Hi,
Missy's answer is great. I prepared this answer early this morning but
wasn't around when your question got unlocked. However, since it's
prepared I'll post it here for you. Most of it has already been
covered by Missy, but .. waste not want not as they say.
begin -----
Hi,
This is going to sound a bit obtuse, but I doubt your website is being
filtered. It normally takes 60-90 days for a new site to be indexed
and listed in a stable fashion on Google or any search engine really.
You are at less than the 60 day mark and Google has already found you.
This is a good sign. For the next few weeks, maybe even a month, you
may pop on and pop off the radar, as the engine figures out who you
are and what your page rank will be. It's frustrating, and can drive
you quite mad if you let it. My advice would be not to look at it too
often and enjoy the holiday season. Honestly. I have several clients a
year that have to go through this and it is always the same. Really.
There are some things you can do to help the PageRank once it is
established and to help your site become more stable on the search
engines. I've written out several things for your website and this
will help your site not only show up, but list well on the searches.
Page Rank, can be viewed by using the Google Search bar. It has the PR
(Page Rank) on it. You can get one of these handy little items here :
http://toolbar.google.com/
I wrote an article on this, can't post the whole thing here, but here
is some of it to help you further understand the Page Rank system
which is used by Google.
Google, has in the past half of a year introduced the Page Rank
feature. If you are not familiar with Google's Page Rank, which is
known as PR most the time, its Google's calculation or score of a web
page based on external and internal linking of a site, as well as
on-page criteria of the web page being linked to as well as the web
page being linked from. The actual amount of effect that Google's
PageRank has on the ranking of a website or web pages is the cause of
much discussion, and Google is keeping its mouth shut on the topic.
What we do know is that a web page's PR does play a role in Google's
indexing and Google's ranking. The higher a web page's PageRank, the
more frequently it will be crawled and refreshed. This is important on
several levels.
Internal linking
To get your Page Rank up you need to pay attention to the foundation
design of your website. The menu systems, links to internal pages from
front pages, from bottom tier pages back to higher levels, and several
other factors. We're going to go through some of that here.
On most sites, the first page, or the index.html page is going to have
the highest PR rating. This makes sense, it being out there getting
hit all the time, and if some else is linking to you, its probably
that page, but you still need to watch how this happens to get the
best effect for your total site.
Lets say your site has three levels of pages. The first is the
Index.html, at the top of the pyramid. The next level is your About
Us, Contact, News, and Items for Sale, cover pages. The third level is
full story pages, product pages, and the more detailed info pages that
your site is offering. In standard design, the top index page is going
to link to the menu
pages, and then those main menu pages are going to link down to the
more detailed pages on the third level.
Let's give your site a Page Rank of 6 on the top level, the
index.html. This is a really good ranking by the way, this means lots
of websites like you and you are doing something right.
As the links happen, and we go down into your site, we'll see that the
second level pages have a rating of 5 on the PR bar. Going further
down to our product pages we see that these detail pages have a level
of 3, or even 2 on some of them.
This type of PR dilution makes since to the robots, but our bottom
layer pages is often where most of the details of our websites lie,
and the content that will bring into our site the web searcher looking
for information on the web. We want these pages to show up better on
the search engines and have higher page rankings themselves.
That these pages have poor PR doesn't necessarily mean that they will
not place well on the search listings, some place very well, but the
better rank they have, the better our whole site will place.
The guys over at Top Site Listings came up with a good checklist. I
don't know much about their company, but many of their articles are
sound in reason and accuracy. You might want to check them out.
* Make sure that your primary page(s), the index.htm page, links to
your secondary pages or secondary levels.
* Make sure that your secondary pages link to each other
* Link your secondary pages to the third level pages within their
sub-directory, sub-domain, or level
* Link the third level pages within each specific sub-directory or
sub-domain to each other.
* Link the third level pages back to the secondary page that it was
linked from
* Make sure that the there is not heavy linking between third level
pages
* Link to pages, regardless of level, that are relevant
* Link to pages, regardless of level, where the text on the page being
linked from is keyword specific to the page that you are linking to
* If there are fourth level pages, follow the same linking structure
that has been laid out in this checklist
Other reminders:
* Only link pages within your site that are relevant to each other
* Use keyword specific link text when linking between pages
* Use standard HREFs in links that are easy for the search engine
robots.
