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What the ****'s happening with Google? 1

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mikesh27

mikesh27

Technical User
Sep 5, 2004
67
GB
Sun. 3 Oct. - Posted thread about the problem I was having with Google finding my sites - could not find them by keyphrases or business name, only by complete site name and then without any narrative.
Wed 6 Oct. - After much help from Chris Hirst and xtendscott I started to get results. Main points of help was to redirect a duplicated site, add url to my signature and correct all broken links. Chris also mentioned to go for directories rather than SEs and I will do this when all the sites are up to scratch, rather than being rejected and waiting another 4 weeks.
Anyway, back to the point, on Wednesday all was well with the world, I could type in "abc computer solutions" in quotes and get 1st, 2nd and 5th (one of the linked sites) on a UK search, 8th and 10th on a full web search, plus all my 4 sites were getting narrative from the found url as well. Even a search without quotes produced reasonable results. Key phrases were a little further down the line, but I could wait. Great![2thumbsup]
Sat. 9 Oct. - THEY'VE GONE!! I can only find by typing in abccomputersolutions AGAIN and no narrative. Same with the other sites.
The only significant change I made was to add hidden counters (from Bravenet) on 6 key URLs on abccomputersolutions to see where people go, but I'm not aware of any problems with this.

Any ideas, anyone?

Thanks,

Mike



 
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don't fret about it Mike. perfectly normal behaviour from Google.

The datacentres and servers in Googles cluster are very rarely fully synched, so the same search (even minutes apart) can show different results for newly indexed sites. It depends on which server handles the request and normally takes around 6 weeks to stabilise.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.
Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.
 
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Mikesh27,

Yes be patient as Chris suggested.

I am also seeing a similiar occurance. Updated a site, it got picked up and was in the cache. Now 3 or 4 days later, it is the old cache of the page. Maybe they are recalculating the index, they are not hitting as hard on one site I track. Only visit a page or two a day the last 3 days. Normally 8-15 for a 50 page site.

Before last November it took 30+ days to see a change from google, relax have a beer and go on make your sites better.

xtendscott
Web Site Design and CF Programming
 
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Hi Xtendscott. I haven't found anything in Google Cache in any of my sites for a week now. However, with the research you and Chris have suggested, I am carrying out the following changes to the sites. Then I'll be patient and hope for the best. I'll make the beers last.[sleeping2]

ToDo list.

1. Build a list of keyphrases and attempt to find ones that aren’t heavily targeted. Try one keyphrases per URL – using separate pages for different keyphrases.

2. Use the keyphrase in the title of each URL with company name, if needed, set to the right of keyphrase. Repeat the keyphrase in one h1 and at least one h2, and at least 4 times in the body text. Where a URL is keyphrase target page ensure this has at least 250 words. Can’t think of 250 words? Cheat, and steal the best ideas from your competitors, in your own words, though. Bold and Strong text is better than normal. Left text is better than right, higher up the page the better.

3. Use the keyphrase in the meta description and make sure each page description is unique. Also in keywords, although at this point in time these are rated less important. But who knows in the future.

4. Submit to Yahoo directory and DMOZ. Do the Addme directories carry any weight?

5. Make content interesting to the reader. What’s unique about this site? Why would someone bookmark it? Who are my customers and what would be their priorities be? If your buying a network, you wouldn’t neccesarily buy the cheapest. You may if you were buying a specific IBM notebook, but maybe not if you had wait two weeks for delivery. Interesting is ok, but the majority of sites I use are database driven like Amazon, Lastminute, Easyjet product/service-related pricelists. How can a smaller version of these get reasonable SERPs?

6. To avoid closed network, will ONLY to point to which, in turn, will point to all websites. Our other three websites and clients websites will ONLY point to these two.

7. I understand every website should have a ROBOT.TXT file. Is this correct? Does it sit in the main directory? What should it say and how should the web pages refer to it?

