search results.

Ha Ha! These people are kindred spirits. They just have to experiment!

Ok, so I'll tell you how I got zapped experimenting online, I guess, trying to increase hits to my site.

I discovered that on dial-up modem connections, the IP address changes often. So I found that if I click from my home page to a sub page and back again repeatedly I could register UNIQUE clicks from several IP addresses.

I don't recommend anyone do this however, because after a while, the ISP must have gotten bothered by my experiments and I wound up with a bill from the phone company for toll charges, which has never happened before in the several years that I had that dial-up ISP. Having thus ruined my ability to log in dial-up w/o toll charges, I cancelled them and shall suffer the toll charge bill, I guess. I wish they'd of sent an email saying "Hey stop that or we'll zap you!", but they didn't.

The world turns. And the analytic in me will likely continue to evaluate things and try to understand them under the skin instead of just accepting them rote. Admittedly, it's nicer to read in credible form, the results of other people's experiments and save the bother of scorching my own thumb.

Searching by my first name doesn't find me on any list, 'The Life of Brian' and Brian Kernighan have nothing to fear from me!

:rolleyes:

[dvessel]

If you don't mind me asking, did you buy your domain name for 5 years?

I have been debating purchasing my domain's from now on for a full 5 years. I have been renewing it annually, but every indication is it plays a factor worth at least 1 point of pr.


Nope, a year is long enough for me. Renew when the time comes.


I cannot seem to get past pr5 even though I get tolerable traffic.

Also regarding the sandbox, While it is not substantiated, I have little doubt that it exists. However there is a way to work around it. Set up content as a subdomain of an established domain with pages already indexed. Link to the subdomain from your domain and let google spiders do their work and index them. Google doesn't penalize the subdomain in any sandbox manner. After a week or two (Depending on how frequently google comes to your site and whether you do google sitemaps or not) the new pages will be indexed.

Then simply do a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file to the other domain name for the subdomain. Google will then take a couple weeks to update to the new location and your new domain will now be out of the google sandbox.

I have played around with this and was pleasantly surprised at the result.

Glad it worked out for you. Is waiting a month and a half so bad though? Well, if your a business it is I guess but how do you know the little trick is not factoring into the rank also? It's stated on the Google help page. Anything to trick the engine even if it isn't explicitly listed as a bad thing it could harm your rank. I'll keep it in mind when I run into some unreasonable client. :p

[dvessel]

Ok, so I'll tell you how I got zapped experimenting online, I guess, trying to increase hits to my site.

I discovered that on dial-up modem connections, the IP address changes often. So I found that if I click from my home page to a sub page and back again repeatedly I could register UNIQUE clicks from several IP addresses.

I don't recommend anyone do this however, because after a while, the ISP must have gotten bothered by my experiments and I wound up with a bill from the phone company for toll charges, which has never happened before in the several years that I had that dial-up ISP. Having thus ruined my ability to log in dial-up w/o toll charges, I cancelled them and shall suffer the toll charge bill, I guess. I wish they'd of sent an email saying "Hey stop that or we'll zap you!", but they didn't.

The world turns. And the analytic in me will likely continue to evaluate things and try to understand them under the skin instead of just accepting them rote. Admittedly, it's nicer to read in credible form, the results of other people's experiments and save the bother of scorching my own thumb.


You don't happen to be a ninja by any chance? Sneaking click to your own site.? :rolleyes: Curious, how much did you gain from the clicks vs. the loss? -jking

I wouldn't take the results from that page too seriously. It does give some indication on what google thinks are important.

[BearState]

You don't happen to be a ninja by any chance? Sneaking click to your own site.? :rolleyes: Curious, how much did you gain from the clicks vs. the loss? -jking

I wouldn't take the results from that page too seriously. It does give some indication on what google thinks are important.

Keep in mind that many recommend clicking your site at least once a day, even my SEO submission site. There's nothing wrong with clicking your own site. Further, many, including SEO submission site and Alexa recommend having your friends, family and anyone else you can get, clicking your site. That's carved in HTML text in many places on the web. It's not sneaking to click your own site. There are from my experience however, some things you may discover that can scorch your thumb, related to clicking your own sitie.


Answer to your other question ...

Gains:

1) about 17 to 30 clicks per day for a brief time.
2) knowledge that unique visits does factor in positively. Google PR3 was achieved, but lost just after cancelling the dialup and click count fell away. Alexa ranking went to under 1 million. The UNIQUE visit count does play into the equation.
3) some elumination on the nature of the 90 day wait and how to build rankings.
4) a knudge to get rid of my dial-up ISP and an email box that was full every day with spam and nothing more and costing me about $30.00 per month.

Losses:

1) $104.00
2) One scorched thumb
3) A slight feeling of embarrassment for being a knucklehead


I have to tell you, this 90 day wait thing is a tease. You work like crazy to build a web site, get it hosted, post press releases and so forth and you find yourself facing the great wall. And day after day, you have this idea in your head that you need to find out if there's something wrong with the way you did your meta tags, your keywords and so forth. And you haven't a clue, so you find yourself driven to poke around and try to find answers. So the losses are incidental.

The gains did not necessarily come as explained above, but from folks who have provided answers on forums, BH and another that I take part in. The experience of others, again, is nice to have. Even if they are in the sandbox too, they have eyes and are likely pressed to do their own investigating and digging. The sharing of info in forums, gives me many eyes and many minds evaluating and investigating and thus many answers and to the point, re-assurances that it'll all work out in the end.


Now, where do I find that Google HELP PAGE, that was just mentioned in this thread?

:rolleyes:

[BearState]

Here's a site you might want to look at if you are interested in the SandBox:

http://www.googlerank.com/ranking/Ebook/google-sandbox.html


The site 'googlerank.com' also has much to say about how google goes about crawling sites, guarding against spammers, extras, and more. If this is an actual Google site, it is perhaps, the difinitive source. But ...

There doesn't appear to be anything on the site that states that this is an actual Google web site. So how you regard the content is up to you.

[dvessel]

Could care less about the sandbox and keep in mind PageRank is not open. They could tweak their algorithms and there goes your rank or even worse you get banned for trying to change your rank artificially.

Please tell me your joking thinking that could it could possibly be related to google. :confused:

[BearState]

Please tell me your joking thinking that could it could possibly be related to google. :confused:

Clearly, the site is related to Google, because that's what the site attempts to describe ... but no, the site does not appear to be an actual Google site.

Whether there is any truth in what they state regarding how Google functions, how bots crawl and rank pages or antything else, is speculable, same as whether there is any info of value there - speculable. I did scan some of the side bar links and find some of the info of interest.

You seem pessimistic about this googlerank site and the sandbox theory. Why?

Here's the actual Google site that deals with web sites submitting to Google:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/

I just found it and will read it first before going back an doing some compares on the other non-Google site.

Never dismiss information without checking it out, even if it is misinformation. To close oneself off from all sources of intelligence is to wear blinders. ID it as misinformation and learn what not to do at the very least.

I think I put it out before that I have very Darwinistic 'Diversity' view on things and when it comes to it, part of diversity is the good and the bad. Both pills need to be swallowed. You can't defend against wrongs by simply ignoring them and not coming to terms with understanding their natures.

Of course, you don't want to jump off a cliff just to learn what it's like to die at the end of the fall.

[Vladd44]

Glad it worked out for you. Is waiting a month and a half so bad though?

Unfortunately I have seen sites sit for far longer than that. Original content with specific keywords designated that in themselves are not in high competition. However they could easily fall into the category of competing with much more competitive keywords in spite of the fact that it is not the specific keywords being sought after.

I choose not to use any blackhat methods of seo, and was hesitant to try the 301 redirects i mentioned earlier. But the bottom line is 301 redirect is there specifically for the purpose of being able to move pages on a site to a new location or new domain name.

I wouldnt suggest people do it to induce scraper sites, or other subpar content, nor would I suggest adding masses of subdomains at one time in this manner, but it seems to not have any negative impact to do one or two at a time.

[dvessel]

Bear, I don't think you understand what I'm saying here. Look at my previous posts. Never claimed "the sandbox" doesn't exist, it was about Adwords. Whatever they are doing in their so called sandbox. It doesn't worry me one bit.

Google is a private company. PageRank and all the algorithms they use for calculating searches are not openly available. They have the patent and they can tweak and change things all they want when you least expect it. One of the driving factors of these tweaks comes from people finding ways of trying to manipulate the search results.

