So, we're newbies and our site www.vivaceviolin.com (http://www.vivaceviolin.com) has only been up and running for a few months, but what have we done in a previous life to deserve a big fat pagerank of 0?? The site, which sells fine stringed instruments and accessories, has been optimised to a large degree, has a good level of content and over 5,500 pictures of rare and fine instruments - at the very least interesting to academics and those studying the art of violin making but, it would seem, not even of passing interest to good ol' Googlebot.

We've uploaded sitemaps, battled with Google Base, registered URL's and anything else we can think of but still to no avail...

Any masters of the Google Gods out there able to provide us rookies some advice would be very greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

I'm not by any means a Master of Google, but I think I can give you a few tips I've picked up here.

First off there's a time factor. Google has a sandbox that new sites dwell in for differing lengths of time. Durring this time you will not rank for any competitive terms. Give it some time.

While you wait start getting some quality related back links. This is what G and others will factor in when they are scoring your site. Remember that each "related" link to your site counts as a vote in your favor. Check your back links on G by using the link:domain.com command (link:vivaceviolin.com (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-47%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=link%3Avivaceviolin.com)) and check out site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/) at Yahoo!.

You also have some canonical problems. Your site resolves to both the www and non-www version, which SEs will see as two different sites containing exactly the same content thus lowering your score, or perhaps causing your site to be penalized.

If you use the site:vivaceviolin.com (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG%2CGGLG%3A2005-47%2CGGLG%3Aen&q=site%3Avivaceviolin.com) command on G you'll see you only have 2 pages indexed, one of which is omitted because it is the same as the first one displayed. These are www.vivaceviolin.com/ and www.vivaceviolin.com/main.asp. I would use 301 redirects for non-www to www and from main.asp to /. This will tell SEs that they are the same locations.

You should also check your log files and see if Gbot has touched any other pages. You might find that Gbot has problems crawling your site structure.

This should give you as starting point anyway.

HTH

Many thanks - will still need to get my head around the 301 re-directs! Any tips greatly appreciated.

For IIS, if you control the server you can install an ISAPI url re-writer. I use Helicon Tech's ISAPI_ReWrite Lite (http://www.isapirewrite.com/). Pretty easy to setup and has good documentation (not to mention the lite version is free). If you don't have server access you'll have to request the 301's from your host.

G shows - Results 51 - 52 of about 249 for "www.vivaceviolin.com"- which suggests it's not particularly impressed with your links, and probably explains the low PR, you've also got a number of Urls pointing to the same page, something G is not fond of...

www.vivaceviolin.com
www.vivaceviolin.com/main.asp
www.vivaceviolin.com/mcp/main.asp

Many thanks - we're doing a significant amount of work on improving links but it is interesting to run the same check on Yahoo where there are a good number of inbound links showing up. No links currently show at all on big G ( only recent press releases under Google News As here (http://news.google.co.uk/news?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GEUA,GEUA:2006-22,GEUA:en&q=vivace%20violin&sa=N&tab=wn) . www.vivaceviolin.com (http://www.vivaceviolin.com/) turns up a good number of results again in Yahoo explorer but almost zilch in Google.

Site is still only partially indexed ( 1st page ).

Thanks for the suggestions - we'll keep plugging away... :(