Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
3 work well, one doesn't - it just trickles a small number of results in Google's serps.
The only difference to the sites is that they offer content in different languages.
Why on earth does Google prejudice one site over the other 3?
Has anyone else experienced this problem?
Are you saying that Google ranks 3 of them well, and one ranks poorly? If so, are all other factors between the 4 sites equal (e.g., good inbound links, etc)? Furthermore, do all 4 sites have the exact same inbound links? I have a personal theory that multiple sites having the EXACT inbound links may raise a red flag (link duplication akin to content duplication). Just a theory of mine which suggests that "link chasing" MAY be futile. I bring this up because I have observed owners of multiple sites acquiring the same backlinks for each of their sites. But I digress. I am still interested in hearing more about your situation.
The one in English produces the Google traffic. The others don't?
The language that is working is the one you wrote the site in first time round?
If either or both of these are true, then there is your answer.
After that you would need to analyse the backlinks to each version. Likelihood is that the backlinks to the busy site far outweighs the backlinks to the other sites - in quantity and/or Quality.
There are also environmental factors that may be at work here as well - like you have all the sites on the same server - hosted in one country - and you are not giving Google a TLD to help it work out that it should be putting the other versions into local language indexes.
Just out of curiosity, what are the languages?
Working - French ; German ; Spanish
Not Working - Italian
Could you explain a bit more what you mean by "3 work - 1 doesn't"?
Are you saying that Google ranks 3 of them well, and one ranks poorly?
Yes - it looks like the 4th site is filtered, almost as though it's "waiting" to break free into the serps like the others did. The issue is, if it is, it's 2 months behind the others.
If so, are all other factors between the 4 sites equal (e.g., good inbound links, etc)? Furthermore, do all 4 sites have the exact same inbound links?
All other factors, except language are the same. The IBL's are translation links between the sites ie Page FR/123 to IT/123 - nothing wrong here, this has been cleared as OK, so long as the content is different, which it is.
So here's my guess.
The one in English produces the Google traffic. The others don't?The language that is working is the one you wrote the site in first time round?
If either or both of these are true, then there is your answer.
After that you would need to analyse the backlinks to each version. Likelihood is that the backlinks to the busy site far outweighs the backlinks to the other sites - in quantity and/or Quality.
There are also environmental factors that may be at work here as well - like you have all the sites on the same server - hosted in one country - and you are not giving Google a TLD to help it work out that it should be putting the other versions into local language indexes.
Non of them are in English
All the links are about equal
All the sites are located on the same server in one country
Google is picking up correctly the site languages of FR; DE ; ES and is also picking up the 4th site [ IT ] - but as i mentioned the results are less than 10% of the others and not ranking.
Not sure what to suggest next. Except to say that I would imagine the number of people using the web in Italian would be considerably less than using the web in French, Spanish or German. I don't have Italian (or other good stats outside the UK) to hand - but it might be worth looking up how many Italian speakers access the Internet compared to the others.
My guess is that it's something to do with the behaviour of Google, but I've no idea why this sequence is being applied.
That's a good sign, but i guess what puzzles me still, is why it kicked in so much later than the others [ 6- 8 weeks apart ].
The other thing that puzzles me is why all of our sites start to increase their results on a Friday, at fortnightly intervals. Is this a date set in Google's cycle to release results on newly indexed pages?
[edited by: Whitey at 11:06 pm (utc) on Jan. 17, 2007]
The only difference between the sites is language [ French , Spanish , German and Italian ]. It's the last site - Italian - that has started to revive recently to complete the success, so i kinda wondered if Google has different release settings [ or algorithm permutations ] for different languages.
** Only one of our English language sites [ 1 of 3 is ] is producing results over the last 8 days - and these are totally diffent page template / link architecture designs [ so i kinda kept this discussion out of things for the moment. ]
Here's some suprising revelations which might be useful to share. Hmmmm .... yes folks we broke some Google guidelines [ please forgive us and don't penalise us - we're trying to do good things :) ]
The good things are:
-Clean heirarchical navigation themed through each level
-Navigation set as a priority on page, left hand side and centrally.
-All pages offer unique content, meta's and titles between the same site pages
The things that surprise me are:
-Some occassional major pages are way too big [ over 400kb ]
-Some occassional pages have way too many links [ over 200 ]
Let me know if you have any other questions - I'm happy to share.
[edited by: Whitey at 3:03 am (utc) on Jan. 18, 2007]
