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I've searched the forums but didn't find an answer to this. I've a site that isn't perfect but should be visible in the search engines, but it's not in the top 100 listings for any of about 20 key phrases in google, msn, and yahoo.
I'm wondering whether downtime could be the cause, so I set a monitor going and in the last fifteen days it was down 1 hour, so I got 99.614% uptime. I see others feel comfortable with 99.9% or higher.
I'm wondering whether anyone knows of any research about the link between ranking and downtime. More specifically, could 99.614% uptime be the cause of my woes?
The site, btw, has been up for a year but never really got much ranking, that's OK because I've been working on functionality for it. Now it's starting to matter.
J
Have you validated your pages? Small mistakes can make them uncrawlable.
Is your content unique? If its too similar to a ranking site, you
may suffer a serious duplication penalty.
How about incoming links? Do you have any? Many?
I can't take this much further without more information.
Good luck - Larry
The content's unique.
Few incoming links, just from a couple of sites.
What makes you confident it isn't the downtime? Just experience?
There are some things for me to do. For instance, I've written four editorials, one to suit each buying stage, and I peppered those with keywords, but the things I'm reading are suggesting that these pages are too large .. there are 1100 words in the first article. That was deliberate, because I wanted people to be able to print it. I guess I need to separate that out into five 'pages' each dedicated to one or two key phrases, and provide a printable version. So anyway, I'm not saying the site's perfect, just that I thought I'd at least get a mention somewhere in a search result, so I was looking for an overarching answer.
The crux is though .. we know there is a link between site availability and ranking, has anyone got a formula that links the two?
Other than that, any groovy ideas to help are more than welcome :-)
J
Few incoming links, just from a couple of sites.
Spend some time cultivating links, and that will likely help your rankings more than anything else you could do at this stage.
Re downtime: I don't have any formulas, but in my own experience (grrrrr ...) downtime doesn't have nearly such bad effects on one's rankings these days as it would have two or three years ago.
Any pointers?
J
