Hello archbob,
Before I begin, I'll have to say that although I am a Google
researcher, that engagement does not provide me with any internal
information concerning their website ranking and selection technology.
Anything I mention here will be information gleaned from sources other
than Google, with the exception of a link to Google's 'dos & dont's'
for Webmasters. Much of the information floating around the web
concerning Google's methods of selecting and ranking sites is pure
speculation, so beware...
I've brought up your site here, and indeed, it is showing up with a
Page Rank of four.
During the course of writing, however, I have refreshed your page a
number of times, cleared cache etcetera, and on several occasions your
PR has actually risen back up to a six! - So, it is possible that
Google are still adjusting their index, and your PR will settle back
after a couple of days. Sometimes (approximately once a month), as
you're possibly aware, they perform a major shake-up of the index
known colloquially on the web as the 'Google Dance' - Many pages
remain 'as they were' in terms of placement, whilst others rise and
fall in the index. This 'Dance' puts many Webmasters on tenterhooks -
sometimes, their sites 'disappear' briefly during this time, or dip in
PR. This is perfectly normal, and things settle down after a few days.
So sometimes it pays just to sit back, watch the TV, and not get too
concerned.
It's possible too, that, in the same way that school exam grade pass
levels are tweaked up and down each year, Google may sometimes
globally alter the PR structure - so if there were to be a drop in
your PR, you might in fact find that, in relation to the rest of the
index, you *actually* haven't moved in relative placement!
From my own personal experience, I once lost a site completely - it
disappeared clean out of the index. I spent a month laboriously
checking every line of HTML, every incoming link.. I thought that site
had been banned from the index for some inexplicable reason. The site
reappeared in the next update though, right as rain, with PR up a
point, even though I had essentially left the site unchanged. Many
factors are completely out of our reach, such as hosting going down
*just* at the wrong time, when the search spider visits, and so on and
so forth.
Checkout WebmasterWorld Forums for more info on the 'Google Dance':
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
(having just visited their site, I did notice a suspicious headline):
"UPDATE!"
"October 2002 Google Update"
"Posted in Google News by liamgt"
"Official. The halloween update is on."
So, we're still pretty close to the tail of the update in many ways.
Anyway. Down to business, let's have a good look at your site anyway,
to see if there is, or could be, anything majorly wrong.
First of all I shall scan through your source code, and see if there
might be anything obvious in there.
Does your code test as valid HTML, at the W3C testing site:
http://validator.w3.org/
No, it doesn't. Here is the first error:
"Fatal Error: no document type declaration; will parse without
validation
I could not parse this document, because it uses a public identifier
that is not in my catalog.
You should make the first line of your HTML document a DOCTYPE
declaration, for example, for a typical HTML 4.01 document:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">"
OK. I shall make the neccessary changes to a saved copy of your
source, and run it through the validator to pick up on any further
errors.
Character encoding was not detected, next.
Remedy - added the following line in your <head> section:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1">
The validator was now able to run through the HTML code of your site;
it reported 76 separate HTML errors. Not good.
Although the quality and validity of your HTML; it's adherence to the
standard, is certainly not the only thing Google takes into account
when appraising your site, it *is* rumoured to play a strong part in
the process.
You should endeavour to reduce the number of errors reported at the
W3C testing site, ideally to zero, although I will concede that this
is sometimes extremely hard to do whilst maintaining the look and feel
of your site. If you do come across errors which are impossible to
remove, given your current layout, you may wish to redesign certain
areas of your HTML, use different methods etcetera, to try and get
round this.
You may wish to take advantage of one of the many HTML tidying
services available on the web, who will perform this 'revamping' for
you.
For example,
Manual HTML cleaning Service:
http://www.lancashirecomputer.co.uk/springclean.html
Site Valet: Tidy Online:
http://valet.htmlhelp.com/tidy/
Ok, having checked the validity of the HTML code, I'll now check the
number of links to your site that Google is aware of, using the 'Page
Info' > 'Backward Links' feature of the Google toolbar. This is
reporting 1,710 links to your root domain - In terms of sheer quantity
this is fine! In fact, it's suspiciously large! I shall let you into a
secret. My own personal site, which I cannot quote due to my
contractual obligations to Google as a researcher, currently has a
page rank of six, with only around thirty incoming links. Looking at a
selection of your linking sites, I can't see a problem, however, one
possibility is that your URL may have been picked up by a 'link farm'
type project. If you happen to notice, in your list of linking sites,
that there are large groups of essentially the same page, but on
different domains, all pointing at your page, try to distance yourself
from them - Google may consider this as an attempt at 'link flooding',
if so, yes, this would probably affect the PR algorithm. One (fairly
drastic, I'll admit) method would be to change your index page URL &
begin again - Ok, you lose all your incoming links & have to start
building them up again, but if your site is getting 'tarred with a bad
brush' by bad incoming links, this maybe isn't such a bad idea,
although a dilemma because you do appear to have worked hard at
getting well-linked. You could change your main URL, for instance,
from index.html, to index.htm, main.htm, main.html, index.shtml. Note
that only the index.* filenames will be automatically displayed to
visitors who visit your root though - i.e. a visitor to
http://www.albinotreefrog.net/ would not get your main page if it was
named http://www.albinotreefrog.net/main.html , like they would if it
was named http://www.albinotreefrog.net/index.html.
