PR4 but nowhere in results for main key phrase

[dwilson]

My new site has a PR4, gets a fresh tag every 2-3 days, and has all pages indexed in Google. I am getting Google traffic on multi-word low-dollar phrases. But in 856 results for my key phrase, I'm not to be found.

Any idea what could cause this? It's the site in my profile if anyone is willing to take a closer look.

Thanks!

[Nicke]

An important factor is also the words used in the anchor text people write in the backlinks to you. You can have hight PR but it doesnt help much if the main keyword is never mentioned in the anchor text that links back to you.

[rfgdxm1]

PR4 is low. And, that this is a new site may be a factor.

[DerekH]

I followed your suggestion and took a look at the site in your profile.

If you run it through the W3C Validation Markup Service you'll probably want to rush away and fix the serious errors in the home page alone - once I managed to get the validator to accept the page, by tweaking the options - something which itself is a bit underhand - it reported 16 errors.

Come back to the forum with HTML that isn't illegal and I'm sure we can take your problem a stage further.

Illegal HTML often displays OK, but one can never be sure what a spider, which is tuned to parse correct HTML very rapidly, will make of something that's got errors.

DerekH

[birdy]

I do have the same problem my homepage has PR5 and my main keyword is at anchor text.There is no links exchange with banned site ect.. I have tried to be compatiable to Google..At the last update my site is disappeard like dwilson's site..Any more suggestions?

[Ledfish]

Have the exact same problem, however my homepage disappeared before Florida. Now it doesn't seem to matter what I do, it doesn't even surface anywhere.

I should add that mine is no where to be found under it's three key phrase or any phrase fot that matter. Almost like it been turned off.

Maybe GoogleGuy will poke his head in here and give some thoughts.

[dwilson]

Thanks for pointing out the HTML validation problems. That is taken care of now.

The fact is, though, that G has indexed it & assigned PR and delivers traffic on obscure searches.

So what gets a site excluded for a particular phrase? Low PR should just send it near the bottom of the list, not drop it completely.

The anchor text in most of my navigation links includes my phrase. I thought that was good basic SEO as well as being natural for users. But is that now considered spam?

[kaled]

From my own very limited observations of this over-optimisation filter it may be that having all the words of a phrase together in both the title and the body text is a bad idea.

Dust off your thesaurus and experiment.

When I have some time I'm going to see if I can get one of my pages back for an obvious three word phrase that appears in the title and body text. It's not urgent since the phrase is more of a benchmark - not many people ever used it exactly.

Kaled.

[dwilson]

Google has picked up the version that has the navigation changed so the same phrase isn't repeated so much. No change as far as appearing in the SERPs.

Maybe I need to give the chnage more time .. don't know.

[dwilson]

OK, this is starting to not be funny any more. w/ PR4 & fresh tags every day or two, I'm still excluded on my main phrase. Nowhere in the top 858 -- which is where G breaks it off saying everything else is "very similar".

Since we're seeing some changes on www2, I tried there. Yes, there are some differences, but I'm nowhere in the top 868.

My DMOZ link that I've had since November is STILL not showing in my backlinks. A GoGuides link that I've had for much less time is showing.

I haven't been kicked out of Google. I can come up first for certain multi-word phrases. But for my main one I'm still gone.

Any ideas? Is it time to abandon the domain?

[allanp73]

dwilson,

I notice a big mistake you target "accidentally" b-idget h-idget2 r-idget3.
Watch the spaces between the first letter which you enlare and the keyword. I imagine this will make a big difference.

[allanp73]

Way the way you are #1 for you targeted term.
What's up?

[GranPops]

had a quick look, and the only search term thatc ould be remotely called targetted, is BHR and you are No.1

What else did you have in mind?

[gaouzief]

I've been having the same problem for my homepage for ages now, and i still can't figure out Why,

All the internal pages are pretty well ranked for their keyword

Homepage Pr is 6 but barried in a 400 something position for the main keywords

And, this in not a Florida/Austin related problem, I have been experiencing this for a long time.

It's in my profile, if anyone wants to take a look, maybe y'll find out something so obvious that i couldn't see

[brakkar]

My homepage moved to the 500th, then 20th, now 60th position since the www. non www problem and never get back in the top 7 results where it used to be. The page is pr6. And it is clearly a page people want to see for my 2 main keywords.
There are a LOAD of absolutely lower quality page that are ranked before mine, even some ugly pdf and page linking to my site, how ironic.

My traffic + adsense revenue has dropped by 50% since this problem.

I expected a page with pr6 and focused on 2 keywords to appear before a pr 2 page on these 2 keywords, but it seems it is not the case. I don't see the point of pr now.

The problem is that it takes so long between each dance to try to see if the position improved.

