jpalmer - 3:11 am on Dec 17, 2005 (gmt 0)

Greetings and Gidday from downunder tomthumb2000,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Have you doubled checked your robots.txt and page meta?

Even after more than 9 years, I still occasionally forget to remove a "noindex" instruction on a beta or "for approval" page, and wonder why after seeing the bots visiting in my stats, the page/s in question still doesn't appear.

As someone also in "travel", I have no problems with my <400 page site, but then I started way back when, have content-content-content, in a highly targeted geographically localised market (with heaps of competition/cherry pickers/scrapers/scammers/spammers ad nauseum, because of the locality), with additional associated but not strictly travel info. (e.g. local history, birds and animals etc., and a personal passion niche subject sub site which is one of the top 5 sites on all the major SEs), which bring in additional links from non target markets as a result. (Hey, even these folk go on holiday though, right?)

I don't use frames, flash or other "bells and whistles" except where it's appropriate. Eye candy is compressed while still tasty, and the site code is mostly 4.x DTD tables, being updated slowly to tableless css. Lean and fast to load.

If you have good quality content, your robots.txt and individual page SEO/META, code and design is OK, then go to Jill Whalen's "High Rankings" web site, and pick the teeth out of her articles.

All other things being equal, you'll be an old hand in no time!

Hope this is useful, good luck,
jpalmer