Hi out there,

My site http://www.mycoolapartmentinparis.com/ has been up for a good
six months now, and still stays at PR0. It has good, quality content,
no "bad" links, I update it often (1-2 a month.) I ask my
"competitors" if we could share links, and they say "NO!" because of
my PR0. The irony is that they have a lot of "strange" backward links,
ie. casinos, adult, blogs, etc. Not appropriate for a French tourism
site.  Yet they have great PR. I'm scared to request for links from
sites that don't concern my business, for fear of being banned by
google. Any ideas are gladly accepted,

Thank you,
kit

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Clarification of Question by kitk-ga on 25 Jun 2003 08:08 PDT

I would also like to add that dmoz.org doesn't want to accept me. I've
written them numerous times about their rejection, to no avail. Is
this connected in some way?

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Request for Question Clarification by aceresearcher-ga on 25 Jun 2003 10:56 PDT

Greetings, Kit!

I've taken a quick look at your site, and the cause is not immediately
apparent.
 
Have you: 
- had lots of server downtime problems with your site hosting company?
- used invisible / clear / 0-point font to include extra keywords on
your page(s)?
- used Automated Site-Submittal or Automated Search Results Rank
Checking software?
- participated in "link farms"? 
- included a page with many links to other sites on your own site? 
- created more than one site with nearly identical information on
both/all of the sites?
 
If the answer to any of these Questions is "yes", I would probably be
able to help you with methods to try to redeem your Page Rank and your
listing in the Google Index.
 
Regards, 
 
aceresearcher

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Clarification of Question by kitk-ga on 25 Jun 2003 11:17 PDT

In response to the Request for Question Clarification by
aceresearcher-ga: That's what driveing me crazy!
I Haven't done any of those-in fact I've been very careful to avoid
those type of procedures.
I do have a page of some travel links, but only about 15-20 links. Of
those, none of them want to link to me, because of my poor page
ranking. I haven't seen any down time, either.
I manually submitted my site twice in six months to google, no link
farms, no mirror sites, no invisible stuff, no keyword tricks.
I read once that my hoster, ICDsoft, had some problems with spammers,
would that be a clue? Thanks,
kitk

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Clarification of Question by kitk-ga on 25 Jun 2003 11:26 PDT

Can I add one more point? Up to a few weeks age, I didn't have any
kind of "robots.txt", nor Robots tags.

Try removing the 'Google Search' at the bottom of the page and see if that works....

Don't think it's your host, because other sites with the same IP
address are listed on Google.

If the place where you have been submitting is:
://www.google.com/addurl.html

...then I have no idea why you are not in Google's index. So I've
linked to your site from one of mine that gets visited by Google's
FreshBot - that might (should) get it noticed by Google.

Interestinn, arimathea. I thought that adding the search bar on my
page would kind of "bribe" google to like my site. How does is hamper
my ranking?

And thanks robertskelton, for the link.

Kit,

I do not think having a link to Google on your site is causing any
problems, and I don't think that there is any reason for you to remove
it.

The general consensus among webmasters who obsessively research things
like this is that such a link probably won't help your PR any, but
it's not going to hurt you, either:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/5963.htm

Regards,

ace