Help

[jampers]

HI
My web site is
http://www.irishpropertymoves.ie
and I must be missing something obvious. I have a Googler page rank of 5, I have good quality links, I hane good content yet I am listed way way down on goole under 'property for sale Ireland'.
This is very very frustrating, annoying and downright unfair. I am ranked below unrelated sites and sites with lower page ranks, most of these sites do not put any effort into ranking.
So maybbe I am doing something wrong or missing something.
Can anyone help?
Jampers

[Marcia]

This is actually a Google search topic - but first, take a look at your page title and get that polished up and more specific, in addition to having the phrase in an additional ocurrence, appearing on the page itself. Use *part* of the phrase in outbound anchor text from the homepage to interior page on the site, too. You need to get some inbound links with the keywords in the anchor text, particularly from pages that are thematically related, at least location-wise. Don't neglect location specific inbound links even if they're not on the identical topic.

Actually, going after best billing for the specifics in the meantime would be far easier and might be more targeted for people in a lot of cases.

[Mel]

Hi Jampers there is a lot more you can do with your site to improve your Yahoo and Google rankings:

Research a list of keywords both generic and more specific i.e. Propertry for sale Ireland (generic), Property for sale county mayo, property for sale Dublin (more specific)

Set up specific pages to target each of these keywords

Set your page title to reflect what you are targeting only on that page, same with your meta description and meta keywords tags.

Get rid of that 200 lines or so of javascript in your head by moving it to an external file.

Put at least 200 words of text on the page

Then you can get on with the tasks of on page and off page optimization.

You will need lots of inbound anchor text links to rank highly for your terms at the moment Google only shows 4 with the link:URL search and 24 with the @URL search; your highest ranking competitor shows 44 links with the link:URL search and 314 with the @URL search.

[anuj]

You have only four back links try to increase them more and put some good content on your home page give some more importance to your linking (internal)

[jampers]

Thanks Marcia & Mel,
Could you or anyone else answer some questions?

To put the javascript into an external file I copied and pasted it on to a web page and saved the page but it doesn't appear to work.

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="filename.js"></script>


When you do a search starting with link: does that refer to anchor text links.

So it would be a good idea to contact eveyone who has a link to my site and ask them to change them to anchor text links?

Would it be a good idea to buy a load of web addresses with similar names or .orgs .nets etc and put my home page content on these adresses with links to my original home page?


Thanks
Jampers

[Mel]

HI Jampers:
Save your javascript file as a text file and it should work.

The link:URL search will show both anchor text and regular links.

If you can convince those who link to you to add appropriate anchor text to your links it would be helpful.

It is NOT a good idea to set up a bunch of domains which duplicate your home page content - they will end up being discarded as duplicate content and will do you no good. Setting up a ring of domains for linking purposes is not a good idea, though it may work for awhile, but sooner or later you are likely to attract a penalty for this.

[Marcia]

>>discarded as duplicate content

Google will figure it out and know which is which, though I've seen some site out there recently get blown out of the water for dups within the site. Yahoo is not nearly as kind.

BTW, nice posts, Mel!

[jampers]

Thanks Marcia and Mel,
I did precisely that, I set up about 7 duplicate home pages and a 26 duplicate pages for 26 county pages and other pages too. My home page had been on top of google, however that was before the Google dance. I slipped badly down Google behind lesser sites. I wonder did I get penalised for that?

Another question, does a search 'link.www...' refer to text links. I have links but they don't show up in this search.

I have also noticed in my stats that a considerable number of people enter my links page and the exact same leave so they are not going into the rest of the site. If I take content of other pages in this case photos & links to pages that are on other pages and put them all together on one page so as people will view those pages, will that be considered duplication ?

Thanks
Jampers

[DigitalRoad]

Jampers,

If you're checking out links in Google you will only get a sampling of them. Generally, you'll see more using the linkdomain:yoursite command through Yahoo. However, don't expect to find all links to you. Another factor might be that links, once added to a site, aren't necessarily picked by search engines immediately.

When you say that all visitors that enter your links page are leaving it, where are the visitors coming from? Are they coming from an internal page of the site or an outside referrer? When they leave, are they all going to external sites? By your comments it sounds like visitors are entering your site at the links page, not visiting any other pages of your site, then leaving. Is that correct? The links page isn't the page other websites are linking to is it?

Jon

[jampers]

Hi Jon
Thanks for your comments. Yes that seems to be the case. People are coming into the links page and leaving straight away. The other links are linked to my home page.

