Hi there!
If the company that you paid to submit your site guaranteed you *any*
sort of placement in Google *at all*, immediately demand your money
back, for you've been misled. Here's why:
"We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any
predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear."
For Site Owners - Submit Your Site
://www.google.com/addurl.html
"Google is a fully automated search engine, which employs robots known
as 'spiders' to crawl the web on a monthly basis and find sites for
inclusion in the Google index. Since this process does not involve
human editors, it is NOT necessary to submit your site to Google in
order to be included in our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites
listed are not manually submitted for inclusion.
Google does not accept payment for inclusion of sites in our index,
nor for improving the rank of sites in our results."
The basics
://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html#A1
"Beware of SEO's that claim to guarantee rankings, or that claim a
"special relationship" with Google, or that claim to have a "priority
submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact,
the only way to submit a site to Google directly is by using the page
at ://www.google.com/addurl.html. You can do this yourself at no
cost whatsoever."
No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html
No one, not even Google themselves, can guarantee you the search
results position you desire. You can do a few things to *try* to
boost your ranking, but the fact of the matter is that most of the
process is outside of your control:
"Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than
100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our
"Why Use Google" page for more details. Due to the nature of our
business and our interest in protecting the integrity of our search
results, this is the only information we make available to the public
about our ranking system."
How Does Google Rank Pages?
://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html
That said, there are a few things you can try to help your page rise
in the rankings, but first it's important to understand how the ranks
are determined to begin with:
" PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by
using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's
value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a
vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer
volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page
that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves
"important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages
"important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google
remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages
mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google
combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find
pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes
far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines
all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages
linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query."
PageRank Explained
://www.google.com/technology/index.html
In other words, when placing your page in the search results, Google
evaluates not only the content of your site, but the content of the
sites linking to you as well to ensure that users get the most
relevant results. The better and more relevant your content (and that
of pages linking to you), the higher up you're likely to land in the
search results.
This is where you've run into a bit of a problem. You have some super
content on your site, but the poor Googlebot can't read it, because
you've relied very heavily on Flash. When trying to evaluate your
page's content for relevancy, the Googlebot is stymied by an apparent
*lack* of content. It can't see keyword phrases like "100% anonymous"
and "protect your identity", because they aren't in a format the
Googlebot can read:
"Make every single page on your site accessible via a text-based link
- as opposed to Javascript, Flash, DHTML, etc. The Googlebot only
speaks text.
[...]
Make all relevant information on a page textual. Don't embed page
content into images or objects like Flash movies. Did I mention the
Googlebot only speaks text?"
Help The Googlebot Understand Your Page
http://www.scribbling.net/entry/394/
Scale back your reliance on Flash to make your site stand out. It may
make your site stand out to your visitors, but the Googlebot can't see
it, and that ultimately hurts your rankings.
Another problem I notice is with backward links:
"The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be
linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from
page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to
you, the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly."
Submitting Your Site
://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html#A1
Using Google's link tool, I found only 2 backwards links - one of them
an internal link from your own site!
Backwards Links
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=link:ronjdBwo6K8J:www.vmonkey.com/
To help give your site a kick, try asking people with sites related to
yours for a link. Do you know someone who is blogging about privacy
on the web? Or is compiling a directory of anonymous e-mail services?
Or is reviewing anonymous e-mail services? Ask them to link to you!
Remember, part of your rank is determined by the quality of the
content of the sites linking to yours, so don't just ask for links
from everyone. Choose a few high quality, content rich sites that
relate to your services, and get links only from those sites.
Remember, though, even if you do climb up to where you want to be,
there is absolutely no guarantee that you'll stay there:
"We update our index every four weeks. Each time we update our
database of web pages, our index invariably shifts: We find new sites,
we lose some sites, and sites ranking may change. Your rank naturally
will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. You can be
assured that no one at Google has hand adjusted the results to boost
the ranking of a site. Google's order of results is automatically
determined by several factors, including our PageRank algorithm.
Please check out our "Why Use Google" page for more information on how
this works.
You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking to
your URL has changed. This is the single biggest factor in determining
what sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages when our
robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via hyperlinks. To
find out who links to your site, use Google's link: tool."
Why does my page's rank keep changing?
://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html
For more information, you might want to give these articles a good
reading:
Nine Things You Can Do To Make Your Website Better
http://www.scribbling.net/entry/310/
Link Popularity
http://www.search-engine-ranking-rules.com/SEO-Search-Engine-Optimization-Rules/Link_Popularity.html
Design A Spider Friendly Site
http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol5/design_no2.htm
Spider Friendly Copy
http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2002/feb/13.html
Webmaster Guidelines
://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
...and don't forget Google's public user support forum:
google.public.support.general
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=google.public.support.general
With respect to the Open Directory, it likewise does not guarantee
inclusion:
"We don't accept all sites, so please don't take it personally should
your site not be accepted. Our goal is to make the directory as useful
as possible for our users, not to have the directory include all (or
even most) of the sites that could possibly be listed or serve as a
promotional tool for the entities listed."
How long does it take for my site to be listed in the ODP?
http://dmoz.org/help/submit.html
The ODP's editorial policies are explained here:
Open Directory Editorial Guidelines
http://dmoz.org/guidelines/
...and you can get specific questions answered in the ODP forums:
Open Directory Project Public Forum
http://www.resource-zone.com/
If you followed the ODP submission guidelines carefully, and feel your
omission was a mistake, the ODP asks that you either re-submit or
contact the Editor for the category you submitted your site to:
"If a site you submitted has not been listed after three weeks, you
may submit it again or you may send an e-mail to an editor of the
category for which the site was submitted."
Procedure After Your Site is Submitted
http://dmoz.org/add.html
Good luck!
--Missy
Search terms: [ "spider friendly" ], [ googlebot flash ], and the
Google Help pages. |
