I understood that. When I coined "all things considered" I meant all things being equal and proper, but the only isolating factor being the PR. Sorry, if I wasn't clear on that. Having said all that, the posts have been super, especially the links.
Google recently said that we shouldn't do reciprocals. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/building-link-based-popularity.html Seems pretty clear to me.
if the sites old then there is a good chance recips will help your rankings for awhile I thought otherwise, but after I tested it out I found I was wrong I have also seen links from relevant sites, apparently getting new sites to rank for at least lightly competitive terms yahoo and msn are hit and miss, sometimes recips work great sometimes not also having an old site seems to help in yahoo
I wish this would help me. My domain is about 11 years old, and nowhere to be found on Yahoo or MSN, but doing fine in Google for my keyphrases (my signature).
One way is definately the best, its more natural. I have heard some respected SEO claim that recprocal links are actually penalised by search engines.
don't know usually pushing up key word density a bit helps in yahoo, but yahoo takes a long time to count links, theoretically in my experience adding links to an old site can cause sudden gains in google, but there might not be any gains in yahoo for like 6 months.
I'm sure its happenend but the best thing you can do is test it out yourself, listening to others will only take you so far
http://www.joelane.com/robots.txt The requested URL /robots.txt was not found on this server. Both Yahoo & Msn bots seem to look for that and if they do not find it they may just be leaving. Hard to say but if you aren't there after 11 years there is definitely an issue that needs someone to go over everything about your site. Also make the URLs in your page coding absolute not relative. And you might want to chill a bit with the H3 tag spam, might help improve your rankings in Google. Id cancel the link to the SEO company since its not relevant, and if they are the ones who added all the h3 tags I would definitely dump the link...sheeesh
I am hoping the gains will come with Yahoo and MSN. The site has been a real estate site for three months, prior to that I was a painting contractor. What's weird is that a back link check shows close to 10,000 links (including subpages) but Google has only indexed three links, that being from when the site was a painting site. You would think I would rank well with MSN and Yahoo, and not with Google, but it is the other way around. I've avoided reciprocal linking, but thought I would start this thread to see what others had thought about it. The thread has been very helpful. In response to this thread and the links submitted, I think I will do recips only when asked!
Actually, SemAdvance is right in many ways. I am in the process of getting rid of some of the <h> tags, as well as lowering my keyword density. I don't' use a robots file. No need to, as I want all my pages indexed. I've got two sitemaps, one of which is Google's which is submitted whenever I add content.
Some of your issues I addressed in post #31 (the 11 years part). What do you mean by "Also make the URLs in your page coding absolute not relative."
Correct me if im wrong but MSN does NOT follow robots.txt I have read this several places I do believe.
I mentioned this earlier, but a robots.txt file is not necessary for any search engine if all pages are to get indexed, AND there are sitemaps in place. Correct me if I am wrong.
I did not say he did not rank well, I said he could improve,,,he is at # 5 on Google and as we all know, he would like to be 1 2 or 3 where 70% of users click. I have sites ranked over three years straight for keywords with competing pages in x,xxx,xxx,xxx and with daily search terms of xxx,xxx on Google alone. I am also the #5 author on Seochat.com and have not written for them in a year...surprisingly I make enough money from my SEO work that I can sit here virtually day in and day out and give marketing advice. I might know a thing or two....hard to say..... Joe More issues for you but first to cover the robots.txt file. You do not need to block any of the bots, there is the notion that if the bots ask for it and do not find it they will leave, being as you have a 10 year old domain name not in two of the major engines I would try to throw one up .,..take less than two mintues to do. Another issue with the first site in your sig in canonical URLs Your PR is diluted to 4 different versions of your URL. This can be remedied via your htaccess or via the domain preference tool under Google Webmaster Tools however this does not fix the canonical problem with the other bots so best to go through htaccess if you can. Results 1 - 2 of about 6 for http://www.joelane.com Results 1 - 10 of about 362 for www.joelane.com Results 1 - 1 of 1 for http://joelane.com Results 1 - 10 of about 1,450 for joelane.com Peace
yea not having a robots.txt has absolutly no reason why you wouldnt be in MSN or yahoo. I can say that for certain.
Change any links like these <a href="/">Home</a> <a href="/buying-home.php">Buying</a> <a href="/selling-home.php">Selling</a> <a href="/featured-listings.php">Featured Listings</a> <a href="/about.php">About Us</a> to <a href="http://www.joelane.com/buying-home.php">Buying</a> <a href="http://www.joelane.com/selling-home.php">Selling</a> <a href="http://www.joelane.com/featured-listings.php">Featured Listings</a>
Sem-Advance, you are now my best friend! I appreciate the critique, however, you are waaaay over my head. Let me back track a little. What is a "canonical url" and what were the 4 results for? I'm not sure what htaccess is but I can probably figure that one out with a simple Google search.