What's wrong with my site? Almost no SE pickup...

Thought it was the sandbox at first....

[Illah]

So I made a site and it's not being picked up much by search engines. I have the dot.com, dot.net, and dot.org variations on the domain name, and Google has only picked up dot.net and dot.org and seems to reject the dot.com version (and it only has the root domain URL for dot.net and dot.org, no sub-pages). Also Google reports no links to my site. Yahoo picks up the site alright, but only a handful of pages. Yahoo also picks up the links to the site. MSN doesn't pick us up at all.

My site launched in mid September '04 so at first I thought it was the sandbox effect, but now we're going on four months and I'm starting to wonder what's wrong. My WebTrends reports show ONLY direct URL refferers, i.e. me visiting by typing in the domain name.

So what do you think is wrong? Here's the main features of my site:

- Non-dynamic HTML with minimal use of CSS & JavaScript.
- I have a Greymatter based blog on there.
- It has very clean code, decent content, etc.
- Keyword density might be high, working on lowering (could this alone cause me to not be listed?)
- I've worked a lot of keywords into the directory structure and filenames (i.e. www.site.com/widget/widget.html)
- Link popularity is low, just recently started aggressively linking.
- Hosted on a corporate server (is a company site). Could another site on the same IP block have caused mine any trouble?
- Have submitted to search engines for whatever that's worth nowadays.

Thanks!

--Illah

[treeline]

- Link popularity is low, just recently started aggressively linking.

I'd go with this one. Get more incoming links, plus a few to interior pages, and SE interest should pick up.

[diamondgrl]

Your problem almost surely is a duplicate content penalty based on the fact that you have .net and .org variations. You need to 301 the domains you don't want to the one you do. You can find more about this problem by searching this site for "duplicate content".

[blaketar]

However, and take this with whatever grain of salt you like!

The most aggresive link campaign MAY NOT get you into any sort of money terms with Google. I myself am a walking study. Going on 8 months now, lots of Quality Backlinks and really only hit and miss with Google. The other engines I am doing quite well!

If its google you seek you will just have to wait until they are ready to accept YOU!

[Illah]

DiamondGirl - That makes so much sense I feel like a moron for not seeing it myself. Just looked into it with WebBug and the IT guys who handle my backend didn't use 301's, so each domain is in fact recognized as an independent site! I'll have them change this ASAP!

Sometimes you just need a fresh pair of eyes :)

--Illah