A few other things.
First that test on Mel's site to check the language, if there are errors can that affect the search engine finding the page? I suppose it depends on the errors.

I noticed when I did a link: search for other sites there were very few links from ther sites but loads of links starting http://wwwetc where as my internal links are <a href="mayo19.htm">

Would putting java script on a text file be a good idea for all pages?

Google is supposed to do a crawl once a moth yet I have noticed different positionongs on a weekly basis van this happen withour a crawl.

And if I do different searches I find my site in one search with ciurrent text on the discrition in the search engine and another may have text that wes on the page a few weeks ago. Maybe that page wasn't picked up

[Mel]

Hi Jampers,
Validating your text is a good housekeeping sort of idea that mostly will not help with rankings, but it sometimes pays off with the finding of major coding errors the prevent accurate spidering and that can affect your ranking.

Regarding links, Google never shows us all ( or even most) of the links it knows about with the link: search. You can try searching for @yourURL.com which will return any instances of your url and which will usually show up most links.

Yes put all your javascript from the head of your pages into an external text file.

Google can change the way it ranks things at any time, and as it is doing right now, update the backlinks and PR. Also any new links you pick up may affect your rankings as soon as they are indexed.

Yes there may be old and new pages indexed in Google, but Google is ranking on whatever is in their index. You can entice the spider to visit more often with new pages and updated content, and you will also see more frequent visits when your PR increases.

[DigitalRoad]

Mel,

Is it possible for the same page to be indexed both in an old and new version, excluding when datacenters are being coordinated? I assumed Jampers was suggesting different pages from his site were not showing up with the same freshness.

Thanks for the @command. It's very useful. I also saw you recently mentioned it in another thread.


Jon

[DigitalRoad]

Jampers,
People are coming into the links page and leaving straight away. The other links are linked to my home page.

So they are coming into the links page from outside referrers then? Who are the referrers, search engines? It appears you have no links into the links page.

Jon

[Marcia]

One hit wonders on the links page could be competitors, people checking to see if you've still got links up if there's reciprocal linking, and other people researching for potential link partners. Or ODP editors at times doing some scouting around. Link pages *can* be found by people specifically looking for them.

You should have the capability to be looking at what keywords and phrases are bringing in traffic, if not for now then down the road when rankings start to appear. That's probably one of the most important things for ongoing promotion of a site.

Speaking of which: there's (areaname) property for sale, homes (areaname), homes for sale (areaname), (areaname) homes for sale, (areaname) homes,(areaname) real estate, real estate (areaname) - the list goes on.

Keyword research never stops. By the most basic definition, optimization is simply putting the right keywords in the right places.

[DigitalRoad]

Marcia,
Some good observations about link page visits. Though competitors and potential link partners generally will come from an internal page. But can these all add up to a "considerable" number of people as Jampers has characterized? Just thought it might be worth a bit more digging, probably nothing.

Jon

[jampers]

Jampers,


So they are coming into the links page from outside referrers then? Who are the referrers, search engines? It appears you have no links into the links page.

Jon

Hi Jon,
I changed the links page to a different address and put content on what previously was the links page.

As I asked before does putting http: links back to the home page better than internal links?

Another thing I read somewhere not to have a link to the links page on all pages?

As i said before I think I have been penalised. I put a load of duplicate pages up.

There's something seriously wrong when my site is ranked below directory pages, so I hope that's the reason and it gets rectified.

Is this a doorway page?
http://www.irishpropertymoves.ie/mayoPages/mayo19e.htm
And if so, how would google know. Maybe it should have at least 200 words.
Jampers

[Marcia]

>>doorway page

No, that isn't a doorway page; it's a perfectly legitimate page (though a little sparse on text), linked to from the homepage even, with a photo of it there. How about putting an alt attribute in the code for that photo with a decent keyword phrase in it. That's good for both usability and to help the search engines know what pages are about.

>>There's something seriously wrong when my site is ranked below directory pages

Sorry to have to tell you this jampers; there may be something wrong, but the fact that your site is ranked below directory pages is no indication that something is wrong with YOUR site. :)

Just get rid of the duplicate pages and if those are already in the index you could put some original content on them that isn't any duplication. There's no such thing as having any control over what's in the SERPs, that's determined by the current algo - which isn't always how we'd like it to be. The healthiest thing is just to work on your own site, making improvements and getting good inbound links.