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Titled the page:
"Keyword by Our Company - Coming Soon"
And I linked to this page on our index.html on a "." that was at the end of a sentence.
It appears Google hasn't even touched the page - and now that we are getting closer to receiving the goods, we really want to begin placing.
Was the page ignored because of the "Coming Soon", or does Google not follow links when the "text" part of them is a "."
Thanks - this forum has been great!
Chris
But as you seem to realize, making a link of a "." is not a great idea. I would remove that ASAP.
My take on using a href "." to "hide" a link is just that..IMO Google would consider this to be an attempt at hiding something. Why not just put the link out in view on your index page "FOR YOUR VISITORS TO FIND" and make sure that the anchor text surrounding the actual href code thouroughly describes your new product offering. Make sure the the page being pointed to focuses only on that product, its specifications and characteristics. If it is something that is entirely new to the marketplace and you want to protect it from being copied before you hit the marketplace then you will have to "beat around the bush" some, but you still could create enough keyword rich text for the page to get looked at...AND...try not to lock any text up in graphics if possible....so that Google can actually access the content...
Google looks for logical links that are part of the link dialogue within the structure of a respective site. If you have a new product offering put it in plain view for everyone to see with a nice "text based" link to the specific page...and place this link and description on everypage of your site so that no matter where someone lands they find your "NEW PRODUCT SECTION" for you site...
From the users perspective --> if I, as a user, were coming to a site that offers products or services, AND, I found the site to be useful to me I would probably come back again to see "WHAT'S NEW" and if I found this new products section I would check it out...
Setting up the link only for Google's sake doesn't cut it...
I suspect they don't bother with various spammy links, including 1 pixel images and single characters. I can't say for sure because I don't use them.
I'd be more worried that google will see the linked period and issue a penalty. Google hates link spam of all sorts, and I'm sure they don't like that sort of thing. Has your PR dropped?
What you should do is create the page to have some content, i.e. a two paragraph description of whatever it is that's coming soon. Then make a conventional link off your homepage called
[link]Keyword{/link] - coming soon from ourdomain.com
One of the big factors that makes a page rank well is the incoming link text - that's why this will be more successful.
I did this for a page at the end of December, put up some text just in time for the beginning of January deepcrawl, added more through January so that visitors to the page had something more to see, and at the end of January update I hit first place for my target keyphrase from 4380 results - based on the content as it was when I first built the page. I'm now getting one to two referrals a day to this page on a range of keyphrases and this will increase at the next update when it takes note of the increased content.
Thank you for the info. I just removed the "." link. The difficulty was that we don't necessarily want our regular visitors to know about the product yet... However, I added a full link on our site map (which gets very little traffic but is fully indexed) that points at the new page.
For know, I'll assume it was the "." link that google ignored or penalized and that my page title "Coming Soon" probably didn't effect it.
Thanks again,
Chris
Better just to be straight up with your links and on the day the site goes live, get your backlinks from directories and vendors and strategic partners.
I've not been tracking PR till recently - our main index.html file is a PR of 5.
wildside - you are right. If the file isn't even showing in the database they probably didn't penalize me for it. Since the only link I had was the "." link, I think Google simply never saw it (which is weird, because a "." link worked on a different web site when I was linking to a different domain - but I've already removed those links as well).
The funny thing was that the goal of this page was to put out REAL information, several paragraphs of text, a sample image, and stuff like that to get a proper listing on the search engines. However, we didn't necessarily want our customers to see it.
I think the link from our "Site Map" page will do it. Our customers shouldn't really notice yet the search engines should.
John - I've not delved into logs yet, but, am thinking I need to. By the way, as an interesting side note, we released another new product on our site just last week with good page build, keywords, title, images, etc. We appeared #1 in the google results within a day or two - must have been freshbot.
Thanks,
Chris
allinurl:www.ourdomain.com
The search was helpful. When I ran it, results show google has indexed all of the static pages on our site (not the shopping cart pages) that have internal or external links to them. However, it obviously ignored the "." link.
I'll see if it picks up the link off our "site index" page - which doesn't have all that many links on it.
Thanks,
Chris
"." is never a good idea. But you also can't count on Gbot (fresh or deep) pulling down the page you're going to put the product on according to your timing. Maintaining a page for this sort of thing in advance of need with PR would good a long way towards giving you control with respect to getting new products into Google.
