Google doesn't seem to be following my links 2

[gmail2]

Last year I created a site for a friend of mine, but it's only in the past month or so that I've started to look into SEO and now I want to retify where I went wrong last time. The site is at

http://www.karenoconnor.co.uk.

At the moment we have about 3 inbound links but a search on google says there's zero -

http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://www.karenoconnor.co.uk/&hl=en

- however google have still managed to find the site. But the strange thing is that the site doesn't seem to have been indexed. if I search for site:

http://www.karenoconnor.co.uk

the only page that gets returned is the home page. It's like it never crawled the links from the home page to index the other pages. MSN has done though. The inbound links are definitely on google's index though as I've checked by searching the site and also they have a page rank.

I created a google site map and on my stats it even says that the highest ranking page is

http://www.karenoconnor.co.uk/fingerprints.php

- despite the fact that when you search the site this page doesn't come up. Why is this? Has this got something to do with google not indexing new sites?

Also, the page rank for

http://www.karenoconnor.co.uk

is 1/10 but for

http://www.karenoconnor.co.uk/index.php

it's 0/10 - despite the fact that they're the same page. I know that in google's eyes they aren't because the URL is different but how do I tell google that these are the same? Should I just redirect one to the other? As well as this the other day I could have sworn that each of the pages had a PR of 1/10, but now it's just the homepage that has a ranking, all the others are zero. I have heard however that the green bar isn't very reliable. How can I accurately find out the PR for each of the pages?

Sorry - I know there's alot of questions there, would appreciate if somebody could point me in the right direction as to what's going on though.

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor

 

[ChrisHirst]

I'd suggest starting at the Tips for new SEOs at HighRankings.
The site is probably still in the Google Aging Delay as well.
Don't bother checking links at Google it never shows anything but a random selection when it does show any.
Forget PR for anything the toolbar is always inaccurate and out of date.
Make sure you only link internaly to the domain or "/" never to "index.php"

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[gmail2]

So you rekon that it is still in the aging delay ... bummer :-(

Don't bother checking links at Google it never shows anything but a random selection when it does show any

So you're saying all those searches for site:

http://www.whatever.com,

link:etc etc etc are not accurate either? Surely that can't be the case for the King of search engines?

When you say forget PR, are you talking about reading it from the toolbar or entirely? Isn't PR the prime factor when sorting search results?

As for the / vs /index.php - yea I think you're right on that score.

Thanks for your replies

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor

 

[ChrisHirst]

nope forget PR totally, even the real PR is NOT the prime factor on sorting searches. The toolbar PR is only a rough approximation that is updated rarely.
It's an easy thing to prove, one way or another. try any search for any phrase, see if the results (1 to 15 or 20 ) are in PR order.

The site: search is ok and will show all the results for that datacentre your query was routed to.
May not be all the pages Google has indexed of course.

The link: search is useless (and for good reasons)


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[gmail2]

I'm kind of glad to hear that the link: search doesn't work because I know that we have incoming links out there and they're not coming up when I do that search. But why do you say for good reasons, why is it such a bad thing and why do google provide this if it "doesn't work properly"? For "some" sites "some" results are returned, so what exactly does it search for?

Well, going by the toolbar, you're right, PR isn't the prime factor when sorting. But that's according to the tool bar - which we already decided isn't reliable. So, two more questions:

1. What's the point of PageRank if it's not used to sort results? Is it used as part of a more complex algorithm to decide what placement a page gets in search query results?

2. If PR isn't that important, then what IS the prime factor when sorting results? Is it escentially the amount of times that the phrase or keywords appear in the page? How close they are to each other etc? So say I search for Karen O'Connor - it's just a name, no words for google to make relationships with. How does it sort the results, simply by the amount of times the "words" appear in each of the pages? Thier proximity to each other etc? (this is assuming that all pages are valid HTML)

And two other questions, hope you don't mind !? What do google hope to gain from knocking out new comers for so long? Surely it seems a bit unfair? From what I understand it's to prevent "linking rings" where new sites link to loads of other sites escentially just to get a hihger PR and therefore higher in the search results? But if PR doesn't have much weight on the results then why bother punishing us all? And finally, how did you get to know all this? Is it simply by experimenting, experience of ? Surely it must be rather difficult to experiment if google won't index new sites though?

Anyway, I know there's an AWFUL lot of questions there and I REALLY appreciate your help in helping me understand all this. If you can't answer them all, it's fine, like I said I understand that there's alot of questions in there.

Thanks again

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor

 

[ChrisHirst]

The link: search has been made progressively more useless over the past few years, basically to stop the link mongers using it to subvert the ranking algo.
Googles over reliance on links, or rather the anchor text of links spawned a whole industry of link swappers and link scammers. So the link command which most people used to find where other sites had links, has been reduced to the point where now it shows a random selection of crappy links rather than what Google rated as important.
For the past year or so a lot of updates have been targetting the link issues and the way that sites can be "bombed" to the top of the SERPs.