In the worst case scenario, you could set up on a new domain, with
just a basic manual redirect from the old URL - this would mean you
have a fresh start, and yet you retain your original traffic. I know
it's a severe option.
Yes. I beleive you need to look into the quality of your links. There
may or may not be problems hidden there.
I note that you have some redirecting in place - any attempt to access
an actual filename, e.g. http://www.albinotreefrog.net/index.html,
results in a redirect to another site - I cant see much farther what's
going on there, but depending on how your server is set up, this may
be confusing Google - most search engines are happiest when they can
access a named document file directly via a URL. Especially, there is
a thing referred to as cloaking, check that this isn't inadvertently
happening. For more information, see:
Search Engine World: Cloaking Overview.
http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/cloaking.htm
Note also that Google specifically discourages cloaking. see:
Google information for webmasters: dos & donts
://www.google.com/webmasters/dos.html
So far I've covered HTML integrity, incoming links, cloaking.
I'll now appraise the HTML and script of your page (which is all that
can be seen by Google) with a different eye, concentrating on content.
First a very brief look at the visual page itself. Not of any great
importance at all as regards ranking, unless you are submitting to
somewhere like the open directory project, where human editors
actually look at the site. All the same, and this is personal opinion
only, I think the page is pretty well laid out, although the banner ad
can become distracting. As I say, though, I don't think this would
cause such a great drop in PR.
Looking at the code itself, these are the points I'd raise. Note of
course, that this is my opinion only - many other webdesigners would
agree with me, many others would not.
1.
You could possibly extend your title safely by a reasonable amount.
Maybe 'Albino Freebies - free web resources for all'
It would be well worth following the advice at
SelfPromotion.com by Robert Woodhead:
http://selfpromotion.com/
where he describes a method for determining useful, highly used
searchterms.
2.
The meta-revisit tag is unneccessary
3.
The meta robots tag is unneccessary - the default behaviour of most
spiders is index and follow, anyway, so you are just diluting the page
here.
4.
Keywords are MUCH less useful than they used to be, I can vouch for
this from personal experience. Google appears to be interested mainly
in the text it finds on your page. In fact, keywords can be
dangerous.. in your keyword tag, I counted the word 'free' fourteen
times. The current wisdom floating around the web suggests that
repetition of a word more than three times in the meta keyword tag,
will raise a 'keyword spamming' flag with the search engine. This
could well be where your main problem lies. Again, I would recommend
Robert Woodhead's SelfPromotion.com website for information about
setting up your keywords, with the exception that I'd go further and
say, keep them to a minimum. Go and have a chat with the users at
webmaster world:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
They keep a close eye on the search engines there, and are a veritable
goldmine of good, current information.
5.
Looking at the body text of your page, there is quite a lot of word
repetition again, although here, I suspect there is less of a worry
concerning overuse. All the same, I would try to include more 'running
text' - this is what Google really likes in my experience. Now here is
your dilemma - you may well feel that the design of your site will not
support this.
There is an answer!
You may well be able to provide several paragraphs of good,
descriptive prose, describing the aims of your site, etcetera,
whatever you feel is right. Place this plain text right up at the top
of your site, as close to the leading body tag as possible. Enclose it
within div tags, and use style commands to position that div below
your main, attractive design:
<div id="info" style="container: positioned; position: absolute; top:
600; left: 20">
here's some text
</div>
This will ensure that the search engines will read your prose, and
index the keyphrases within it, easily, whilst you are able to retain
substantially the same layout. (just adjust those top: and left:
parameters to get the effect you need.)
I hope this information has helped. If you would like me to expand on
any point, or feel that there is something I have not covered, please
do not hesitate to ask for clarification before rating my answer.
Best regards,
gan |
