Are any of these pointers damaging me?

[richiwatts]

I just seem to find it impossible to get organic growth. It is not too much of a problem as I am paying for sponsered ads in all our major search engines.

However, searching for my site by keywords gets exhausting after page 60 and still no sign of my site.

I changed my domain name about a year ago. On my old site I have put one of those redirects after 5 seconds to my new domain (OK or BAD)

My site uses a JavaScript drop down menu, however, on the main page I have a link to a site map to get all the pages indexed. (OK or Bad)

CP

[Tsuren]

richiwatts,
1. bad. Why you do not use aliases? Or 3xx redirect?
2. Depend on script. As a rule it does not matter because script is responsible to move the menu. Links in the menu can be read. Anyway if you have other links - it does not matter.

[walrus]

Supposing you're using good content, meta tags ,robots.txt and normal chatacters in the file paths then maybe its the structure of the pages?
If your using tables there can be problems.
Just a thought

[richiwatts]

I always see top ranking sites using tables. What is the problem woth them then?

[mincklerstraat]

Almost all sites use tables, since they're easy to use. A disadvantage is they can make your page a lot larger than it needs to be. And content inside of tables that are inside of tables that are inside of tables might be considered by search engines as not so important since it's so deeply 'nested'. Using css *well* is likely to decrease your page size dramatically.

I'd look into using .htaccess to make 301 redirects from your older site to your newer site, and maybe replacing those js menus - every link on your site counts, and js menus can water down this factor a great deal.

Also, poke around here a little more.

[grandpa]

find it impossible to get organic growth

I prefer a 301 redirect from my htaccess file rather than a meta-redirect. It's easier to maintain (IMO).

How is your link campaign? I recently checked a site on both Yahoo and Google, reporting appx. 500 backlinks each, less than 200 when I remove domain.com from the check. So, I've got over 300 internal pages providing backlinks. The site is ranking pretty good, today...

But, I will add more external links and continue to add content (more pages). Organic growth depends upon visibility. Are you listed in any directories?

How are your page Titles? Do they accurately reflect the page content, and do they contain the keyword(s) you want that page to be ranked for?

Look at your page with the SIM spider [searchengineworld.com]. What is the first bit of text you see? Your keywords, or something else. Try moving your content around if the keywords are closer to the bottom than the top.

[walrus]

Regarding tables , the <tr valign="top"> is also read by some spiders as the descriptive or most important content in the table so sometime i guess you can end up with what you think is content at the top but what spiders may read is some gif or ad or somethin in the top tr if one is assigned that.
Someone please correct me if im wrong about that,]
i was sure it was just a TR thing, and the tables in tables as was mentioned.
And I think a site may have lots of inlinks and content so a table structure may not matter as much in their case.
<and maybe replacing those js menus - every link on your site counts, and js menus can water down this factor a great deal.>
I was actually thinking about that lately and was wanting to ask someone this,
Ive read the top 250 lines are scanned by spiders or searches.Does anyone know if its the top 250 in the body or the whole page and is it counting java?