Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have a relatively new .co.uk website that has been up for about 4 months. Currently, for my chosen search keywords, I am in the top 80 on yahoo and in the 1st page top 10 on msn live search (which I'm very pleased with :) ). Though I seem to be almost nowhere on google for the same search terms - recently in the top 500, now I'm only in top 500 for a search on www.google.co.uk and not the .com. How can I fix this? I'm also wondering if this is partly because my site is very new in google's estimation. Might I see it rise through google serps if I simply wait for a few months? I ask this, as that seems to be what happened on msn live - it was gradually rising through the result positions and then suddenly shot into the top 10, which is fantastic, but at the same time surprising :).
The general answer I seem to find here, is that I probably need more relevant inbound links. I have paid to list in respectable directories that I have seen suggested here - though I'm not sure I could afford to keep doing this and there seems to also be a limited number of good ones. So I'd also like to ask how I might go about obtaining links from relevant sites? (my website is about web design).
I've noticed that my leading competitors on page 1 results for the keyword search on google, use all sorts of dodgy tactics lol (hidden text, cloaking, redirects etc.) which I would really rather not do, though how can I compete with them? The page 1 results on google have also all been around for about 4 to 5 years, and will always have more history in that sense than my website will. So, I'm wondering if I can beat them, maybe I need over 2000 relavent inlinks or something (at the moment I have about 20).
Any advice greatly appreciated.
Regards,
James
It sounds like you are still being affected by the Google trust filters that create what people have called the "sandbox effect". Here's a good thread on the topic:
Filters exist - the Sandbox doesn't. How to build Trust. [webmasterworld.com]
Yeah I did read this thread a bit before which has some good points in it (got a bit put off the first time - all the whether to call it sandbox / trustrank, though I'm reading through it more carefully this time)
I suppose it may simply be partly that my site is considered 'new' in google terms, but is clearly not held back on the other search engines.
I think Trustrank is quite a good term :) as from studying my top competitors: they have had their sites around for years with many links, nearly all of them are cheating and between them they break all the rules that googles says you really must not do! So there's clear evidence that these older sites can get away with murder, which seems a bit harsh on people trying to do things correctly (so frustrating! lol), but there you go.
Anyway, I tried viewing my listing in the google serps for my keywords using an anonymous proxy server based in London, and got an interesting result. It seems that my site is still in the top 500 there, but still doesn't appear in the serps for the actual server that gives results to people who live in my part of the UK (which is quite close to London). (I also later found that it is viewable from the other gfe-xx.google servers too)
It dropped from my local google server literally a couple of days ago, but is clearly viewable if I search from a computer in London and elsewhere (via proxies). Is my constant checking of it's position a possible reason? Well it's an odd effect I'm not sure what to do. I'm trying to appeal particularly to customers that live in my county, so this is very important.
Ok so back to the thread you mentioned - is changing internal links to the index.html page to / really important? Mine point to index.html, I've seen many sites that do.
I'm also quite cautious about changing my site too much, as I don't want to upset the yahoo & msn results, which took some time. Though I know google is so extremely more popular and I use it myself most of the time, I expect my customers would too.
Should I just leave the pages as they are and try to get more links?
Paying for 2000 links could be very expensive.
I really wonder how you can get organic/normal links from people when you are trying to sell a particular product, without paying them? As I'm sure most people could never be that enthusiastic about any new company that they would feel they had to go and write a blog and them and post a hyperlink. I don't do blogs myself though, maybe I'm wrong... Well if you do know any who would send them my way :-) lol
Should I just leave the pages as they are and try to get more links?
In my experience four months is not a long time in the sandbox. During the last couple of years I have launched several sites. At one end of the scale one site took 15 months to emerge and at the other I had a site that slipped through the filter and started ranking right away.
I would say that (assuming you have decent content and no black hat techniques have been used) you sit this out for a while. It is likely that your site will emerge eventually.
Mine was initially ranking for much less competative keywords, and then I changed it for what I'm guessing are better ones. So it's probably only been 2 to 3 months at the most, maybe I should just wait. I read somewhere that changing it a lot might affect it too?
I'm not aware of any black hat techniques, certainly nothing intentional. Only one thing I've done that I noticed everyone else was doing, adding extra similar pages with town names. I've only added a few, though I've seen it done on a huge scale on other sites, but they usually mention every single town in the UK, which seems unnatural, i.e. done for the search engines not the user. I've only added about 4 towns (each with their own page) that I would actually visit and know very well, as I expect customers to come from this region - so this seems quite normal to me. Maybe the content on those are too similar, though I am offering the same service to each town?
[edited by: James1 at 1:10 pm (utc) on Dec. 2, 2006]
Regarding your site, if it is clean and contains good content then it will rank eventually, probably within 6 to 9 months. When it does come out of the box and settle into a position in the SERPs you can then start to think about making tweaks to improve your ranking.
That is not to say that you cannot make changes to the content before this happens. Google appear to like sites where the content is regularly updated.
Do you have a technique for determining the point at which the site has climbed to its natural maximum for a keyword search
That is, the site is ranking 200th, an google thinks the 199 sites infront are better
as opposed to
its ranked 200th, and the 199 sites in front are older but not actually better, but simply more trusted by google
Long story short, do what I did. Take the advice you see here the most: Focus on building content and good quality back links...then be patient.
is changing internal links to the index.html page to / really important?
Yes. The domain root is one url, and index.html is a different url. By using them both in links, you are not focusing all your potential Page Rank on the domain root, but instead you are splitting your PR into "two piles", if you will.
In some cases Google seems to catch this, but not always. I recommend you not leave it to the algo, but eliminate any chance of trouble.
[webmasterworld.com...]
and
[webmasterworld.com...]
and
[webmasterworld.com...]
Remember that a 301 redirect will pass PR and backlink influence.
Well my site is still rising in msn live, and I hadn't altered it at all. I don't get much visits from there with the keywords, even though I am high in the top 10. Maybe this will change with Windows Vista, and their integration of searching facilities - perhaps this will renew people's interest in it and help people discover the new msn live site?
I'm also back in the google serps though still very low down (400 and something). Google list 30 times more results though (several million), than msn does. I'm not sure how relevant they all are though. I hear what you guys are saying about being patient, but a year is a long time in business terms :-)
Freelistfool: that's very interesting what you were saying about your site jumping at exactly 1 year to the day. Also the keyword match broadening - does google eventually allow your site to rank well for even broader terms typed with your competative keywords (and also ones not on site pages)?
I'm wondering if my keyword terms are going to be the best way to find my customers. It's hard to know what people might type in. I've done some experimenting with adwords and ppc. I've been aiming to get my site seo'd for keywords that are not too competative to start off with in the normal google serps, so I can see some sort of result as I'm quite new to this.
How can you be sure of what search returns you will get when you list high up? I've used overture for my terms, to try and guesstimate it, though now I realise they obviously do not relate to the number of searches on msn live in any way.
There seems to be a lot of guesswork involved, and my concern is that not only is a year a long time to wait for google positioning - it's an extremely long time to wait, if the search terms are not as popular as I might have thought when I started (which would mean having to start again). What do you guys think?
[edited by: James1 at 11:08 am (utc) on Dec. 7, 2006]
