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I run a free interactive map based County photo Classified site. When i first started this venture 2 years ago I was running a Florida Counties only site, Now I've gone all US States. Now i find that googlebot is crawling my site, but for links that never existed? why is that? I have no results what so ever in google even though ive watched googlebot crawl every other day for over a month. My main page showed up for like 3 days in the results, then disappeared.
site is an .asp/ flash with a sequel 2000 back end. 20,000 pages worth. I went ahead and created static link index .htm pages, one for each State. will this help?
the next question is, I am offering 3 for 1 link exchanges to any non adult sites. Basically it allows websites to be drilled downed from US, State and County for those sites that are considered local. Is this a good idea? and will it help with rank?
As far as how I plan to keep this running. Well there are over 20,000 468 x 60 dedicated/non rotating banner spaces I rent out from $9.99 to $49.99 a month, 2 per page. 6 banners per county, 8 banners per state. over 3300 US Counties, 50 States and the US pages. I figured this would allow local business to pinpoint local traffic. This is the sites only revenue. and to date, hasn't made me 1 cent. So i'm wondering if i'm taking the wrong approach with this. I figured people love something thats free, and this is the only way i can think of to produce revenue. I don't want pop-ups or any of that because it annoys people. Im trying to keep this site spam free by using banning features and so on.
Guys and Gals, I'm new to this! this is my first major launch and I'm starting to feel I've done all this work for nothing. I've spent almost 2 years working on this project of mine! Any advice you can give me will be a great help.
webmaster@uscountytrader.com
Without enough inbound links (now only 8 as far as I can see), it will be hard to get Google (or other SE's) to index those 20,000 pages. And if visitors find (almost) no classifieds in their county, then they might leave without adding one. Like searching for an item at an empty eBay. In both cases you need to break this circle. But it can be done.
Good luck, and keep reading at WebmasterWorld.
The problem with freshbot asking non-existant pages, is new for me. Are you sure the problem is not in your database? I mean, usually freshbot will only look for pages that were linked. And there won't be many external links to non-existing sub pages at this moment.
Yea, its a sick circle. over time I'm sure it will fill up. But who knows how long that will take without any other way to get the word out! I'm a broke puppy! doing this single handed! with 2 daughters, a disabled wife, and cheesy salary at work makes it really hard to come up with funds for advertising, bandwitdh and so on! I will make it, and will not give up. But its rough!
I am aiming for something Ebay doesn't have though. The choice to deal locally or online! This approach I believe will make online scams less likley and make people feel safer. Also unlike ebay, its completely free to users and Businesses to list inventory or items. This will never change, will always be free! This is where I am hoping to have an edge! But this won't happen for a very long time unless I get either an idea to promote, or get a news story as an alternative to Ebay, or by some other miracle!
every classified thats posted is searchable at 3 levels. US, local State and local County. The interactive maps drill it down, then it can be filtered by section, keyword and so on. Same applies to Website listings and Business listings. and yes, they are free also!
I know this idea will take off, It's just a matter of how long, and what I or god does to speed it up!
Any ideas on what I can do to speed this up? I need those pages crawled. each counties meta has the county and state name in it. will help alot to get those pages listed.
As far as promoting, seeing I have no funds, I only have banners to barter with. either by exchanging them or renting them. But I'm not a salesman. wish I had one!
