Quality content : PR 0, barely indexed

[Ulkari]

I have a site which is primarily informative. I am working hard to build high-class content and think first of my visitor's experience.

Following the pieces of advice read on Webmasterworld:

- clear hierarchical structure, theme pyramid
- listed in DMOZ
- quality/relevant incoming links with good PR and man-made anchor texts
- some relevant outgoing links to reference sites
- All "white hat" stuff
- Domain bought july last year, was owned but unused at that time, unknown history
- robots.txt ok

- high kw density due to the site's nature, but not more than an another very similar site (with similar structure) that does very well
- virtual hosting, shared IP with I don't know who.

It's been up since March. PR has stayed at 0, it doesn't show up in the SERPS, Googlebot visits a couple of times a week but spiders only a couple of pages each time. 100+ pages are indexed (out of 3500) but only the URL shows. Since Florida, not a single backlink (out of 200+) shows anymore. No reply from Google to my email.

I've been scratching my head for the past 6 months and I'd be glad to sticky-mail the URL.

I don't rely on it for a living, but it is sooo frustrating to put that much work into building a high-quality site and see only few visitors.

J-F

[Brett_Tabke]

Get more quality inbound links. Higher PR is your problem.

Good content leads to good inbound links.

>It's been up since March

Not long enough to call a problem yet. A site can take a year or two to get well positioned in Google.

In the mean time, get busy building more content.

[Ulkari]

Thanks Brett. But I had the same content on another domain (free hosting) before that (until March -yes all links updated and the old site has been removed) with less incoming links, and then I had PR 5 and excellent rankings.

What worries me is that the situation is getting worse, with backlinks and page caches removed from the index a couple of weeks ago (reminds me of the "slow death" someone was writing about a month ago, except that I was not grown-up yet...)

Thanks,
J-F

[Brett_Tabke]

> same content on another domain

There could be the problem. Google originally saw the content as duplicate.

[Ulkari]

Hmmm... even if the content was not on both sites at the same time? (I had no access to .htaccess, so replaced the content of each page with a link to the new page)

If that's the case, anything I can do?

[Brett_Tabke]

Ya, if the previous content was still indexed in Google when the new site was put online.

>anything I can do?

Google should have figured it out by now, but I'd:

- make sure the old site is doa.
- get off the shared IP address.
- double check that the site is crawlable.
- check and check again that you aren't doing something inadvertently wrong.

[kaled]

Deleted - didn't read your post properly.

[edited by: kaled at 11:23 am (utc) on Dec. 3, 2003]

[Brett_Tabke]

Also, throw the ip address into Google and other engines to see what it spits out about your ip. It is very rare that it happens, but some ips can be considered "dirty" or have some spam history. Again, get off the shared hosting, as your neighbor may be a problem.

[takagi]

Hi Ulkari,

Some time ago you gave me the URL of your site. I don't think getting links will help much in this case. Of the 100+ pages indexed, only a few have a snippet. One thing that surprised me when looking at the source, is that carriage returns are rare, what makes the lines extremely long. Not sure if that's the problem.

[Ulkari]

Thanks Brett for your help, highly appreciated.

There's not much I can do about the old site: it is a shared domain on a big ISP "free personal pages" site, and worst of all, it does not return 404 when a page does not exist (but 302 to a custom error page). I manually removed the old entries from Google, but nothing changed.

I'm not sure how a new IP would help?

[Ulkari]

Hi Takagi,

I removed most carriage returns and tabs last week to reduce the size of the pages...

[Ulkari]

I checked the IP in SEs some times ago (and again after your post) but nothing comes out. I can't afford a dedicated web server with a unique IP (this is a hobby site) but perhaps I should change my ISP.