I'm not saying the information in GoogleRank.com is not interesting. I read it, but to accept it so easily is plain silly. All I'm reading from them is that the "SEO community" says so. No proof nor evidence.. Even if some things were true, how long before it changes? Who knows. My main point from my first post is that if you do it right, all this trickery is not needed. It's definitely useful to know some general guild lines but when it's all said and done, if you don't have the content, you don't get the juice -ranking. As always, content is king..

[BearState]

Joon,

I don't think you're seeing my point(s).

1) I'm not perfect and am new to having a web site.
2) I want to understand how to make my web site succesful.
3) I want to understand whether my web site is optimal
4) I know there are others who are in the same situation and this thread will likely help them too.


I am not looking for trickery, but perhaps my dial-up modem experience has you believing so. That was an experiment to try and see how things react. There's no way that 17 to 30 clicks from ME is going to make my site really, to put it colloquially, click!

It's a business I want to start here. Not a just for fun web site. So I have to consider 'business intelligence' within the domain of the biz. And it comes from both sides of the coin, ligitimate info and bogus or misinformation. It plays in.

There are others who have heard of 'sand box' and are newbies like me and are trying to come to grips with 'knowing the ropes'. The thread is doing just fine in that respect. There's already info here that I find illuminating and that others I'm sure, appreciate.

My SEO provider has a blog and in it, the president tries to be helpful. I've read that

'Search engine providers can get angry if you submit too frequently'.

But then there is contrary evidence that they actually want you to submit frequently and further, that there are reasons why you should. Your page gets old in the database and needs refreshing. Some sites are very dynamic, to the point that their content changes 'DAILY'. Do search engines re-index that frequently? Apparently, for some high content turn-over sites that are very popular, they do.

The point here is that I've been given conflicting advise. Advise from the SEO provider not to submit frequently and advise from another quarter that it is a good thing to refresh you submission periodically and that the Search Engines find this desirable.

Now I can put 2 and 2 together and understand that Search Engines probably don't want to be over-run re-analyzing the same page for small fixes daily. They no doubt want you get all the fixes done in as few passes as possible. Further, if you are a submission provider, you probably don't want all your members submitting every day. You get a monthly fee and there's no need to inspire thousands of members to be banging away submitting their pages to hundreds of engines every day. But where am I being mis-informed? How frequently can I change my pages and resubmit? The submission provider does it automatically once a month if I set it up to do that. And I can do it manually and have, with matter of factly, positive effect when I did.

My point: It pays to gather intelligence regarding this business and it pays to learn.

It does not pay to be afraid to try. And further, it doesn't pay to let your mind be controlled by the pieces of the puzzle. Your mind should control the pieces. 'I don't care' is not a good perspective. It seems to demonstrate a predisposition where certain beliefs ( pieces of the puzzle ) are in control. Throw all the pieces down, look at them and compare, tear them apart and give your mind the liberty from preconception to be determinate.

[dvessel]

:D Your a funny guy. I don't want to bore and I've said all I want for now. Good luck with your business.

[hyperlin]

Try this link...it's probably one of the most helpful I have found and they probably have something like this on Yahoo or some of the others, as well. I followed it most of the way and did what I was supposed to do. I'm being crawled now by 4 engines (Googlebot, MSNbot, AskJeeves and some unknown bot).

https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

I'm not ranking really in the engines, but I know that my keywords probably need more granularity. I could use some pointers if anyone has any, also. Thanks.

[BearState]

Try this link...it's probably one of the most helpful I have found and they probably have something like this on Yahoo or some of the others, as well. I followed it most of the way and did what I was supposed to do. I'm being crawled now by 4 engines (Googlebot, MSNbot, AskJeeves and some unknown bot).

https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

I'm not ranking really in the engines, but I know that my keywords probably need more granularity. I could use some pointers if anyone has any, also. Thanks.

Thanks Hyperlin,

I had found the google webmaster link myself and had read through it and have started making some changes to comply with what it advises.

I have further found a very interesting web site that allows visual feedback on web page suitability for bot crawling.

http://www.widexl.com

This site has some analyzers that have just helped me solve some really strange things that were going on in my pages. The analyzers provided by my Search Engine Submission provider didn't come close to doing what widexl.com has just done for me.

The combination of reading Google's webmaster help pages and using widexl.com have done wonders for my pages and I haven't even resubmitted yet. Still working on making adjustments based on what I now understand.

For example, I had a problem where Google's listing for my site showed a Javascript Not Enabled warning that I implemented in the page. It should not have done this in my mind as I thought it would use the Description Meta Tag. But instead, Google digs into the body of the page and uses the first paragraph it finds, apparently structured to assume that the first paragraph would be descriptive of page content. It does not take into account that some knuckleheads like me might do some setup chores there.

The metatag analyzer of widexl.com shows not only feedback on title, description and keyword relevancy to page content, but also shows what the listing will look like ( exactly how it will look on Google ).

Relevancy of Title Words, Discription Tag Words and KeyWords to page content are all important and widexl.com's results make this abundantly clear. I now have solved the Javascript Not Enabled problem, improved title, description and keyword relevancy on most of my pages to 100% and have made some other changes that had I not, would have left Google refusing to index some of my pages. For example, widexl.com declares that certain words will cause the crawler to stop ( stop words ). And of course, I had stop words in use.

There are also 'poison words' and 'common words' that will cause problems.

How do I know? ... my pages to be sure, had poison words and common words in titles, descriptions and keywords.

widexl.com has been a great help. Results are still pending my completion of changes and resubmission, but I expect the best.

I'd like to share all that I've just now been discovering, but this will have to do for the moment as my priority is to revamp my site.


Has anybody else used the widexl.com site? What has been your experience afterwards?

[BearState]

When I was a young man, I had told my best friend that I wished I were a happy idiot. Because a happy idiot didn't care and didn't bother to rationalize and therefore was free of the pain of trying to make sense of an unsound world. A happy idiot doesn't care who he wakes up with, just so long as she didn't care either.

When dealing with Google, I again wish I were a happy idiot. If I were a happy idiot, I'd have slopped together some HTML and probably got it pretty near right, purely by accident, as I'm sure many people do.

But no, I tinker. I rationalize and try to build into my web page features that make sense.

The biggest thing I 've learned about search engine optimization is that that indexing is not simply a matter of looking up keywords. Oh NO!!

How simple it would be, if it were. But if it were, the thieves and deceptive practice clowns out there would have a field day. And so, Google is a mine field and it pays to be a happy idiot. But maybe not even ...

To really understand how it works, one must look at it this way.

1) You write an HTML page ( consider it purely text ).

2) You scan all your text and pick out words for your title or you intentionally put your title into the text body. The words in your title must come from the body of text on the page, most probably from the first paragraph or two which introduce the subject matter of your page.

3) You repeat step two, but this time for your description meta tag. The words for the description must exist in the body text of your page just like those for the title did.

4) Finally you choose keywords and ideally, these must all come from the body text of the page and include the chosen words you put in the title and description.

This is what is termed page relevance.


Now some twists and turns ...

5) There are allowable lengths for title, description and keywords which should not be exceeded.

6) You should not use more than 20 keywords.

7) You should not use certain words which are deemed poison, stop and common words.

8) You should not idx:n and other script attributes.

9) You should avoid doing anything which might be seen as an attempt to hide text.

Want to warn your users to turn on JAVASCRIPT? Ha Ha! Try putting that somewhere where it is not found and displayed in the search listing! You'd think it should go right up front in your page, right? So how do you avoid having the search engine find it and display it? You don't want it displayed, except when the user doesn't enable javascript for some reason.

<noscript>
Hey Stupid! Turn on JAVASCRIPT!
</noscript>

Where does that get displayed on the page? In the search index listing?

ABC COMPANY Hey Stupid! Turn on JAVASCRIPT!
A company for the ABC block loving kid who hasn't graduated to paper and pencil yet.


All right! All right!

That's enough frustration for today.

Toss'n 'n turn'n time tonight.

[wirewolf]

Hi BearState,

I visited your site and I did a all-in-site site search of your domain on Yahoo, MSN and Google.

