Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'd also like to report my results, so far on a 5 week old site, and ask a couple of questions. Hope this helps someone out there.
My site hasn't used mod-rewrite but has friendly URL's anyway. The forums have session ID's removed and the site content itself validates and has had seo applied in large amounts... all of it on the up and up and accepted by search engines as positive changes. I use robots.txt to ensure sections I don't want looked at (pages with login stuff etc) aren't crawled. I use "follow - noindex" tags on "sub-index" type pages in the forums and in category type links from the main index. I put a lot of planning into site structure as well. Nothing about the site is vanilla, meaning I've made what I believe to be improvements in almost every part of the site. No redundant content or links, no links with different names pointing to the same content etc..etc.
The results... I've done a check of everything once a week and will continue for a few months.
Week #1 - 7 days and I'm getting love in the serps already. My index page got listed almost immediately under its name as you can expect. About 40 other, mostly forum pages, also got indexed but all as supplemental. This seems completely normal as the site has no "juice" to pass along to sub pages.
Week #2 - With exactly one incoming link from a PR2 site to my main index all pages that are linked to directly from the front page of my site came out of supplemental. The forum index, the article index etc. I suspect that even minimal incoming pr was enough to do this for only links directly attached to the main index. The rest is still supplemental. I'm seeing a ripple effect.
Week #3 - I've been writing about an article a day, all completely original and written by me on a subject i'm passionate about so it hardly seems like work. Images have alt tags, uri's are relevant etc..etc. I've gotten a surprise. The first article I wrote and uploaded in week one has come out of supplemental without a direct link on the main page. It ranks as 42nd in googles search results for its topic.
Week #4 - I did my usual Saturday morning check to see if I can learn anything from the actual google results, what does google like, dislike etc. Another surprise. The same article now ranks as 2nd in search results with still zero incoming links to it. 2nd out of a possible 17,825 pages according to google. 15 incoming links total are directed at the main page as the sector the site is in is begining to notice my site. I think the article is doing that well simply because it has no strikes against it, its obviously not because its been linked to a lot. (Thanks again webmasterworld).
Week #5 - 138 pages indexed with more articles out of supplemental, the first one is still ranked 2nd for its topic. If I change the order of the words searched for the page stays between 2nd and 4th in the results. 138 pages indexed, again many of those are from the forums but all 18 non forum articles are out of supplemental and holding their own. Googles adsense program unlocked a few new features for me this morning although I have very few ads on the site and none in usually prime locations.
So far so good, far better than I expected honestly. I'm not feeling a "sandbox" effect at all. The age of the site is nowhere near old enough to draw anything definitive BUT google obviously updates the results on an ongoing basis for me to have seen inclusion and movement already. Its not my first site, perhaps the sandbox effect applies to the webmaster and not to the new site. I put in a LOT of effort to cover all the bases this time around but avoided anything even remotely questionable.
Question: for an article to rank 2nd in googles main serp but to rank between 2nd and 4th depending on the order of the words I searched for (same words, different order) suggests that the order of words in your title/uri/description matter.
I'd like to continue using the titles that make sense when read by a person but I realise people don't search for what they read, they use condensed versions, does anyone have more experience with title selection they can share? Should I remove words like "and" and "the" or not. I don't want to but as webmaster of my site its also in the readers best interests that I at least consider and research it. Thoughts?
Also, pagerank. Its become apparent to me that even if I use a robots.txt exclusion to keep sections of my site out of the serps they do in fact gain pr and pass it along. I'm seeing that they don't pass it along however if the "follow - noindex" tags are applied. I know a "nofollow" tag says "don't vote or pass PR to this page" but the "noindex" page also doesn't hold or pass PR, is this the norm? So far its holding true on the limited sites i'm following closely which suggests using robots.txt may be prefferable to using nofollow / noindex tags when possible.
I'd love to hear more experiences with sites just a couple of months old if anyone has them.