I will see how my page is positioned after the next dance, and if it doesn't improve, I will definitaly try to contact google on this matter.

Brakkar

[dwilson]

and the only search term thatc ould be remotely called targetted, is BHR and you are No.1

BH is the phrase I'm targeting (not the letters, the words ... you know.)

[Chndru]

-Too broad kw
-Too little content to rank in the top 1000 results? I see so many quality sites on that topic.

[steveb]

dwilson, that is a very broad term which I suppose you can make a case to be in the top 858 for but its not BHR where you are obviously ranked correctly.

I would fix what allan pointed out. Your first page text focuses on LIE not BHR. Put all that in H1 text and it should help for the two word phrase.

You are screwed on the DMOZ links only because Google continues to show a ancient cache from before when you were listed. This seems to be a large problem they are having specifically with DMOZ pages, so there isn't anything you can do about it, except you could link to those category pages to try and get them crawled more often than otherwise.

[taj79]

dwilson,
what's the keyphrase u r targetting?
isn't it black history review

[anime_otaku]

he's targeting "Black History" fyi, hence why it's hard to serp well. Plenty of high ranking sites in serps. no suprise it's not easy to serp well for a competitive phraise.

[dwilson]

Allan, thanks for pointing out the space problem. I'll work on a way to fix that.

Steve, perhaps putting it all in H1 would help. I like the effect I created this way ... maybe there's some clever CSS I could use to create something similar.

Chndru, I'm targetting a broad keyphrase b/c that's what a lot of people search on, according to the research I've done. More content ... well, it goes back to Brett's classic post: content, content, content.

Thanks to all of you for your ideas.

[steveb]

You do rank first for...

lack istory eview

[flamehead]

I am having a simular problem with my site and wonder if anyone could give me a clue as to what it could be? It is a T-shirt site. If you do a search for "phrase t-shirt" I don't show up. However a search for "phrase shirt" and I'm on the first page? I don't understand this? It seems I'm being penalized for T- but why?
Anyone?

[experienced]

Hi,

The same problem is with my site. Site was doing good with every keywords targatted by me but 3 months back i got dropped with some of the good keywords. Now i have got (last month) ranking back with some of the keywords only. With rest of the keywords when in the top 5 now not in 100 results. This is quite amazing how site is going up and down everyday. Anybody knows...?

Thanks
Exp...

[dwilson]

I fixed the space problem w/ some CSS those in that forum were good enough to show me. But now things are worse.

I am 98th for the BHR phrase and still nowhere for the BH phrase.

When I look at the cached listing, the title in H1 is not highlighted. Apparently Google doesn't think it matches. Is my CSS hurting me worse than the <font> junk was?

Here's the code:
<h1><span class="big">B</span>LACK
<span class="big">H</span>ISTORY
<span class="big">R</span>EVIEW
</h1>

Thanks for the help!

[phantombookman]

I have the same problem. A site for a single author (PR5), search author name rare books or author name books then the index page is #1 Google match.
search just author name and not included at all, going back hundreds of matches!

I don't expect it to be #1 but if it is good enough for the number one spot in some searches then surely it should be there somewhere.

I am no expert but I think the last algo change has hammered what it sees as keyword abuse
Regards to all
Rod

[jtoddv]

One, I would NOT get all hyped up thinking the bad HTML is causing anything.

One of my competitors is ranked #2 for my term and has 340 errors on his page. LOL

[StudioGuy]

I have somewhat the same problem as the original poster.

My site is quite new (first time indexed March 15th) and as I've read about several places in this forum that might have something to do with it.

My homepage got PR 3 instantly when first indexed together with my pages one level down,except for one having PR4. Pages on the 3rd level and deeper didn't get any PR. At that time Google showed only a single backlink which was pointing to the PR4 page

Now just a few days ago the PR updated, giving home page PR 4.Now I have 2 backlinks showing pointing to my homepage. The single backlink to my level 2 page that was originally PR 4 does no longer show, but the PR for that page has not changed.

After the update ALL my other level 2 and deeper pages were assigned a PR of 3. No other pages show any backlinks in google.

My home page ranks 185 for my main keyword today. It has been fluctuating between 172 and 205 since it got indexed. The ranking in the SERPs for my other keywords and pages vary from 45 to nowhere.

Will it be a matter of waiting before i see any increase in ranking (considering it's a new site) or is there something I can do?

PS. I try SEO to best of my ability, considering I'm still a rookie and I'm trying to get incoming links wherever I get the opportunity for a quality targeted link.

[dwilson]

There's a simple explanation for my problem. Google hasn't updated most of my pages. So for them it still sees the space problem, though it no longer exists. At least, that's what the cached version suggests.

Creating more food for the 'bot to try to get another deepcrawl ...