1 - Keywords and Description meta tags are nice, and you should include them, but they have lost the importance they once had. The search bots tend to ignore them now. Too many sites spam them (over write and repeat). Your images are nice, but bots can't crawl images. Content is KING! You need more descriptive, meaningful text on your pages!
2 - Lose the java script links. Bots can't follow them. Over 76% of web users have java disabled in their browsers and you are not going to convince them to turn it on! And that Java warning is showing up in the Titles of some of your pages. Not good! You don't want a warning associated with any of your pages.
3 - I see all of your pages are in php. One word - Mod Rewrite! They then will show as html pages (Bots LOVE html). Bots do not like php extensions. php are scripts and then output to templates, but the url still shows as php. Mod Rewrite is a neat little trick on Apache Servers (Bluehost has Mod Rewrite available) that will take a php page on the fly and make it appear as html. So - http:// www. blah.com/blah.php will show as http:// www. blah.com/blah.html
4 - Lose the left side menu bar (its too confusing and will make more room for content) and keep just the top one. Have it show on every page. Simple navigation is very important! Include a footer with a link back to your home page, and About Us page (users want to know about you and what you are offering along with your other footer links.
5 - Move your ''Welcome to AVenues+, '' message to the top of that page!!!
6 - Your domain ''home'' points right to "wvcom.php", change it to index.php (default in any directory is to index.htm, index.html, index.shtml, and then index.php) then rewrite your home page url to ''http://www.avenuesplus.com/" or "http://avenuesplus.com/" (you can lose the www, that is now assumed).
7 - Create a RSS Feed, create and send out weekly or monthly newsletters / bulletins, write articles related to your venue once in a while, find, join and post in forums related to your venue (be sure to have your site url in your signature).
8 - Create a Blog or a Forum, if you want, for customers to discuss common issues.
9 - On this page, http://www.avenuesplus.com/vnucns.php you have Buttons showing up in the middle of no where and a drop down menu that doesn't work.
10 - I see you have disabled ''Right Click". Don't waste your time. Still, 70% of users are on Internet Explorer and they can still can download using IE's nifty little menu bar (I hate that thing!)
11 - If you can, create an Archive of pages in plain text (strips out all the graphics and formatting) with html extensions (Bots love plain text!!!), but include links back to the actual formatted pages.
12 - Don't fret over Google page ranking. They change their search algorithms so much, it's impossible to keep up. I had some pages that were 7/10 one day and then 3/10 the next. Then a week later went to 5/10. Go figure?
13 - Google AdWords. Don't cost you a thing and they do help. And Yahoo (submit your RSS Feed and it crawls your site hourly or daily for updates).

Not being over critical, but if you want the search engines to start crawling and indexing your site, many of the above are important to implement.

After much hard work, I now have the major Bots (MSN, Yahoo, Google, among others), visiting my site and indexing pages on a daily basis. One day I went to view my ''whos's on line'' page, and most of the anonymous users where MSN (crawling six pages), Yahoo (crawling 15 pages) and Google (crawling ten pages), all at the same time.

John

[BearState]

Wirewolf,

Thanks for your input.

I was checking my stats this morning and saw that somebody was out there hitting every page, several times.

This is my first web site and yes, it was written by hand and it still needs some work.

You think you've read the book(s) on HTML, PHP and JAVASCRIPT and then you host your site and whammo, you find that the search engines have re-written the book(s).

Wonderful learning curve.

I'll look over your suggestions and yes, many of them are already clear to me from what I've learned thus far. At the moment, I find myself a bit flustered, but fully cognizant and realizing that I have to tweak and learn. You say you had a hard time getting there ... well, I suppose that is encouraging ... that you got there after all that work. I look and wonder if I somehow muffed it and spoiled my chances permenantly, but your post helps to put that doubt in the closet. Thanks.

Being search bot friendly is a topic that is not clearly defined on the web and incredibly, not even mentioned in the tomes that detail how to write html, javascript, php, asp, jsp and so forth.

I was wondering how I could get away from default.html and you've nicely answered that question too.

Right now, I'm taking a break from this whole thing to clear my head and catch up with other non-related things and fight off the mental block that this bot-friendly issue has put in my way. I might tickle you later by e-mail if you don't mind to tap your experience further - OK?

Again, thanks for your most valued input.


:)

[wirewolf]

...Right now, I'm taking a break from this whole thing to clear my head and catch up with other non-related things and fight off the mental block that this bot-friendly issue has put in my way. I might tickle you later by e-mail if you don't mind to tap your experience further - OK?

Again, thanks for your most valued input.
You're welcome.

Good! Some times you can't see the forest for the trees. When I get frustrated writing a script that doesn't want to work, I'll stop, and leave it for a while. When I come back to it later, and boom! There's the answer in front of my face and I'll go, ''Duh!' It was right in front of me all the time. It's good to get away and clear the old noggin.

I did a lot of research, took a lot of time and implemented changes one at a time. It does work, but the biggest thing you need is patience. It won't happen overnight.

If you want to contact me, send a PM and I'll give you my email address.

One more bit of advice. Don't waste your money with submission sites. You might as well throw it in the toilet bowl. Unless you want to pay extremely high fees to Google, Yahoo etc to be sure you're at the top of every search page. You may notice Amazon search ads showing in most search results pages. You don't even want to know what that costs!

Good luck, John

[BearState]

Wirewolf,

Right now, I use Engineseeker for submission w. monthly charge.

It has a bunch of utils for monitoring the site and promoting link partnerships, et al. But it also has a forum ( a rather dead forum compared to BH ) where questions might be answered.

If you are aware of free submission sites, let me have the list.

Also, your initial post eludes that you have a way to check your page activity. How's that free?

:rolleyes:

[free2001]

What ever you do just dont hire that guy they link on the control panel. 100keywords. That guy doesnt know how to do anything just charges you then wont return your calls. Its one guy that runs it out of his house.

[wirewolf]

...............If you are aware of free submission sites, let me have the list.....I never used submission sites, it's a waste of time. You have to do it on your own. The two most important changes I made where Mod Rewrite and to add content on my home page that had a lot of keywords geared toward my particular venue. You should have very little graphics on the home page, you want text. The home page is the first thing that gets the search bots attention.
You could create a home page in pure html, little graphics, lots of content, with your menu bar, then with links to the rest of the site. Once you are happy with the way it looks, don't change it.....Also, your initial post eludes that you have a way to check your page activity. How's that free?...I run a Forum, the same program as Bluehost uses, vBulletin. If you go to the forums home page Whos' Online - http://www.bluehostforum.com/online.php you'll see listings of what users and guests are doing. As an Admin, I see more info, especially about the search bots. Also I have a script that catalogs daily activity on the site - http://shipmodeling.net/vb_forum/statistic.php?do=spider and emails me a daily report.

Copy and paste these four Keywords into Yahoo, Google or MSN searches- model ship boat forum

Most times my site is the first one listed or at least in the first ten. Statistics have shown that most web users don't go much past the second page of search results. You want to work your way up from being on page 256 of some 3,546,674 search results.

You may see two other sites show up with similar searches, http://shipmodeling.info and http://www.cafepress.com/modelships . Those are my other two sites. All three cross link to each other.

Yahoo's indexing to date: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=model+ship+boat+forum&ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&vst=0&vs=shipmodeling.net

John

[BearState]

Thanks for the suggs.

One of the most insightful clues that a home page should be text is that Google's Webmaster help pages state that running the page in Lynx should provide clues as to how to improve its bot-friendliness.

Lynx however, is one of those 'download source and compile it yourself' deals, for those of you who read Google's suggestion and are considering it. Of course to compile, you need a compiler ...

The other uninspiring Google offering is sitemaps, for which apparently, your webhost needs to provide 'python' to use and if they do, you need to know how to use python or follow Google's instructions to the letter ( I haven't even looked to see how vague those instructions are). Further, you'll be breaking Google's Terms and Conditions if your web site is commercial as sitemaps is for 'personal use only'. That means to me that hardly anyone can use sitemaps, because 1) personal web sites are probably 80 percent python unaware and 2) 80 percent of other web sites are probably commercial in some way - don't forget those personal sites may sell ad space to get a break.

Sitemaps BTW, appears to be the only way Google provides to do many chores such as 1) removing old submissions, RE-INCLUSION, diagnosing problems, etc., etc., etc.

How totally amusing!! Google is a wall in so many more ways than just getting the bots to run your site and get indexed. It's downright unfriendly. But still, at least they offer a method - something other sites don't.

I may be wrong however. Python has been out there for a while and maybe most personal web site owners know it as well as html. But then, we've seen some web site owners don't quite know html. FrontPage and other template and page generators may jump the need to know html hurdle - but hey, do those same folks know python?

Yep, let me repeat it ... How totally amusing!! :D

The world wide web has been around for some time now and this type of thing seems like the stone-age to me.

Where do I find the smiley with the huge occular ridges, massive jaw and cranial ridge?

[BearState]

[QUOTE=wirewolfCopy and paste these four Keywords into Yahoo, Google or MSN searches- model ship boat forum[/QUOTE]

This is nice, but if I were searching for this, I'd enter model ship building

That's what your site is about, is it not?