8. Try to keep Javascript in external files and link to them.

I'm starting these changes as soon as I submit this. Thanks again for the links. When I check sites on linkpopularity.com, their seems a direct link between these and SERPs. The only 2 I have are both from your backlink. Can these only be gained from backlinks from established sites? How do most people harvest their backlinks to build up the site's popularity?

Thanks,

Mike




 
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Hi Mike.
A few more pointers

Keyphrases. Aim for 2 phrases per page, maximum of 3. Use these in your title. Try to get these phrases into the first 60 chars of the title tag where possible without making it read as nonsense. Remember this is the first impression you make on the visitor, So make it count. The 60 char length is Googles display cut-off btw, they do read more. But 60 - 85 char is an ideal to get most or all of your title displayed. But don't stress over it.

Do not stress over getting the company name in the title of every page. This is branding. Nobody knows who you are yet, so leave this for a title of a contact page and the "About us" company profile page.

Do not worry about 250 words per page. it has been blown up into a rule from a off the cuff remark from Jill Whalen. If I locate the HR thread I'll post it.

Heading tags, bold and strong, Em and italics. Use these for their correct purpose. If they help, then great, but it has been observed that sometime the exact opposite can occur.

Meta description should describe the content of the page it is on, same with meta KW. There are some threads at High Rankings on Yahoo and meta tags when Mike Grehan published his interview with Jon Glick of Yahoo. Long, but worth a read.

Don't worry about which directory carries weight they all help in some way.

Smaller sites can and do get good results just takes time and sometimes the personal service is worth far more for trust and reputation building.

It's robots.txt (the case is important) BTW. It's not essential and it goes in the root directory and it can be empty. The pages don't make any reference to it at all it's just there for the robots. More info at RobotsTxt.





Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.
Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.
 
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I don't know if this has anything to do about your issue.

1. kill all the white space below your page and get rid of the "Brave Net" Links. Counter and all.(a good host has stat software that give you that info, and linking "schemes" are fround upon by SE's plus I got a pop-up the first time I visited the page)

2. aseasyas.co.uk still has a link to abccs.co.uk that then redirects to abcomputersolustions.co.uk. Clean up the linking to a more natural style.



xtendscott
Web Site Design and CF Programming
 
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Thanks xtendscott,

Ditched the Bravenet scripts on the Home Page, other pages will still have counters for now. Also abccs links in aseasyas replaced. Thanks for pointing those out. Problems in reducing white space, but that's another forum.

Thanks Chris for the tips.

Scanned the article with the interview with and noted the points you highlighted regarding Yahoo's comments on meta tags, meta keywords and interlinking.

Also it mentioned:

"The other thing is when you take a look at connectivity, every site has a certain amount of weight that it gets when it's voting on the web and that is based on the in links. And they get to distribute that energy via its out links. Those outside of the domain. For those how much each link counts is divided by the number that exists. So if you have a couple of partners, or suppliers you're working with and have an affinity with, if you link out to them - then that helps a lot. If you have... 3,4,5 of them... well if you added 300 random reciprocal links, then you've just diluted the value of the links that you gave to the other people you have the real relationship with. It's as simple as this, people who have massive link farms aren't really giving much of a vote to anyone because they're diluting their own voting capability across so many other people. So you need to consider the number of out links you have on a page, because each additional link makes them all count for less."

Do they weigh this up as a ratio or in units, and do they count forums. Chris, you have several links to forums. Would each new thread count you were involved with count as a link?

Regards,

Mike


 
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Links are always a contentious issue, It's generally regarded (and has been hinted at) that sitewide links are weighted differently, but I do think that this will be where there are several hundred or thousands from the same domain. Forum links are probably treated the same as any other link (no supporting evidence btw) simply because in any given thread there will be several links to different URLs, and the same outward links will not be found on every page, but they won't usually have much weight to pass on because of all the other links around them.
The link analysis part of any SE algo is not trivial by any means and they are continually refining the algo to reduce the effects of manipulation.
That said, The only real benefit I see in forum sig links is it gets the crawlers to visit on a much regular basis, and of course if your site is a good advert for your services, and forum visitors find the post from a search engine there is a chance that it may lead to some business.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.
Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.
 
