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I have two sites - lets call them site A and site B.
Site A is a site that I've spent a lot of time on and have optimised to the best of my knowledge with proper keyword density and title tags, keywords in bold, keywords in link text, h1 tags, keywords in anchor text and dozens of backlinks from sites with PRs of 4-7. The site offers a wide range of products and also has a lot of content and information. I started this site in April and submitted to google in May.
Site B is nothing but an affiliate farm that I started in May and submitted in June. I spent little time writing it and it has hardly any original content and no backlinks. I also did the bare minimum of optimisation on it. I never submitted it to google because I assumed that google wouldn't rank a site made up of affiliate links.
Now the strange part - in the pr update of a few weeks ago, site B increased in pr to 3, whilst site A is still languishing at pr 0. Googlebot visits site A from time to time, but never goes deeper than the homepage. Googlebot has spidered every page of site B. No backlinks appear on google for either site. Site B appears around pages 4-5 of the serps for some of the main keywords, site A only appears for the url and not at all for the keywords.
I'm pretty confused by this situation. Can anyone offer any ideas as to why site A is doing so poorly? I don't think that I have over-optimised site A but I have wondered if it could be a possibility. There are only two other things I can think of: a) the shop part of the site is hosted on a different server/address, and b) the navigation may not be ideal as I have a start page which offers a choice of entering the store or the resource site and has links to a few brand pages. I'm not sure how important these two things would be to google though. Site A fares a bit better on inktomi and altavista, although still not in the first few pages yet.
the navigation may not be ideal as I have a start page which offers a choice of entering the store or the resource site and has links to a few brand pages
Good navigation definitely makes a difference in my experience. Try a consistent menu structure across all pages with a link to a full site map on the menu.
Googlebot normally does a pretty good job of spidering sites laid out this way.
Is it just PR0 or a greyed toolbar too?
the shop part of the site is hosted on a different server/address
I don't know if this is an issue or not, maybe someone else can tell you. But I have to wonder if Google thinks Site A is actually an affiliate site of the shop on the other server/address.
Googlebot visits site A from time to time, but never goes deeper than the homepagestart page which offers a choice of entering the store or the resource site
How do you offer the choice? Are they text links? Search engine spiders don't make decisions - they can't fill out forms. They also won't follow your links if they are JavaScript.
Also, there is such a thing as over-optimization :)
The navigation is the same on every page except for the homepage. On the homepage I have the following links:
1. A large two column, one row table that offers the option of entering the store (which as I said, is on a different server and address) or entering the main part of the site - the resource site.
2. Eight image links with alt tags to our most popular brands that we sell.
3. four keyword links that also go to our store.
4. two more keyword links that go to pages discussing those keywords.
5. Five or so links to shopping sites that we are listed on and insist we place their link on our homepage to stay listed with them.
Thinking about it, there are quite a few links there that go straight out of the site. Would this be detrimental to the site? Maybe that is something I should look at changing.
I don't know if this is an issue or not, maybe someone else can tell you. But I have to wonder if Google thinks Site A is actually an affiliate site of the shop on the other server/address.
I had thought about that actually. It could possibly appear that way.
Thinking about it, there are quite a few links there that go straight out of the site. Would this be detrimental to the site?
Yep. And in the most damaging way possible. After spending all that effort getting a visitor to come to your site, you want to do your very best to keep them there!
Yep. And in the most damaging way possible. After spending all that effort getting a visitor to come to your site, you want to do your very best to keep them there!
I agree with your point storevalley and I plan to amend that. What I meant though was 'are all the outgoing links detrimental in terms of ranking?'
So how has it got to PR3?!?
What I meant though was 'are all the outgoing links detrimental in terms of ranking
Potentially. Have a good read through this thread ...
[webmasterworld.com...]
I'm more interested in Site B. From what you say you've deliberately done everything "wrong". It doesn't sound as if anyone would link to it.
So how has it got to PR3?!?
I wouldn't say that I deliberately did everything wrong on site b. I just never made any attempt to optimise it and was never too bothered if it ranked or not. I did it more as a portfolio project. But you do raise a good point. Plenty of sites get stuck at pr0, but why would google assign any pr at all to such a blatant affiliate farm? Baffles me....
Looking on alltheweb, it has about four sites linking to it. All quite old sites, since they haven't checked for a link back in some time obviously. I previously used the domain for site B for a different site, but it was only for a few months, wasn't a very good site and was also full of affiliate programs, only had a small number of backlinks and was never given a pr. As far as I know google never indexed it in its old form. Even if it had gained some pr or credibility on google before I changed it over, I would have assumed that would have been lost as soon as google re-indexed it. The url actually re-directs to a free web host address, and the new pages are on a different server to the old ones. There are 6 new pages all full of affiliate links and nothing else, yet they have all acrued some pr, unlike my site A.
Obviously I'm not complaining at site B getting some pr, as i get the odd bit of traffic here and there from the search engines and get an occasional bit of comission. I'd much rather have that pr on site A though, where I get all the profit and have put all the effort in!
1) encourage google to spider my site A more frequently and more deeply
2) count as spam because I'm using multiple domain names for the same website
?
Forget about the two sites you currently have for a minute. Read this thread back to front ...
[webmasterworld.com...]
Then look at the products you are selling, and use this info to improve site A.
Forget PR! The G toolbar doesn't seem to be doing the best job of reporting this accurately at the moment. Use levels of traffic as a measure of success. Once you have some traffic, you can start looking at ways of improving your conversion rate (selling is what really matters ... right?)
Making sure you are spidered frequently by Google is initially a matter of being linked to the right people. Use site search to look for "freshbot" and start reading. There are some great threads there.