But I can already see that if a site is new and has a low ranking, no, you don't want to use the most logical entry, because then you'd wind up on page 2,238,482. So you gamble on a alternate phrase like ship modelling or model ship builders forum or model ships, boats or hand crafting model ships or model ship materials and techniques

or maybe the model ship design and any number of other alternatives that might have a high surfer entry probability, but low website keyword probability.


You just gotta test by searching and using.


But I've seen it advised also, that the file names you use should be named like your key words. For example, instead of msb.html, make it model_ship_builder.html and another possible subpage, ship_modelling_forum.html, instead of smodforum.html.

So, I have to look at revamping a number of things on my site, now that I've gained a little insight into how indexing works.

avenusplus.html is likely not a good file name for my site, because not being famous, who the heck will search for avenuesplus? Next to no-one.

There is a better probability that they will search for advertising_space or something like that.

Much to think about.

[97th FLoor]

Here is my 2 cents on SEO

Best Way to get indexed in Search engines get a link from a site that is indexed and has a high Page Rank in Google. The higher the page rank the more often the page gets revisited and cached. Don't tell the SE's about your site get other sites to tell them about your site.

Page Rank - Is created off of the amount of links you get from other sites with page rank. Page Rank is passed from getting alink with a high Page Rank site. eg if a pr 8 page links to 4 sites a lot of page rank will be passed, if it links to 2,000 sites on that page very little page rank will be passed as it will be distributed through all the links. So to get a higher Page Rank get links from high page rank sites that dont link to other sites. Also on your own site if you have a hig pr on the home page and want to increase it on your subpages make absolute url links to those pages, and creat relevant urls to the pages you dont need pr for. eg you dont need hig pagerank to your about us page or contact us page so link to them using /aboutus but link to your services page withe the full http://www.URLNAME.com/service.html

PR doesn't mean what it used to as far as ranking you will find that the average PR of the top ten listings in Google is around 5.3 ish where it used to be high 6's and 7's. This is in the insane industries such as weight loss, web design all that stuff. PR is still good to go after though because the higher you have the more you are spidered and indexed.
Pr is updated only every 3 - 4 months on the Google Tool Bar but Google has a live tracking of Pr that is updated every time your site is re cached. Thus you can rank high before the Tool Bar shows any cahnge in PR. There should of been an update on the 7th of July based off of the past. So it should be any day now. Also if you PR dissapears and comes back it doesn't neccesarily mean that your site has been hurt or banned it just means that your Tool Bar is pulling from a data center that hasn't had the PR updated on it yet.

PR and the sand box have no relation. The sand box is an age filter on sites to try and prevent spam from ranking high, there is one, but it can be beaten quickly. It also has no play on low hanging fruit keywords. Average time is usually around 4-6 sometimes 9 months in some industries. But it is beaten all the time. My experiance on beating it is through a lot of unique content, high quality relevant back links (not neccesarliy high PR). Also constant back links, it has been said that link spikes can hurt your chances with beating the sand box sooner. Meaning getting 10 links in 6 months then 1,000 in one day then back to 10 in the next month.

Title and Meta Tags
Title tag can still have a bunch of weight especially in the smaller industries, keep it very short, try not to use a lot of non keywords, also try to right it to help increase click throughs (as that is what we see in the search results) and never use a word or phrase that is not in your content.

Description tags keep short and again dont use words that aren't in the content. Yahoo and MSN will use it but Google typically doesn't unless you are in a very non competitive industry.

Keywords Tag
This tag will basically do nothing, only list the few words you are going after on that page that you are writing it for. This tag will hurt you more than help you if you do it wrong. If you stuff it full of every word variation you can think of and repeat words in it this can trigger spam filters, as it is one of the older methods of spammers.

Content
write it for your visitors don't stress out about density of keywords vs. non keywords, this is also an older method especially on Google. Make it unique and theme it out. Go after a hanfull of words per page and make each page very specific. *a lot of site owners write Title tags and content with the same keyword phrases on multiple pages, this will just confuse the engines on which page they should rank for which word. Each title and meta and content should be totally unique and optimized for totally different sets of keywords.

Keywords in your URL will help and use dashes instead of Underscores. Underscores read as one phrase and dashes or hyphes seperate the words for the engine. eg blue_elephant reads as blueelephant whereas blue-elephant reads as blue elephant. Don't spam your urls with a million keywords in it. Keep it as short as possible, this will aslo help users find it again.

Try to keep pages static, static, static, this is essential when going after the serious words.

Link campaigns are the most important, this is the Google Trump Card, (the legit one at least) You want one way links from relevant sites, that are anchored with your keyword as the link. If you can't get a site to anchor the keyword as the anchor text, then try to work in a sentance that has the keyword just before or after your URL as this will help as well.

Trading links or reciprocal links are o.k. if they are with relevant sites. A site selling computers trading links with a site selling baby clothes isn't going to help out too much.

What really hurts you with links is getting them from link farms or FFA's (Free for all's) meaning where anyone can get one. Whcih usually links to adult, viagra, and casino type sites. You don't want those. You also dont want to get a lot of ROS links or site wides, this can look like you are buying a link and can hurt your standing.

It is still a hot topic as to whether one way links can hurt you your rankings, as if they can a competitor could submit your site to 1,000 junky link farms and get you to loose your rankings or get you banned. I have seen proof that it can, but only in the range of 20,000 links or more going to the site, and it took over 4 months before it started to hurt.

Use PRess releases and articles for getting traffic, as they no longer pass Pr or count as a link back in Google. They will help in yahoo and msn though.

Write your keywords in your title for your PR or article and often times it will out rank you for a while and help with traffic.

But most of all just think of what the search engines are looking for. They are trying to bring back the most relevant page for the query searched, and of a site has the keyword in its, Title, Content, URl and then in the anchor text of their back links they will rank high eventually. After laying out the site correctly it is really just a matter of more and more quality links that are gained consistantly.

Keep it natural

[BearState]

Very detailed reply ...

At this point in time, the things I recognize most are that

1) Yahoo and Google are more strict than MSN.

2) Google is more helpful about providing information and clues than Yahoo.

3) Other members of this forum can certainly benefit by what you have to say as I'm sure that we all wind up having to jump through this hoop, unless we are lucky enough to get it all just right the first time.

4) My site was hand coded and did not use Front Page, Templates or any other generator. Therefore, I got creative and freely explored using HTML, Javascript and PHP to paint my pages. Also, although I am a very experienced software engineer with many years experience, web page design, HTML, XML, PHP, JSP, JAVA, JAVASCRIPT, ASP, XML, etc. are still under a learning curve for me. Much time has been spent in study and now that I'm getting practical, many things un-encountered in study are becoming apparent. To the point ... if Google can be used as the yard stick by which to measure search engine bot friendliness and compliance, then, I have some work to do to be compliant. MSN Search seems to do well by my site, but Yahoo and Google both have obviously not indexed me yet and Google's rules at least imply why.

a.) I did not fully understand the importance of keyword, title and description relevance to page content.

b.) I did not understand that duplicating a page, default.html or index.html by forcing load of samepage.php would cause a problem.

c.) I did not know that there were poison words, stop words and common words that would cause bots to stop processing a page.

d.) I did not and still don't fully understand indexing rules. For example, using Real Estate as a keyword for a new site is LAME. There are too many real estate sites out there. So alternatives must be sought. Phrases or combinations of words w. Real Estate in them that are not highly used, but can be predicted to get fair find rates.

e.) I did not perceive that every word on the page, including the file name itself, the names of links, names of images, abbreviations et. al. may hold importance to search engines. I have now run some tests and have verified that ALL of these may be found by Searches.

Try it on my site. I have an ALT=(My Red Guitar) for an image on a page titled AVenues+ Kiosk.

Search for Kiosk My Red Guitar and my site pops up on Google in the 3rd position.

What's really nice about that is that customers to my page can be found if I name the images for them using their real names. For example, you can search for business card locksmith california wasco and find my Biz-card page with the Wasco Lock Smith's image using Google Search. That's nice and I'm sure if the Locksmith knew it, he'd appreciate it. That search result BTW winds up first in the list on GOOGLE. Yes!

Interesting what you find when you do some tests?! Yes?

Search on Google for business mitchells blind cleaning. Bingo! That's wonderful and I'm not even out of the sandbox yet!!

Similar results can be obtained searching for links to my subpages by naming the subpage.php in the search. Unfortunately, I've named all my page filenames stupid things like spcom.php, pfcom.php, eccom.php and so forth. That is now in retrospect, a waste and a major faux-pah with regard to SEO.

So yes, I am learning and I do have changes to make. But I am getting the picture.

[97th FLoor]

Yeah testing is the key.

