Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Right I've been trying for nearly 6 months now to get an online glasses site ranked on Google,and am just having no luck whatsoever.
I'm relatively new to the SEO game,however have had success with other sites I've done.
The thing that baffles me is that I've managed to get the site a PR of 3, mainly by using an online press release, and a few other inbound links. However when using SEOElite to check my ranking it returns as not found for the keyword phrase the site has been optmised for, and thats in the first 250 results.
My on page optimisation is sorted, good keyword density etc etc etc. The sitemap I submitted is returning no errors at all, GoogleBot comes back and re-caches the site about once every two weeks (does a cache update automatically mean a SERPS update?).
The site uses the Cactushop ASP shopping cart software, and there's nothing in the backend setup that I can see could cause a problem. There was a cookie re-direct that was stopping the whole domain being awarded the PR of the inner pages, but I turned that off well before Xmas, and has solved the issue.
What makes it even more baffling is that the site is ranked in 3rd for the same phrase on MSN, and was 15th on Yahoo, but has now dropped off that too.
All competitors only have max PR of 4, so shouldn't be far behind them at all. My client is currently using AdWords to gain sales but is costing a fortune and really wants the natural results sorting.
I'm showing 5 backlinks for Google (both.com and .co.uk), 18 for MSN, and 21 for Yahoo.
Help?!
For a number of reasons, it's sometimes harder to get new sites ranking on google. Keep building links and content at a natural rate and you should hopefully see some results within the next 6 months. If you don't see any increase in ranking, your site may never be able to rank (under google's current algorithm) possibly due to your site not exhibiting enough 'signs of quality' during it's few few months in existence.
arran.
The above is all based on the following assumptions:
- You are using basic SEO properly.
- You site doesn't have any obvious problems such as duplicate content or canonical issues.
can you clarify my initial question though - does a visit by GoogleBot and an update of the cached site automatically lead to a change in SERPS, or does that only happen every 6 weeks or so when larger Google updates seem to take place?
if anyone else has any input on this please help.
Sitemap retrieval, robots.txt retrieval, crawling, indexing and cached copy maintenance all seem to be disparate functions. I've recently seen pages crawled and put in Google's cache - but not turning up on keyword searches for over a week.
Also if you do a search on your unique keywords, and a search for your site using site:, and pull one of your pages out of Google's cache - all those requests might be serviced by different data centres.
This just doesn't seem to be many backlinks. I have a site that ranks only for very speciic key phrases in google. It has 179 inbound links listed in Yahoo. A lot of my competitors have 300-400.
Check on your competitors by running their backlinks. Yahoo will give you a better idea since Google masks backlinks.
When you say Google masks backlinks, do you mean they just hide them from people using the link: function, but they do still actually count? (eg. I have a backlink from a PR6 site that shows on Yahoo, but not on Google)
I'm aware that it's not a huge amount of backlinks, but would have thought enough to get ranked somewhere - the site isn't even showing in the top 750 results for said keyword yet has a PR3.
