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So, any real stories? I've done almost everything, from meta tags (keywords, descriptions), using H1, H2 for headings, rich content.
After all I've read, all I can say from real experience is that some stuff is real:
1. How old your site is, matters for google, so is not the same to add 5 pages per week when you are 1 year old than when you are four... because google knows that in one year your site can disapear.
2. Adding fresh content every day has some impact.
3. ***A real structured site matters (links from and to everywhere within your site)
4. Is better to create your website in silence, finishing it (no broken links) and then submiting it to google and everywhere else, instead of submiting an unfinished site from scratch.
So, the best results I got, was in one of my sites, when I changed and created a new version with links that interconected the whole site itself, generating more clicks.
A.) Per example, one page is about the numbers from one to then are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6... and number four is a link to a page where you tell the story of number four... and so on.
B.) Simple and intuitive navitation, well structured.
C.) getting in touch with my visitors... this happened to show a good result, perhaps related to the "mouth to mouth marketing"
D.) Updating my index page at least once per week
So, do you have any real stories?, like adding pictures to every article dup your visitors?
Ie: I've just bought my domain now. Haven't got a host yet. Would google start counting now or only from when its uploaded?
Additionally, I made it dynamically put the things in the title. Previously, all the page titles were "JK's Widget World". I made it take the name of the category or the "page" so the titles were things like "Four legged blue widgets at JK's Widget World". The links to the "Four_legged_widgets.html" page also had "Four-legged widgets" as the anchor text. It did before, but before, the link was to the blah.cgi?catid=7689384&id=347893 so it didn't help the search engines really know what the page was about.
This massively increased the traffic I got from search engines as more "pages" were indexed. I'd say it doubled in a month, and increased by a factor of 10 in 6 months. It was the same number of pages/urls, but just changing the page names and titles made an enormous difference.
This was probably the simplest change ever, but man, what a difference it made. I'm never ignoring the page title again. :-)
JK
[edit] For a new site, I did a similar thing, paying attention to the page titles and page names. I emailed it to a friend, who liked it and linked it on her blog. From there, it just started showing up in Google within like a week. She doesn't even have that popular a blog! (Maybe 20 people read it, and almost all of those are her personal friends.) Traffic has been growing by about 50% a month.
[/edit]
Goneriding, by "age" I mean how old is your site on the search engine.
For what I read, it sayed that "Google thinks that if you exist after two, four years... means that your site is important, as a lot of sites disapear the first year".
I had the experience that, in several sites with like 200+ pages, with little activity, the traffic raised after two years.
JollyK, thanks!, I've read about that exact case and would like to try it... but I'm still searching for info about "removal tool" on google. Seems like 6 months of... and without doing it so, I've read that Google might think that I have duplicated content, so still searching.
remove site from google
into Google, and it should be the first result. Google has information there about removing all or part of your site from its index.
Not sure if that's what you meant, though.
Rightz: I really don't know for sure, but I think Google probably starts counting the age of the site from the first time one of its bots visits it. In other words, if someone links to you, and google follows that link and finds your site, your site's age starts then. This would make sense to me because I've had domains that I've registered and sat on for years due to lack of time to work on them, and even a 3-year-old domain took probably about a year after I put a site on it to really start taking off.
JK
What I want is to convert my site from "food/271762.htm" to "food/vegetarian_sandwich". And delete all the old 328718273.htm's, instead, my not found page will take asked url and search it on the database to print the right page (for users that bookmarked the pages)
but for google, it will crawl the new pages with friendly filenames.
I was worry about dup content, but after reading your post, I found this:
"Google updates its entire index automatically on a regular basis. When we crawl the web, we find new pages, discard dead links, and update links automatically. Links that are outdated now will most likely "fade out" of our index during our next crawl."
Anyone has ever converted all the file names from your site to other names? I'm talking 180+ pages.
And yeah, anchor text helped me too.
Anyone has ever converted all the file names from your site to other names? I'm talking 180+ pages.
Yes. 700+ pages renamed and 301 redirect was in place. Google took two weeks to update from old url's to new ones.
JollyK, i have tried the same technique in one of my websites but could not confim the SERP effects as it is still in sandbox, about 6 months old.
Milan
For the pages that had the highest PR and the most links, I either set up redirects, or changed the page named, e.g. 10125.html to just include the appropriate content with an SSI call.
For the rest, I had a script that took the URL (e.g. my_domain.com/98463512.html), looked in the database for what that was, and said, "Sorry, we've rearranged the site. That page is now located at my_domain.com/blue_widgets.html. Please make a note of it." Something like that anyway.
It does leave me with some duplicate content (especially on the SSI pages) but I have several .gov and .edu links to those and I didn't want to lose them. (It's terribly hard to get .gov or .edu to change links.)
JK