Look at your competitors back links and you can get an idea of how many you need to get. Look at there whois to see how old the domain is on average for the word, that can give an idea of how nasty a keyword is.

also use the allin searches at google to see how your site is doing

like:

allinanchor:keyword phrase and allinanchor:"keyword Phrase"
this will show you how you rank for that word in comparison to everyone else for the best anchored text. Meaning the more links you get with that keyword phrase as the anchored text the higher you will rank. (this is good for keyword analysis to see how nasty an industry is, and also it works for sand boxed sites. As you can be number one for allinanchor but not rank yet. At that point keep working and wait.

allintitle:keyword phrase and allintitle:"keyword phrase"
this is who has the best title tag optimization for the phrase. This is also good for keyword analysis. This is better for analyzing your site post sand box. if your site ranks higher than your allintitle for the same phrase, you have room to better your title tag. If your allintitle is higher than your actual ranking, then its not your title that needs to be tweaked.

allintext:keyword phrase and allintext:"keyword phrase"
same as title but in relation to the word in the text of the sites.

allinurl: same as above but the phrase in the url

also get a dedicated IP if you are serious about seo for your site

and if you have junky urls for your subpages then do a 301 redirect in your htaccess and you are good to go.

also on the home.html or index.html don't have your subpages link back to those, have your homepage link from your subpages be absolute and 301 the index.html page and the non www version of your domain to your www.

this will help avoid indexing problems.

also use google sitemaps for indexing in google and make a text file list each url of the site on a seperate line and save it as urllist.txt then upload that and submit the full url to yahoo. this will help with them.

[BearState]

and if you have junky urls for your subpages then do a 301 redirect in your htaccess and you are good to go.

also on the home.html or index.html don't have your subpages link back to those, have your homepage link from your subpages be absolute and 301 the index.html page and the non www version of your domain to your www.

this will help avoid indexing problems.



The allin thing is a new one for me. I'll have to check that out. I know about link: and site: and a couple others. Is there an explanatory web page somewhere to illuminate all these?

The 301 redirect is also a foreign concept. I'd love it if I don't have to go renaming all my files and the links that point to them.

Please explain.

Will Google sense a 301 redirect as an attempt to conceal?

[97th FLoor]

301's are acutally encouraged by google. They are the best way to tell them where to go. This is also the only way to pass page rank and page trust and to not loose a ranking from one url to the other.

so it is not shady at all and actually encouraged.

it works like a beauty, anytime you change a url do it. Or get rid of a page 301 to a new page. It will also pass the links in the search engines too.

[dvessel]

The post by PamR in this thread (http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?t=1331) was some how overlooked. :confused:

There's a link in there. I'll leave it up to you to find the paragraph that talks about redirecting links. It makes the most sense to me. Hint:: 302 -transition-> 301 over time.

[BearState]

That's a nice catch.

Thanks Joon ...

That article points to to a web site article that says a 301 redirect will cause google's DB record of the current URL to be dropped, along with any earned ranking. It advises to use a 302 redirect ( temporary ) and then then make sure that during the interim, the new domain name's links are re-established.

It does affirm that a 301 is encouraged and might otherwise SEEM to be the best way to go, but ....

Hmmm ... So a 301 redirect is a hazard that is better stepped around by using a 302.


Anybody ever watch that first George Lucas movie THX1138 where THX' is being tested as a toss away deviant by two techies?

"Hit him with a 301. ... No, no, that's too much. Back it off a little and give him a 302."

"Oh, oh, my fault. I didn't catch that. Screw it, let's 401 the clown!"

"Well, a 501 might get a more interesting result, don't you think?"

"How do I know? You're the mentor and I'm here to learn ... "

"Don't take that attitude or you'll be the next deviant we get to toy with here. Give him the 501 and observe!"

"This THX1138 deviant doesn't fit my consumer ... why can't we get that Luh babe in here? I could 501 her in a heart beat."

"I tried, but the dean wanted a whole case of red label and not just one bottle ... "

"You cheap SOB."

[Packleadr]

I have recently fall on a great SEO software (http://jnbgroup.bryxen1.hop.clickbank.net/), almost made for dummy.
Up until now It work great for me, and I learn alot about web page performance and what it take.

Take a look at it.

[BearState]

For those of you who read the previous post and try the kiosk my red guitar search on Google and find it doesn't work, that's now true.

You see, after fixing some, but not all of my pages and resubmitting them, Google apparently let them be cached in the sandbox for a couple days and now, has reverted back to the pages cached back in May.

Sorry. That's Google for ya!

Man, am I glad I'm viewing this as a learning experience and am not dependent on my web site as a source of income. I hope some of you are learning from this.

I'd hate to think that I'm the only one learning from bashing my head against the Google sand box wall.

So, I think I need to convert all my pages all at once now and try again.

It strikes me odd that Google and Yahoo are so worried about spam web sites and I know from experience ( having got a worm once from a web site once already that was easily found using Google Search ) that there are web sites out there that drop viruses and worms and Google and Yahoo clearly don't expend any effort at all to screen them. As I've pointed out before ... very amusing. What Quality Standards is Google talking about anyway?

Mean time, a lot of legitemate web sites with no intent to spam languish.

Very amusing.

[BearState]

I'm busy converting ALL my pages right now, but happened to notice something odd ... even though I am being sand boxed, I now observe that I have a GOOGLE PR of 3!!!

How the bloody blue blazes did that happen?

BTW: To see the Google PR for all sites you visit, do the following ...

1) Install the google tool bar.
2) on the Google Drop down on the tool bar, choose options and check the box that displays the google page rank.

After doing this, you will see a little slider on the tool bar titled 'Page Rank' and if you mouse over it, it will show the page rank as a ratio, 3/10 in this case.


Fascinating!

Will mysteries never end?!

:confused:

[Vladd44]

Try Tracewatch to keep track of traffic, pageviews, bot traffic, referrers and what words they searched for to get there.

http://www.tracewatch.com/

Free and relatively easy to set up.

[BearState]

Try Tracewatch to keep track of traffic, pageviews, bot traffic, referrers and what words they searched for to get there.

http://www.tracewatch.com/

Free and relatively easy to set up.


Wirewolf was suggesting that there is no need to pay SEO submission sites and I was struggling with his suggestion as I don't want to install vBulletins just to allow me to monitor traffic.

Tracewatch looks very enticing and is free.

I've found that you can submit for free to at

Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl

MSN: http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx


These only accept home page basic submission and are free.

There are links from these pages that explain how to get indexed, etc. as well.

So yes, it does look like it can all be done for free instead of forking out $29.00 or so per month to an SEO.

So what do SEOs offer that I haven't seen a free web site for?

1) Link Partner Programs
2) Top 10 Submissions.

BTW: Yahoo only shows the two pages, my home page and spcom.php that I put out to top 10 listings for 90 days.

I would like to comment on how friendly MSN Search is. Not only do they have my site and all its pages fully indexed, but their help pages are much more illuminating than their competitors. They take a lot of the guess-work out of it.

I think I may finally at least have my home page indexed on Google and Yahoo, but none of the subpages. Google has sandbox cached pages dating back to May and any latter submissions I made are ignored. Yahoo only shows my SignPost page and that appears to be in connection with a top 10 posting I did.

[BearState]

I've haven't changed a thing and Yahoo now has several of my subpages listed!!!!

I am psyched, pleased and somewhat astonished!

I thought Yahoo would be the last to get me fully indexed.

I noted early last week that Yahoo dropped my SignPost page, which was a top 10 submit I did and thought for sure they were somehow cued only to index if you did a top 10.

But I just checked using site:avenuesplus.com and voila! More of my pages are listed! But not all of them.

I'm so happy. I just had to be patient and wait, I guess. I wonder why they all aren't indexed yet?

I wonder now if I have to wait on Google??

I wish I had a jpeg of a fire works show to include right now.

:)

[silentcollision]

You know, I think that helps, visiting and participating in forums as I've seen a lot of hits come from this BH Forum.

Blogs are also recommended as are 'certain' news groups.

Comparitively, I get very few hits from forums. Sitepoint gives me the most out of any forum, but only a few hundred hits a month or so.

I've got quite strong PR's across my sites (4's, 3's, 2's), but none of my sites show up on the first page of search results, mainly because i'm in competitive markets. I think we need to make the definition between SEO and Traffic though. SEO does not necessarily mean traffic. I ran small revenue site with 10k uniques monthly, on a 0 Pr for quite a while.

If anyone has paid for SEO, I would love to hear your experiences. I'm considering it now.

[BearState]

Here's an interesting thing for those of you who are lurking on this thread and are interested ...