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Chris,

On the subject of sitewide links, a site that has a backlink to your caravan site site, namely has 14 links according to (ok 7 after accounting for duplications between SEs). However, out of 14 only one isn't a sitewide link. Yet a Blackpool Guesthouse search puts it on the first SERPs page. I know most would type in Guest House but it still throws up 83k plus.

What I'm trying to say is, Chris, it's not a very good site (people in glass houses, I know), it's hosted by freeserve, but still does okay. I can see that sitewide links would be weighted fairly lightly, so how does it do so well????

In your experience, would a site a handful of links but with good keyphrases that match the search, be as successful as one with a poorer keyphrase match and hundreds of links?

BTW, while studying building up linking and keywords came across one of your old referrals ( on a thread at ihelpyou.

Regards,

Mike






 
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Hi Mike.
It's a strange one and the club site gets a couple of referrals a week from it. The only thing I can put it down to is they have used SubmitExpress and AddMe as submission tools (links on their site) so there may well be tons of random pages and FFA pages around with them on. I've looked at it a few times and wondered why. But, Hey it was a natural link so I don't complain because they all count in some way [smile].

The "blackpool guesthouse" search is a zero competition phrase though (6,060 for intitle: ) even "blackpool guest house" is only 7k+.

jadeboutique is sometimes a bit of an oddity, I came across it looking for online shopping when I was promoting classycopys and got some sticky traffic from it. But other sites listed there have never had a single referal.
Same with other directories. some sites will get traffic from Gigablast for example others won't.
One thing you will find with SEO is there is very little science to it at all. You can analyse the theories down to Nth decimal place and implement it precisely and the site will go nowhere. Change something that is against the theories and off it goes. But do exactly the same thing to another site and it fails. It's something that you have to look at for each site and go with the feelings not the formula. The HR phrase is "The Art of SEO". It's what makes it more than a job.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.
Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.
 
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Glad it's not me going mad, Chris. I am getting bogged down with analysis and re-analysis, SERPs making a nonsense of another SEO theory. I need to get down to some site building.

xtendscott advised me to kill the Bravenet Exchange, but isn't SubmitExpress the same sort of thing. Is it worth trying? All my sites submitted to Addme but I'm not using their javascript in any of my web pages.

I'm still haven't got anything in Google Cache on any of my sites in the last eight days. Is this normal?

Thanks,

Mike


 
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I did the same when I first moved into the commercial side of website coding. Following threads and opinions at WMW and wondering why it didn't work for me the same way. Then came across IHY and got a sudden education into why it didn't always work the same. I learned more there in 6 months of lurking than in the year or so at WMW ( no disrepect to Brett of course everything has it's place).

I wouldn't bother with Bravenet most serious webmasters have outgrown that after the second site and it doesn't reflect well using them on commercial site, Submit Express, I used them once on a site about 3 years ago. The site is long gone but the spam still arrives to the email address I used and to be honest, I'd put addme in a similar bracket. They are linking schemes designed to promote them more than anything.

There are some changes happening at Google currently and my guess it will take another few weeks for the dust to settle. Both sites in your sig have had the initial crawl and it often take a few weeks for the return visits to happen. So the best thing is to not even check until at least mid Nov, so you aren't getting frustrated (been there, done that <grin>) and just keep improving the sites and getting good links .


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.
Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.
 
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Been a couple of times to and it's a chocolate factory, there's so much great stuff there, if I joined I don't think I'd ever get out again. 4000+ threads just on Google, with 10 posts per thread. What am I doing here???

Working on my keyphrases now (2 per page) and the penny's finally dropped that "network support" refers to an awful lot more than just IT.

Mike


 
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