External Linking
The greatest effect on your PR is going to come from external links.
This seems like a bummer because we don't have much control over what
someone else will do with their site. Also its just as important Who
links to us, as it is how many link to us.
Internet is based on community and what some people call per review.
Always has been and this is some of the basis of what Google considers
good external links. There are well thought out reasons for this. If
someone that owns a car dealership is linking to my page, Google
doesn't feel that the link is as important as say another Internet
Programmer linking to my page. A link from a page in the same type of
category is a per review for better or worst. The link may becoming
from my competitor from inside an article that explains how much I
don't know about Internet programming, and why you should stick with
him. That's okay, says Google, its still a per, so the PR is higher
for my site. As they say about gossips, "Hey, at least they are
thinking about you."
My link in this article is helping Top Site Listing's PR, but not as
much as you might think. Their current PR is 5 and at the time of this
writing, mine is 4. Having a lower site link to a higher site is not
as good as the reverse happening. This is not to say it doesn't help
them, but its a lower calculation.
This is why the idea of getting 100 domain names and having them all
link to your main website is not really a worth wild idea. The 100
domains are not going to have a high PR, in fact, with this strategy,
they normally don't have a PR at all. And if they are all linking to
each other, the web-bots figure this out and call it spamming, and
black list the whole lot of you.
Your site is also lacking a few things, enough so that your site will
drop off the radar periodically, as mine did before I fixed them.
First off, make a file called robots.txt. This should be a plain text
file and have a single line in it (for you anyway) That line should
be:
User-agent: *
This lets all robots know that its okay to index your site. You don't
have one and google bot will sometimes get confused and skip your
site, at least this is the way it was explained to me. Since I've had
this file, I've not had the problem.
No space at the top, and plain, regular text. Put this in the main
area of your site. Check that it is readable by going to the file
using http://www.ledgaming.com/robots.txt. You should be able to read
it. If not, then try again using plain text. Don't put anything in
there except that line.
You can find out about Robot files here:
http://www.upenn.edu/computing/web/webdev/meta/metarobot.html
And you can find one that will work for your site here:
http://www.lucidmatrix.com/uploads/robots.txt
If you haven't done so already, submit your site to the DMOZ project.
You can submit your site to Netscape's Open Directory Project (DMOZ)
by visiting
http://www.dmoz.org
Stay away from programs like Web Position Gold.
If you are using a program such as Web Position Gold to monitor your
website on the Search Engines, then you will want to stop and write
the google admin folks at help@google.com and let them know you have
stopped. The polling feature Web Position Gold uses to monitor
websites is known to Google and is against their Terms of Service.
Using it will take your website off the index all together. A good
page to read on this subject is here :
Search Engine Guide: Orbidex: Safe and Smart Site Submissions
http://www.searchengineguide.com/orbidex/2001/0824_orb1.html
More Links to SEO information
Google Search Engine Webmaster page
://www.google.com/webmasters/
Google Support Discussion Group.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=google.public.support
Search Engine Forum at JimWorld
http://www.searchengineforums.com/bin/Ultimate.cgi
Quote from Google submission Page :
Google does not accept payment for inclusion of sites in our index,
nor for improving the rank of sites in our results. We do offer
advertising opportunities adjacent to our results, which are always
clearly labeled "Sponsored Links". The method by which we find pages
and rank them as search results is determined by the PageRank
technology developed by our founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
One of the pages this is on is here:
://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html
://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html
In the same area, a quick list of Do's and Don'ts for Google listings
here:
://www.google.com/webmasters/dos.html
Google explains Page Ranking
://www.google.com/technology/index.html
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hyper-textual Web Search Engine
http://www-db.stanford.edu/%7Ebackrub/google.html
There is a website that will show you what the robots are looking at
when they come to your site. You will notice that very few words are
being seen and none of your hyper links leading inside. This is a
problem.
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi
Here's a good page to read on getting lots of visitors and improving
your PR
http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/guide.htm
Here's another one about the Google Engine
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/google_faq.htm
Thanks,
webadept-ga |