BH CPanel has an icon for WEB/FTP Stats. If you click it and then click to see the visitors to your site, a rather detailed output will be generated listing all the different site components loaded and who visited.

I peek at it now and then and today, all three major bots, MSN, Yahoo and Google showed up, plus some others, snapbot for example.

Very interesting ...

I wish that BH would provide a simple summary visitor listing, showing only the visitor once and the pages they visited. The current listing is so detailed that it seems overkill.

[Erock]

Good thread, I've just optimised my site and it went from a poor to an excellent just by following the guidelines on this site...and it's free.

http://www.instantposition.com/seotest.php

Of course it doesn't apply to all search engines, but I reckon it's a pretty good yardstick.

Erock

[BearState]

:eek:

Can anybody tell me why Google created indexes for my web site using https instead of http?

I mean it is absolutely fascinating how Google seems to screw my site around, but I don't understand it one bit, not one bit.



...


Good thread, I've just optimised my site and it went from a poor to an excellent just by following the guidelines on this site...and it's free.

http://www.instantposition.com/seotest.php

Of course it doesn't apply to all search engines, but I reckon it's a pretty good yardstick.

Erock

I looked at this site as it does suggest cleaning up titles and descriptions differently from widexl.com for example. It also suggests that the most important keywords should be first in the title and clarifies that the description should be LONG, at least 12 words.

I made changes, but I doubt that those changes are going to resolve the issues I am facing with Google.

Thanks anyway. It likely will help in the end.

:rolleyes:

[BearState]

For those of you who read the previous post and try the kiosk my red guitar search on Google and find it doesn't work, that's now true.

You see, after fixing some, but not all of my pages and resubmitting them, Google apparently let them be cached in the sandbox for a couple days and now, has reverted back to the pages cached back in May.

Sorry. That's Google for ya!
Very amusing.


Well, if you've been following this thread, you know that my site finally got out of the sand box for at least the home page on MSN, Yahoo and Google. In fact MSN and Yahoo have got most of my pages indexed all though not in all cases, the most current pages.


The interesting thing is Google which has persisted in caching my old old old pages submitted back in May, 2006 and indexed them with https:// instead of http://

Well I finally figured out how to get Google to drop all those old cached pages.

I removed the following meta tag from all my pages:


<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" content="index, follow"/>


After resubmitting, Google promptly dropped all but my home page.

Now all I gotta do is get them to re-index all the sub-pages again so that they use the most current pages for their cache.

Wish me luck!

:rolleyes:

[97th FLoor]

BearState Hope this helps

Re-converting or changing pages and seeing a drop in the SERPS isn't the same as the sand box. The sand box is a theory that new sites get held back in the SERPS and it is on a keywords basis, competitive words are boxed non-copetitive are not.

Also PR has nothing to do with sand box, I have pr 5's and 6's that are boxed cause they are brand new and Im going after insane words.

PR is soley based on Backlinks, the more links you have pointing to you with High PR the more PR you will get. Also the site that has high PR that is linking to you but also linking to 100 other sites will barely pass any of its PR. So to increase pr you want high pr sites to link to you and very few other sites.

Also to avoid cache problems from Google, and that is all the reverted cache problem was, Google jacks up sites cache all the time, they are contantly testing all the time. Use your .htaccess file to tell the engines exactly what you want them to do. 301 redirect your non www. version of the domain to the www version as they are 2 different pages to Google. Also 301 the /index.html or /home.html to your absolute .com so that it doesn't take the place of your homepage cache either.

The quickest way to getting out of the sand box is to get links from high authority sites, Yahoo Dir, DMOZ, and huge related sites in your industry.

There is nothing that will rank you better than a quality link campaign that will trump anything.

also make sure you are checking all data centers as Google could be testing something on a couple data centers and you may happen to access them at that time, and then totally change your site thinking that it is all messed up, when in reality all Google is doing is testing.

Good place to do this is http://mcdar.net/dance

[BearState]

make sure you are checking all data centers as Google could be testing something on a couple data centers and you may happen to access them at that time, and then totally change your site thinking that it is all messed up, when in reality all Google is doing is testing.[/url]

This is a totally inept thing to say.

Google is testing and screwing people over to do tests with live submitters to their search engine??!!!

Thanks for confirming that Google, one of the biggest search engines, is supported by a bunch of imbeciles.

I am sick and tired of Google, thank you. Their indexing algorithm is obviously buggy and the engineers at Google need to get off their butts and fix the problems. Just because they are the biggest does not mean that they are not Buggy, and they obviously are.

I refuse to use them for searches as it is clear that I would be missing a lot of good decent sites pertinent to my queries.

[dvessel]

Hmm, how about this? I'm trying to learn php but I keep running into road blocks. It must be buggy. I don't know what I'm doing half the time but it surely must be the fault of the creators. :p Heh..

Seriously, anything worth achieving is never easy my friend. Get used to it. ;)

btw, my site went from Rank6 to a 3. The 6 was a surprise so I'm not worried about the lowered rank. Perhaps it was from me not keeping up with my site.

[BearState]

Hmm, how about this? I'm trying to learn php but I keep running into road blocks. It must be buggy. I don't know what I'm doing half the time but it surely must be the fault of the creators. :p Heh..

Seriously, anything worth achieving is never easy my friend. Get used to it. ;)

btw, my site went from Rank6 to a 3. The 6 was a surprise so I'm not worried about the lowered rank. Perhaps it was from me not keeping up with my site.

Don't take me for a complete novice.

I've been working in computer science since 1976. I think I can tie my own shoes and bush my teeth without choking on the tooth brush.

This may be my first web site, but I think I can put 2 and 2 together when 2 of the top 3 index my site properly, but the 3rd makes a shambles of it, prefixing it with https for example, when the site is not an https site. This is just plain indicative of Google's indexing algorithm doing things that are absurd. Sure, they index many sites properly, even bad ones.

But the symptoms indicated by the indexing results I get from Google imply something about Google's algorithm that has nothing to do with how well I know PHP coding. And there is NOTHING wrong with my PHP code, so don't go there. My pages work and work well and efficiently.

[dvessel]

I come off as harsh sometimes. -sorry Didn't mean to sound that way but still you misread me entirely. I was talking about my php coding level. I know I have a lot to learn but I'm not trying to place blame. It was just a joke.

You knowledge of computer science isn't helping you in your quest for SEO. All I'm saying is that it takes time to understand but I guess I didn't have to tell you that. Or did I? :p

[BearState]

You knowledge of computer science isn't helping you in your quest for SEO. All I'm saying is that it takes time to understand but I guess I didn't have to tell you that. Or did I? :p

I originally submitted to Google in May. They have indexed me.

However, the indexing results are horrible. They cached my pages from back in May and refuse to use the more current pages. They have things all botched up, prefixing them with https instead of http.

There was just one time when they had it right while I was in the Sand Box and after that, phooey.

I've put in the time.

It should not be this difficult. Google's Algorithm is the next thing lower than Shinola. I support MSN Search and Yahoo. Google is not recommended.

[dvessel]

You don't have to like Google and that's fine but the rest of the world still uses it.

As 97th suggested, why not just set-up an .htaccess with a permanent redirect to the plain page then use your experience with php to automatically submit a sitemap. They have sample code. It definitely seems to help. I can spot google bots downloading the map and scanning my site for changes everyday.

[BearState]

You don't have to like Google and that's fine but the rest of the world still uses it.

As 97th suggested, why not just set-up an .htaccess with a permanent redirect to the plain page then use your experience with php to automatically submit a sitemap. They have sample code. It definitely seems to help. I can spot google bots downloading the map and scanning my site for changes everyday.

Google does not allow commercial sites to use their account sign up for site maps. It's against their terms and conditions. Are you suggesting that I use it anyway?

My site is for profit and therefore, a commercial site.

[dvessel]

Whoops! Wasn't aware of that.

edit:: read ahead. They do allow it. I didn't look close enough.

[BearState]

Yes, so am I to believe that Google won't properly index commercial sites until they first extort some kind of tribute?

Does it make sense to you that if the Google Algorithm is hatcheting my site like it is, that it's entirely reasonable, intuitive and logical that a lot of other good sites are out there unseen or badly represented on Google and that by using Google, you'd miss all those sites?

If you don't want to miss what the web has to offer, I suggest using the search engines that demonstrate that they do a better job of indexing sites, MSN and YAHOO, to wit. That's what my current experience with Google has taught me.

[dvessel]

Google is the largest most popular search engine. Everyone wants in and there are plenty who try to abuse. Is it not prudent for them to keep things under control? I don't know about anyone else but when I do general searches, I don't want to see it all. Only the most relevant ones.

