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Q: My site, www.leicesterontheweb.com has lost numerous pages on Google ( Answered,   0 Comments )
Question  
Subject: My site, www.leicesterontheweb.com has lost numerous pages on Google
Category: Miscellaneous
Asked by: dillonb-ga
List Price: $20.00
Posted: 06 Dec 2002 17:21 PST
Expires: 05 Jan 2003 17:21 PST
Question ID: 120616
Hi,  I submitted my site www.leicesterontheweb.com to Google a few
months ago.  Since then Sections of my site (Jobs, Cars, Property,
Dating) have listed very
highly when searched for containing the town where I run the site
(Leicester).  So, if someone entered, for example, 'jobs in leicester'
our JOBS INDEX PAGE would come up very near to the top of the
listings.  Now, however, only our MAIN INDEX PAGE is coming up in the
listings, our index pages for each subsection are not appearing, can
you shed some light on this for me please.  I fund my site by getting
local businesses to advertise on my site and my main selling point is
my position on Google and Yahoo for search terms relating to their
business type.  Where I used to appear highly for search terms because
the relevant index page was listed, now I appear miles down the
listings because only my home index page is listed.
Answer  
Subject: Re: My site, www.leicesterontheweb.com has lost numerous pages on Google
Answered By: webadept-ga on 07 Dec 2002 12:41 PST
 
Hi, 

Your main page has a PageRank of 4, which is good, but we still have
to work a bit to get the robot to index you completely, and we need to
pay attention to how the links are working inside the site.

Your front page is using frames, which is hardly ever a good idea
these days, and also your page is repeating words several times (count
same phrase 15+ times). That is keeping your rank down and lowering
the areas to search on the site. It would be better to change those
"coming soon". and "Click Here To Advertise In This Space FOR FREE!"
words to an image.

Off the main menu you are using a deep directory system, for example
http://www.leicesterontheweb.com/cars/html/index.html

This puts this page and all the pages under it, two levels below the
main page, and consequently brings that pages PageRank down to 1, so
anything on there is probably ignored as far as links and key words.
On top of that, the page is in a frame set, which hurts it even more.

Linking back to the main page from that last page we find ourselves
here
http://www.leicesterontheweb.com/portal/html/index.html

Which is a duplication of the main page here
http://www.leicesterontheweb.com/

And now has a PageRank of 1. 

What you need to do is to go through your site, and get rid of all
those frames. Also you need to spend a lot of time on the layout of
your site, verses the directory system. To be honest I'm surprised you
are maintaining a PageRank of 4, but this is a good thing, it means
you have time to get this fixed up. Just fixing all these will
probably bring your site up to a 5 or a 6.

Here is part of an article I wrote on Internal Linking systems which
will give you some guidance on what to do to get your site indexed as
fully as possible.

----
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 someone 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 sense 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.
-----

After you take care of this, you are going to want to add to your site
a "Site Map" and a robots.txt. These are going to help all the pages
on your site to get indexed, once you work out that directory problem
you have there.


Read these pages for more information. 

Search Engine Optimization 
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/23/index1a.html
 
Top Site Listings 
http://www.topsitelistings.com/ 
 
Reasons your site may not be included  
://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1  
  
Google Technology      
://www.google.com/technology/      
      
Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it      
http://webworkshop.net/pagerank.html      
     
Google Under the Scope    
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/google_faq.htm    
     
PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web    
http://hci.stanford.edu/~page/papers/pagerank/    
     
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hyper-textual Web Search Engine     
http://www-db.stanford.edu/%7Ebackrub/google.html     
    
 
    
Thanks,  
 
webadept-ga

Request for Answer Clarification by dillonb-ga on 07 Dec 2002 14:40 PST
Hi, thanks for the comments.  What I cannot understand is this, a week
ago my site was ranking well (With frames) and the spiders were
finding my main & index files in all of my subdirectorys.  This is
what I cannot understand, why would it change in such a short amount
of time.

Request for Answer Clarification by dillonb-ga on 07 Dec 2002 14:44 PST
Hi, thanks for the comments.  What I cannot understand is this, a week
ago my site was ranking well (With frames) and the spiders were
finding my main & index files in all of my subdirectorys.  This is
what I cannot understand, why would it change in such a short amount
of time.

Also, if you visit a fellow ontheweb site, being
www.crawleyontheweb.com which also has frames, they rank very highly
on google for all relevant search terms, so it must be possible with
frames.

Clarification of Answer by webadept-ga on 07 Dec 2002 21:57 PST
Google re-evaluates sites on a monthly to a bi-monthly basis. With
your PR at 4 you are probably getting a monthly evaluation. That is
why you "suddenly" changed. If you look at the links I send you,
especially the one "Why is my Site not listed" you will see that one
of the reasons is frames.

The biggest problem you have is the directory system and the menu
system. It is way too deep, and the menus do not link back to the top
pages. That is where you need to spend the time. Doing this right is
rather hard with frames. You can do it, but it is a lot of work. My
advice is to get rid of them. You don't really use them to a large
advantage anyway.

webadept-ga
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