Please Review High School & College Student Site

[Mitch]

I’ve been doing web development for about 3 years now, but most of my work has been on Intranet applications. This is one of my first attempts at an Internet site, so as you can imagine, it has really been a learning experience.

Please, if you have a few minutes, take a look at http://www.irecess.com, and leave me some feedback. Do you “get it”? What works & does not? What could be done to make it better? Anything you can come up with….

The site went live in January, and we have been having a heck of a time getting google to index us. I appreciate any insights that you might offer.


Thanks,

[TStewartFan]

dead link :(

[Mitch]

The link works here. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

[chachacallis]

your website is nice, but try changing the font size for school so it matches the text beside it.

[quaffapint]

Nice site. As far as Google, did you submit a sitemap? You have a very deep site with many subdomains. I'm not sure how Google's bots handle those. I would suggest letting google know your site structure through a map.

[Mitch]

Thanks. Subdomains are dynamic, so we have like 20,000 (one for each school). I have been afraid that the google algo would flag us as SPAM because of this. Would submitting a google sitemap help? Can you think of any other ways that we can minimize the chance that we will be lumped into the "suspicious site" bucket?


Thanks.

[romanmittermayr]

Nicely done. Especially the ads are not annoying at all, guess you are doing a good job. I would still add a link block somewhere.

[teaticket]

Very nice.
Do you mean "state or province", though?
You know what would be cool?
A running crawlstrip at the bottom with a few words from one post, followed by another, etc, running kind of fast.

Not that I know how to implement that....:o

[Kunks]

i like the overall feel of the site, good job

[webmasterlabor.com]

It looks great. Interesting business model. However, you may want to make it more viral by incentivizing or empowering members to use your site as a social networking platform revolving around a local school or local interest.

[ramakrishna p]

The Designing of site is perfect!
But it is lacking the following two;

(1) Photo of debating student.
(2) School building.

If the above two images can be placed some where on site it will replicate the theme. Present Images: The female not looking like a student, The walking legs not a symbol for student communication.

[Mitch]

Thank you all for your feedback.

[Twas]

I like the site but you have to be careful. I would say this site is going to get banned very quickly by not one, but possibly all the engines especially once you start doing linking into it.

I will not go into all the reasons, but this one is number one.

The engines express that any artificial methods to boost SERP's gives them the right to ban or block your site. Some of them say that the use of sub-domains for site promotion is not allowed.

I'm sorry, but if you understand an engines algo, it will rank this site so fast you will be amazed, if your linking structure is correct. A few well place links and your site is going to be number 1 for most every term you have.

Sounds to good to be true doesn't it. Well I have done it in the past and even had 9 out of the top 10 places on Yahoo, 5 out of 10 on Google, and the same for MSN on tough keywords. I lost 23 sites and tens of thousands of unique visitors per day because of my lack of knowledge.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo treat a subdomain almost exactly as another domain. So in short, what you have done, is given your home domain thousands of links from other domains.

You asked, sorry for the bad input, but this is not a good practice and you can easily loose your adsense account and get banned as well. I have seen it to many times.

Note: If it's not to late, change your url structure right now.

Really sorry!

[Deano]

Yeah, I go along with Twas, you've got 20,000 different sites! Most of which have 90% the same content, when I click from one school to the next, It looks exactly the same with the exception of @school1 being replaced by @school2, maybe you can alter your main description to contain more information about each school?

[Elearn-uni]

I like the site but you have to be careful. I would say this site is going to get banned very quickly by not one, but possibly all the engines especially once you start doing linking into it.

I will not go into all the reasons, but this one is number one.

The engines express that any artificial methods to boost SERP's gives them the right to ban or block your site. Some of them say that the use of sub-domains for site promotion is not allowed.

I'm sorry, but if you understand an engines algo, it will rank this site so fast you will be amazed, if your linking structure is correct. A few well place links and your site is going to be number 1 for most every term you have.

Sounds to good to be true doesn't it. Well I have done it in the past and even had 9 out of the top 10 places on Yahoo, 5 out of 10 on Google, and the same for MSN on tough keywords. I lost 23 sites and tens of thousands of unique visitors per day because of my lack of knowledge.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo treat a subdomain almost exactly as another domain. So in short, what you have done, is given your home domain thousands of links from other domains.

You asked, sorry for the bad input, but this is not a good practice and you can easily loose your adsense account and get banned as well. I have seen it to many times.

Note: If it's not to late, change your url structure right now.

Really sorry!

Interesting info Twas. Green rep for you. I had wondered about multiple subdomains but instead went for loads of static pages across just three interlinked domains differentiated by relevancy. Early days but seems ok practice I hope. :cool: Glad I read this thread!

[Mitch]

Thanks guys, I have been suspecting that Google (and others) would interpret all of the sub domains as spam because the content is so similar.

As the site grows, the content will not be the same at all (It is all user generated). All of the information for each school is unique (blogs, forums, ratings, classifieds), so they will be very different content-wise.

I based the url scheme on citysearch. http://austin.citysearch.com/ and http://dallas.citysearch.com/ and hundreds more *look* the same, but have different content that is specific to the city.

In our case for example, http://lacuevahigh-albuquerque-nm.irecess.com/ is a unique high school that has content specific only to La Cueva High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The problem is that we don't have much content yet.


Another example is meetup.com, http://coldfusion.meetup.com/ is a specific meetup group that is related to Macromedia ColdFusion.


I agree that engines should be red flagged when a website has thousands of sub domains (lots of spammer out there), but in our case I feel that it makes sense.

Are there in specific guidelines for the use of subdomains? We are not trying to artificially boost our rankings or hijack search results.

Thank you for your help thus far. Any more ideas?

[Mitch]

Anybody else have any comments on this? Thanks.

[thewishbone]

Seems nice, clear.
I think you have to check some SEO things.

Cheers