If/when any of the other search engines get on top I can only hope they take the right measures so I don't run into penis enlargment pills. There will be gray areas of course so indexing them takes more time.

No one's forcing you, if you want to stick with the others then go for it.

[BearState]

Google is the largest most popular search engine. Everyone wants in and there are plenty who try to abuse. Is it not prudent for them to keep things under control? I don't know about anyone else but when I do general searches, I don't want to see it all. Only the most relevant ones.

If/when any of the other search engines get on top I can only hope they take the right measures so I don't run into penis enlargment pills. There will be gray areas of course so indexing them takes more time.

No one's forcing you, if you want to stick with the others then go for it.

What makes you believe that Google is showing you ALL the MOST RELEVANT? If they are doing to other perfectly good sites what their algorithm is doing to mine and those sites are relevant to your query, you'd be foolish not to have to question whether you are getting only the most relevant and not just the ones lucky enough to get properly indexed and cached.

Yahoo and MSN seem superior in their capacity to render the most pertinent sites. I'm sure they weed out the undesirables just fine.


Is that de facto enough?

[dvessel]

Take a second and think about all those searches you've done in the past through Google. Do you notice a pattern? Most searches go straight to resources that are focused on information. To spread knowledge not commercial sites trying to sell you something. There is a bias toward non-commercial results and for good reason.

There are plenty of commercial sites that provide great info and at times Google will show them when relevant but to expect any commercial site to be listed with little scrutiny is naive.

I think this article explains it better (http://www.seobook.com/relevancy/). Google isn't perfect but I think it's by far the best right now. You having a commercial point of view won't agree with that but I don't think the rest of the world does.

[BearState]

Take a second and think about all those searches you've done in the past through Google. Do you notice a pattern? Most searches go straight to resources that are focused on information. To spread knowledge not commercial sites trying to sell you something. There is a bias toward non-commercial results and for good reason.

There are plenty of commercial sites that provide great info and at times Google will show them when relevant but to expect any commercial site to be listed with little scrutiny is naive.

I think this article explains it better (http://www.seobook.com/relevancy/). Google isn't perfect but I think it's by far the best right now. You having a commercial point of view won't agree with that but I don't think the rest of the world does.

You're not getting the point. My listing is butchered. It is NOT that it is not indexed and listed. It is thrashed. Get it? The stuff they have cached is out of date garbage. They have it prefixed with https instead of http. Get it? Their listing of my site exists, but it is all screwed up!

What you write above is absurd. Google itself, is commercial in nature. Does that make adsense to you? They do not give non-commercial sites deference in listing them, ie. unless their buggy algorithm does it by trashing the listing like it does for my site.

I'm not interesting in visiting the above site as it is IRRELEVANT to the problem I am having with Google.

[dvessel]

Your site listing getting butchered should be the least of your concerns. It can be fixed. Getting indexed in any meaningful way is the hard part especially for a site like yours.

Yes, Google is a commercial enterprise but if you read a bit of background on them it might give you a clearer idea. And that link is very relevant. It seems very credible and I hope anyone reading this interested in SEO looks at it.

Here it is again.
http://www.seobook.com/relevancy/

[dvessel]

The SEO book lead me to Matt Cutt's site (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/). He works for Google handling quality issues & SEO.

I don't have anything to add but it looks like another good place to look.

And for those that like to watch videos. Cutt's has a whole series on Google Video. (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4526554928294588907)

[KVN]

Cheers for that link dvessel.. v interesting.

I've been using Google Sitemaps for 8 months now. I've a PR of 2 for my sitename (which is quite a unique name.... granted)

and I'm usually around PR 1-2 for my targeted keywords
(Auckland Irish Community)

I've had a quick breeze through all the previous posts on this subject but lost interest in a few posts - so forgive me if I'm just repeating something someone else has already said.

I managed to get my PR by doing the hard yards and submitting by site to all the local site directories (new zealand) and 2-3 relevant irish site directories

I found that doing this, in tandem signing up to google sitemaps had my PR converge within weeks ( I was withing the top ten of google after 2 months of creating the site.)

..... one last comment (which I noticed someone mention earlier)..... content needs to be TOTALLY relevant and consistent. Googlebot crawls my site aboyut every 36 hrs and seems to like capturing consistent use of keywords.

if you sign up for google sitemaps then you'll see what I mean from their excellent diagnostics and statistics page for your domain.

hope it helps

KVN

[dvessel]

Google does not allow commercial sites to use their account sign up for site maps. It's against their terms and conditions. Are you suggesting that I use it anyway?

My site is for profit and therefore, a commercial site.

I don't think you read the whole thing or read it out of context because here they are saying something else (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35182&query=commercial+use&topic=0&type=f).

I just wanted to clear that up.

They recently changed a few things around so now it's "Web Master Tools" which contain Sitemaps and more in the console. Not a big change but a notable one in this case is that they now flag and let you know if your pages are in violation of being spammy. Everyone should sign-up.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

[Thegolfer]

Thanks Dvessel for the link to Search engine relevancy article. It was very helpfull. A" must read article" in my opinion. I would also like to thanks everybody that has contribute to this SEO chattering. I hope it continues to grow.

Again Thank you everybody! :cool:

[dvessel]

Yeah, I hope all of us can continue discussing realistic solutions. I don't mean to pick on you Bearstate. It's just that there's way too much information out there, good and bad. Let's just try and look for the good and point out the bad where we can spot them. This way everyone wins! :)

I've learned a lot just from you starting this thread Bear. It made me look and question things so thanks. :p

[97th FLoor]

Bearstate

make the .htaccess file, then pass some links to your homepage from some authority sites or directories and seriously the caching problem will be fixed in no time, a week or two at most, and it shouldn't go back.

Google does experiance the most problems with caching sites this is for a lot of reasons, testing, changing, filters all of that stuff and it is really frustrating, I had a clients site go from number one to number 150 for the month of dec, 05 cause googles cache reverted to one back in o4 when it was an all flash site, they lost so much business it was a joke. But the .htaccess and links got it back.

Also upload a xml sitemap or resubmit your existing one this can help as well.

commercial sites can use sitemaps, I have an account with over 50 commercial sites in just that account and there has never been any problems, I have had commercial sites in there since the week it started.

Google sitll returns the best results in my opinion though, which doesn't say much since ask, yahoo and msn can be spammed with both hands tied behind your back.

PM me if you want a list of really good sites and directories that will help you get re-indexed in a matter of days.

[dvessel]

I ran into an article on arstechnica about PR popularity and the thought of monopolizing search results on well established sites. The fear stems from the idea that established sites with their higher PR will get linked to more often thus increasing it's chances of being listed in a search result. From there it would turn into a vicious cycle bringing in more traffic drowning out other sites.

The surprising thing is that there is an upper limit on these established sites. Once they reach a certain saturation they are no more likely to be listed and there's a very clever reason why.

From the article:
The paper proposes a factor that can help explain these results: user interest. A user interested in a topic will probably have already visited the popular sites the cover that topic. Search engines allow them to identify the less-popular sites that cover areas that specifically interest them. Incorporating that factor into a mathematical model allowed them to match the curve of the page rank vs. traffic data over a broader range of popularity, and accurately predicted the saturation apparent at the high end. Their conclusions?

The reason I bring this up is that Googles algorithm tries to mimic human behavior. It's not only in this example but think about how Google gives weight to links.. What are the chances of your site being clicked on when 99 other sites are listed? Weather it's a user looking at the listings or Google doing the calculations of those same listings, they are somehow weighted in a similar way (or likelihood of being clicked). Who knows what other behaviors are simulated.

We, being human search for answers so it all comes back to the content. That is the underlying motivator of getting your site being more popular. It might not happen overnight but in the long run that is the ultimate way to getting popular.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060817-7532.html

[Thegolfer]

Hello Everybody,

First let me tell you that this thread has been really helpfull
to me . THANK YOU everybody! It is just sad that it has been
quiet for a while now...

I know some of you guys are seo expert, that's why I am posting my question here. 5 or 6 year ago I registered multiple domain names(at godaddy.com) that are related to my industry(keywords). I started adding quality links to my site 4 months ago. Most of my pages are now index by google,yahoo and MSN and I have good serp in some of the keyword phrases I choosed, BUT my google pagerank is showing 0 pagerank. Could that be because I forwarded all extra domain names from godaddy to my main domain name here at bluehost? Do you think search engine sees this as duplicate content? I have no idea if this is a 301 redirect...Could it be just a question of time before my google pagerank start showing?

