Purchased site that was idle ... developed... launched... now what?

search engine placement timing how long to reach google

[ccollins]

I purchased a domain that was once used for the same content that I am now using it for. They sold blue widgets, now I'm going to sell blue widgets under the same web domain.

They no longer sell those blue widgets, and I do.

The site went to one of those "this site is for sale" pages.

Then it expired and I purchased it directly (about 6 months ago).

I recently developed it (designed fully functional ecommerce site) and launched it (about 30 days ago).

Goggle still can't even find it if I put in the exact domain name. Nor MSN. I can only find it buried deep in Yahoo.

Is this normal? Anything I can try?

[leadegroot]

Do your logs say that the spiders have been through?
If yes, its a waiting game - increase your links and your content while you wait
If no, increase your links to increase the chance they will find you. Oh, and increase your content when sick of link building
:)

[specter]

to be founded in Google (and other SEs)you may have almost a link with any other web site,and in particular,with a page already indexed in the considered SE.
You have to wait the time needed to Google (or other SE)to recognize your link/s as of the last crawling,so,almost 4 weeks from link/s adding.

[ccollins]

Thanks for the replies. I'm BRAND new, so please bare with me on my ignorance.

By logs, do u mean site statistics? If yes, only Yahoo and ebay shows up.

I've got some ebay auctions up and I'm using a link to my site for the IMAGES. I've gotten a ton of image hits/impressions. Does that help? Hurt? About 3000 image url hits/impressions so for in March. In other words I'm using a URL instead of uploading a picture, it refers it to a picture on my site of the item I am auctioning.

What does sandboxing mean, and how do I know if that's happening to me? (remember the site was idle/stale for 6 months, maybe more)

[sem4u]

By logs, do u mean site statistics?

Log files should be available to download from your host. Run these through a log analyzer or check them by hand (using notepad or similar)

What does sandboxing mean, and how do I know if that's happening to me?

Try a site or Google search for 'sandbox'. Will turn up lots of reading for you.

[leadegroot]

No, people pulling images from your hosting for your ebay auctions is irrelevent to your SE placement.
What you need to do is build backlinks to your site (and add great content! :)) - add your site to directories and think about what sorts of sites might want to link to them. Read through the link building forums here. Google will decide your site looks useful if other sites have linked to it and come visit to check it out.
But the sandbox will mean you wont get Google placement for, oh, 6 or 7 months, but you could burst out after that if you keep building links and content now.
yahoo and MSN arent affected by the Google sandbox.

[Powdork]

Keep in mind that even sandboxed sites appear when you search by domain name. There is an expired domain penalty which basically means the backlinks the domain had before expiration (and whois change?)no longer count. You should send an email [e-mail] with the subject line of Reinclusion Request and explain as you did in your first post (although you can give specifics to them). Then get new links from authoritative sites. Think of links that will bring you relevant traffic rather than SE benefits and it will be harder to get links, but much better in the long run.

[ccollins]

Thanks for all the posts.

In regard to goggle bot, there are a ton of logs and I have requested an upgrade of my webhosting so I can use URCHIN and find out if google has been by, I can't tell thus far through the logs.

CONTENT: In regard to content, I think I understand what you mean. I can only talk so much about the blue widgets I sell. I sell about 30 different versions of this blue widget, each product version has a detailed page. Is it true that I should keep the homepage text light?

I didn't even know you could email google, so I will definitely try that as well.

Do you guys recommend getting backlinks by the "old fashioned" method - email a webmaster and beg for a link? And does that link need to be on their homepage to be worth a damn? I've noticed that most sites pageranks are their homepage only. Secondary pages usually show 0 to little page rank. I did read on here that I should look for a site with pagerank of 4 or more.

[ogletree]

I hate to break the bad news to you but there is a good chance you may never rank.

Read gg's post on Msg 4 [webmasterworld.com]

They put penalties on sites that expire automaticly. You will need to ask them to remove it. Also if they see the site was for sale they may let you in but take away all the old backlinks. They do not like people getting backlinks from a domain purchase.