PageRank when first implemented was a clever idea and a smart marketing move, without PR creating an interest in the webmaster world and the press would Google be where they are today ?
It is just 1 out of over 100 factors in the ranking algo which is far more complex than simply counting the words. Of all the factors that the algorithm is made up of, many different combinations can make up a well ranked page, this is why you will often see me posting about there being no formula to SEO and each site/page will need to have different characteristics to get a good ranking.
What works for one site may perform very badly on another site. This is the real skill and fun of SEO, working out what each site needs, and why I never care about any SE updates, because there is every chance any site I am involved in, will not suffer greatly.


The aging delay was actually an accident of programming according to Matt Cutts and was only noticed when SEO forums started talking about i. The link filter is usually referred to as the "sandbox" these are two different but connected issues, the "sandbox" is actually caused by a time delay on newly discovered links, it's about 8 to 12 weeks for most sites but some sites seem get away with a few days.

A error of cause and effect here, PR is not and has never been important in getting results. The anchor text and the links that create the PR is the important bit, but the "experts" decided that a higher PR was the cause of good ranking rather than an effect of the links causing good rankings.

How do I/we find these things out? I participate on several other forums and test things that are posted for myself (never take anybodies word for anything SEO related). So it's experience and testing in equal doses, all you really need for experimenting is a few already crawled sites that are not production sites for yourself or clients and play around with things. Above all don't be worried about "breaking" something. If a page disappears after a change have the patience to wait and see if it comes back in a few weeks, if not undo the changes and see if it then "comes back" note the results and learn by it. The try it again see if the same happens



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[gmail2]

What you said about the link: search makes sense of course. I guess in a way it's there to protect us as much as anything else, if Google were totally open about how they sort search results then even the "bad" sites would be able to get up there quiet easily.

What baffles me about PR is that about 2 weeks ago the PR for the home page went up to 1 (from zero !!). Then all of the pages went up to 1, next day back down to zero. Last night they all went up to 1, now back down to zero again. The only page that has stayed consistent is the home page. I know that the toolbar PR isn't reliable etc, but I can't help but think that there's something going wrong somewhere when this keeps happening. And even though you say PR isn't that important - I still long for the day when I see it go up, even by just one point !!

Also, about 2 weeks ago I subscribed to google maps. Every time I checked, sure enough google would have downloaded the sitemap at most a day previous. Until last Friday, when it suddently stopped. So last night I decided to resubmit (maybe a bad idea, I'm not too sure) and again, google is downloading it every 20 or so hours again. But why did it stop? Is downloading the sitemap different from actually crawling the site? And if so, why does it download it so much?

Just to confirm about the new domains "problem" - there are 2 factors, links into your site must age (referred to as sandbox) but also the domain itself must age before it's returned in the results. Have I got it right? That might explain why when I search site:

http://www.karenoconnor.co.uk

I get the home page but nothing else. I guess the links to the other pages (from within the site) aren't old enough yet. Or else it's just not crawling my site at all yet because it's not old enough.

So the bottom line I guess is to just design a site that users will want to read, and then hopefully the Search Engines will too. If not then try again, ' eh If only I could get that first domain indexed properly so that I can begin testing, it be a big step up that ladder !!

Well, thanks again for all your feedback. You've really given my brain alot of food there - only problem for you is that the more I find out the more questions I have !! You've definitely earned that star, and I'll try to leave this as the last set of questions !!

Thanks again
Martin

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Get your Irish Poetry Published

 

[feherke]

Hi

Also, about 2 weeks ago I subscribed to google maps. Every time I checked, sure enough google would have downloaded the sitemap at most a day previous. Until last Friday, when it suddently stopped.

Probably it considered that your content is quite static and there is no need to visit it so frequently.

So last night I decided to resubmit (maybe a bad idea, I'm not too sure) and again

Not bad, because no harm, but useless if there is no fresh content.

But why did it stop? Is downloading the sitemap different from actually crawling the site? And if so, why does it download it so much?

The sitemap just give a hint for scheduling the crawler more efficiently. For example, to not crawl archived data again and again, wasting your and their bandwidth and time. Sitemap has just to indicate where the fresh content is on the site.

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[gmail2]

OK thanks for that, it's good to know that at least I didn't make things any worse by resubmitting the site map. Anybody got any ideas now why the PR keeps going up and down ?

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Get your Irish Poetry Published

 

[ChrisHirst]

because it does things like that!

ignore it the toolbar is always flakey




even better just turn off the PR display, that way it will never bother you again.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.