I was thinking of transfering all name to bluehost and forward them all from the same place. Any idea what would be the best way for proper SEO?

Thank you for your support!

[thenewguy]

My answer to that is here
http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?t=2580

[97th FLoor]

page rank has pretty much nothing to do with anything except having sites with page rank link to you. Pages with PR pass pr to pages they link to, there is a sort of ratio thing going on. PR is mostly passed to internal pages of your site, and the remainder % is passed to external pages you are linking to.

Also PR is updated pretty much daily inside of Google, however they only update the Tool Bar (what we see) about every 4-6 months, about 3 - 4 times a year. The next one should be happening in OCT of this year. So dont over think PR and dont become addicted to it either, especially because the Tool Bar PR is out dated the day after it is updated. Just work on getting relevant links to your site and Pr and rankings will come.

As for the forwarding and 301 stuff, the thread above this one is good to read. I have never had problems with forwards, and I mainly use 301's when I rename urls or have a client that is redoing the site including url change. And also always have your non www 301 to your www and the /index or /home redirect as well give Google an absolute url for your homepage it helps a lot when trying to avoid spidering problems.

Hope that helps

[RustyTheWonderdog]

use the allin searches at google to see how your site is doing

i have a webcomic named Business Casual, and i set my sites on getting on the first page search results for "business casual" on all the major players. but, i've never been able to crack a serious ranking in google. for a couple of days, my site was in the top 20, but it quickly disappeared. in yahoo, msn, and others, i maintained a respectable 1-20 search engine result.

i checked out the allin stuff and found that on google, i am in the top 10 for allinanchor, allintitle, and allinurl. i even have a pagerank of 4 which is decent enough i guess. for allintext, however, i'm not even in the top 50. this makes me believe that google places heavy emphasis on the textual representation of a site. my problem is that i don't want to use "Business Casual" over and over on my home page. it would just make what is actually on the page sound silly.

i know that i need to do some extra on my .htaccess file because i have yet to set it up since moving to BlueHost. i think i'll also add a sitemap just to see what happens. i also need to get those meta keywords tags out that have been in there for a while.

[thenewguy]

What are the advantages of ranking high for that phrase instead of ranking high for something like business comic or work cartoon?

[RustyTheWonderdog]

that's just the phrase i targeted because it's the actual name of the comic. i figured it would be my first search phrase target since phrases like "business comic" and "work cartoon" are more generic search terms that i figured would be harder to capture.

[Thegolfer]

Guys, thank you all for your precious help. Glad to see this thread is
coming back to life!;)

[magpie2419]

I found following these tips worked well for me.

Content is key! The amount of content and its relevance to the keywords and key phrases in your Meta tags and Description tags affects the way search engines rank your site. Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. A minimum of 5 web pages and a minimum of 400 to 500 words per page will improve the indexing and ranking of your site.

Use relevant keywords and key phrases. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. This way, you increase your chances of having your site displayed when a user enters these words.

Use text links for navigation. The use of JavaScript navigation makes it difficult for search engines like Google to crawl your site. If you have such a navigation system, provide an alternative way of navigation such as text links in the footer of your site.

If your site has too many pages or sections, build a sitemap with text links to every page or at least every major section of the site and then include a text link to the site map from your homepage.

Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler does not recognise text contained in images. Not yet.

Use Unique Title Tags and Description Tags for each page of your site. The title tag is about the most important thing a search engine looks at of all the other elements of your site.

[97th FLoor]

RustyTheWonderdog

How old is your site?

How old is the domain?

How long ago was it first indexed in google - to the best of your knowledge?

Depending on how old your site is it may be held back in Goolge cause Google hates new sites. Google is all about trust, and trust comes from links. You get links from trusted sources and it will help your trust. Usually when sites are ranking well in Yahoo and Msn but no where in Google it could be cause the site is new.

Also did the Google rankings that you once have happen right after starting some optimization, cause a lot of times sites will rank for the words for a week or so at the start then get thrown to the back.

Let me know how old your site is, if you want to pm me the url I can look at it in more detail.

also get in the yahoo directory if you havent already, Google loves that link it will bring a lot of trust and help out a ton.

[RustyTheWonderdog]

How old is your site? How old is the domain?
the domain is about 3.5 years old. i did have a year hiatus from the site where the content was fairly stagnant, but i now update the site at least weekly.

How long ago was it first indexed in google - to the best of your knowledge?
it was indexed years ago when i first started the site. i've always been able to enter my web address (www.business-casual.net) and find it in google.

Also did the Google rankings that you once have happen right after starting some optimization, cause a lot of times sites will rank for the words for a week or so at the start then get thrown to the back.
this is exactly what happened. when i started updating the site again in late august, i changed my site to a more search-engine friendly design under the hood. i moved from meaningless tables and text to a div layout, <h1> - <h3> ordering, and better title and description headers. after these changes were implemented, i started seeing the google search result appearances. it lasted for a few weeks, but now, i can go through 10 pages at google and not see my site in the results.

also get in the yahoo directory if you havent already, Google loves that link it will bring a lot of trust and help out a ton.
i just submitted to this over the weekend. i am listed in the dmoz directory, but didn't know that yahoo had its own. i also signed up with google webmaster and added a sitemap. also, after reading some of the suggestions here, i have tweaked some of my code. i reduced my meta keywords count (in case i was getting a keyword spam penalty) and updated my page titles and meta description.

[AirAndAqua.com]

I would recommend www.seoelite.com , I use it and we are #1 on yahoo for "air purification systems" and a few other keywords I had targeted.... it really works! if only they paid me for refferals... *sigh* lol

He also emails free lessons just about daily.... it is well worth it, check out the videos he has too...

[AirAndAqua.com]

oh and by the way, **** YOU GOOGLE. No seriously, I hear you about the google thing... They hate us... I have no idea why but I DID use to have a page rank of 5 and then one day it was 0 and has been for 6 months or so now.... I don't get it...

[97th FLoor]

oh and by the way, **** YOU GOOGLE. No seriously, I hear you about the google thing... They hate us... I have no idea why but I DID use to have a page rank of 5 and then one day it was 0 and has been for 6 months or so now.... I don't get it...

When I go to your site I get redirected to http://www.airandaqua.com/sunshop/

instead of just the .com, did the page rank in google used to be to the .com and not the sunshop page?

also if you are using seo elite are you using it to trade links? that can hurt as well if it is over done especially with sites that aren't relevant.


Rustytehwonderdog

Your site has some great design. It has a ton of pages indexed in google that is awesome. You need more links though. I would work on getting links from some really good directories and relevant sites. Try to get most of them one way links as well.

When you do the allin searches is it your homepage that is the page coming back in all the results?

[97th FLoor]

Rusty

also business casual is a pretty competitive kw, go through and look at all the backlinks of all the sites ranking most have over 5k, so even though the kw is in your domain you will still need a lot of links

http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/

use that tool put in your domain and the kw you are analyzing and it will show you everything about the top ten sites in Google for that word and compare it to yours. SOmetimes it is a little off but it is still good. Use it to look at the links of the sites with the least amount of links that are ranking and see if you can get those links as well. I say the sites with the least amount of links because they have the most quality. A site ranking in the top ten with under 500 links when everyone else has 5,000 has some good quality links.

hope that helps

[RustyTheWonderdog]

When you do the allin searches is it your homepage that is the page coming back in all the results?
yes, http://www.business-casual.net is in the top 10 of the allin searches except for allintext search.

http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/

this is a really nice tool. parts of it wasn't working yesterday when i checked it out, but it seems to all be there today. it appears that the two pages with under 500 links that are in google's top 10 have links from monster.com. i would say that that is a good link to have.

looks like i just need to build some linkage for google to appreciate me. thanks for the suggestions.

[Thegolfer]

Great tool thanks!

Guys,

I already asked this question about using multiple domain names (alias) for the same site. You suggested a few solutions with Ht access, but what about using parked domains? Bluehost says that parked domains are just alias that point to your main domain site. This is the easiest solution for me .Would search engines see it as duplicate content?

Thank you in advance!
:cool:

[thenewguy]

Google says Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.I think that duplicate content refers to actual words and things existing within the HTML code or whatever on a webpage that a search engine could possibly index.

Go to broadcast.com and see what happens. I do not think that is duplicate content.

However, copying a Wikipedia article and putting it on your website with pay per click ads around it probably would be seen as duplicate content.

[Thegolfer]

If having multiple domain names pointing to the same web site is OK for Yahoo, then it should be OK for me too! I understand now that this is not the same thing as having duplicated content at different places or sites.

THANK YOU thenewguy!

:rolleyes: