Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
i get traffic from google, but on my primary keyword, i rank extremely poorly from google.
i'm looking at the site that's #1 on google for my keyword, and it's a general "how to" site with forums / questions / answers, etc. Using available tools, it seems like my site is much newer, so it doesn't have a toolbar pagerank yet (so i dont know what the pr is), and i've got a decent amount of site-links. however, in comparision to the top site, i "lose" on links to the domain and on site age.
the site, being a bigger site, has lots of links to the domain (probably many of them coming from the domain itself)
i'm left to believe that my small, much more targeted site will lose in google because of the massive nature of this other site (it has hundreds of thousands of pages) and the age.
i can get over the age, but i'm not doing a user generated content site, it's maybe 30 pages of content about how to do certain things related to my keyword.
will i just age my site over time and rise? or do i need to create more pages? right now, i've got what i think is a very good pages per visit ratio (maybe 7 pages per visit on average, so i think my users think the content is very good)
i'm thinking i just need a lot more links, but i'm more interested in the WHY, so i can apply the knowledge elsewhere.
also, interestingly, google provides most of the search traffic, counting the "long tail" -- most of my organic search referrals happen only once or twice per week/month, and that's over 50% of my traffic.
i'm just looking to 1) get more traffic on my primary keyword and 2) understand the 'why' of this phenomenon.
thanks in advance,
-jmatthew3
Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com]
the site, being a bigger site, has lots of links to the domain (probably many of them coming from the domain itself)
When studying links, don't depend on Google's link: operator search results -- they intentionally report only a sampling of the links they know about. You can get more definitive information from the Yahoo Site Explorer [siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com] -- and it allows you to check for inbound links that come ONLY from other domains.
i guess i didn't understand quite what the tool was reporting to me.
Also, thank you for linking to that post. I've read it, and it's very good at "how."
What i've noticed, very strongly, is that as i add more pages of content to my site, i get re-crawled and i start getting referrals.
It seems to be all about "content" -- i understand that, and I'm going to keep adding content as I can. However, I know that I also need links.
I need to get creative about going and getting links from people.
