Hi My site www.intensive-driving.com is showing up fairly well in Yahoo and MSN but the same search phrases come up no where on Google. If the site shows up well on Yahoo and MSN then I must be getting something right - but am I doing something to offend Google? The site has been spidered by Google. It comes up straight away on a search for intensive-driving.com and the cached page is from 3rd October 2005 The only traffic I get via Google is from my Adwords campaign. I haven't set up a robots.txt file but would not having one prevent the site being properly indexed? Very puzzled all suggestions gratefully received. Steve D
All the search engines have their different ranking algorithms so showing up in one will not necessarily mean that the other search engines will react the same. Did you submit your site to google? Here is the Add URL page: http://www.google.com/addurl/ To optimize yoru site, you will need to select a set of keywords that you want to optimize your site for. Use those keywords in your html text on your webpages and in the title and meta tags. Many of the search engines are now using off-the-page factors to help rank websites. For example, getting into Yahoo is important. Since Yahoo uses human editors for their directory, other search engines will check to see if a site is listed in yahoo or not. If therearetwoequivalent sites, but one is in yahoo and the other is not, then the one in yahoo will be ranked higher. Also, google does check to see what our link popularity is and uses that as a ranking factor. So if there are two equivalent sites, but one has other sites linking to it and the other one doesn't, then the site with more link popularity will get higher ranking. To complicate things further, google also gives sites a PR (page rank) number. So their algorithm does look at the PR rank of the sites that link to yours. If you have high PR sites linking to yours, then that may boost your ranking, more than having a greater number of low PR sites linking to yours. To learn more about search engine marketing, check out sites like: searchenginewatch.com DiscountASP.NET http://www.DiscountASP.NET
Hey there... Just stumbled upon this thread looking for answers to a related topic: Google ranking problems. DiscountASP has a problem with the way the URLs w/o "www" (ex: http://intensive-driving.com/) do not 301-redirect (page permanently moved) to the "www" version (ex: http://www.intensive-driving.com/). Try it yourself and you'll see it doesn't change to one or the other, it uses BOTH. This may seem like a benign problem, but Google HATES duplicate pages and it may be the reason you're not ranking in Google because they don't know it's the same website. Essentially, Google may think you have a mirror site and are trying to pull a trick on them. I havea few sites on DASP right now that won't rank because of this, even though they were #1 on the old UNIX host with proper 301 redirects. Best advice is to somehow re-write the URLs properly (which turns out to be a very difficult task) or dump discountASP for a host that can do this for you with the IIS settings or a UNIX host htaccess file, that's what I will eventually do when I get the chance. Another way to eliminate copied pages is to make sure your page is unique through a tool like copyscape.com. Just keep changing around your text until no more results are returned. Once again, if anyone out there has a global way to redirect static html pages the way I mentioned above, please help!!!! My site is all html, no asp (I know forum people, I know support staff, why the hell am I on dasp to begin with!). I'll move soon don't worry, but I would still like a fix for now. Hope this helpssaveyou from the frustration I've lived with for a year now. -Mike
That's pretty standard behavior at any host, and I would doubt that Google is penalizing any sites that resolve to the same page when pulling up the domain with or without www. Google uses a lot of different criteria to rank, but the best thing you can do to be ranked high on a search term is to have a lot of relevant information relating to that term. Also, the more relevant incoming links you have (meaning links from different sites, not hundreds of bogus incoming links from "doorway" pages - you'll definitely be penalized for that, if not dropped outright), the higher your site will rank. If you can combine those two things, you've found the magic bullet to a high Google rank. Remember, Google's aim is to provide relevant search results. When they see that people are manipulating data to alter their rank, they change their criteria accordingly to maintain relevance. It's an ongoing thing, so any "tricks" that you employ to boost your ranking may work temporarily, but they will eventually fall short. mjp DiscountASP.NET http://DiscountASP.NET
They're not "penalizing" anyone per se, just confused... From Google: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34481&query=301-redirect&topic=&type= Their words, not mine, and the "preferred domain" settings only work marginally well with Google ONLY. Unfortunately, Y! and MSN aren't this sophisticated yet, and they get all F'd up over it if your link partners don't follow your directions. Just good practice to avoid this problem from the beginning! Better safe than sorry.
