Ok, I have just about had it with Google and it's idiocy. Please help me to understand what is happening here.. I have 2 blog websites, site (a) was created in Jan 2005 and is a 3 word hyphanated keyword phrase ending in .org. eg: www.wide-screen-televisions.org I have spent a heck of a lot of time on this site, it is keyword rich and full of good quality unique content. The keyword phrase (wide screen televisions) is randomly sprinkled throughout the site. I have managed to get it up to a PR4 and although it ranks well in other search engines it is nowhere in Google, even where you search for the site name Current backlinks are 17, dropped from 31. Pages indexed are 400+ (most supplemental). This site has quite a few outbound links 20+ and participates in link exchanges, both recipricol and A-B-C exchanges. Site (b) is another kettle of fish altogether. This domain was originally purchased in June 2005 but sat dormant until Dec 2006 when I decided to do something with it. The domain is a random phrase and ends in .com. eg: randomphrase.com. This site again is keyword rich, full of good quality content however the randomphrase is mentioned just once in the footer of the page. This site minutes after propogating DNS was PR4, I guessed it was taking PR from another site and sure enough the pagerank didn't last long. Within 1 month it had dropped to PR0 but has now gone back upto PR3. This site ranks well for many search terms. Current backlinks to this site are 19 but 18 of these are from the domain itself, only 1 is from an external site. Pages indexed are 400+ (most supplemental). This site has few outbound links 5+ and does not participate in any link exchanges. Normal thinking would be that site (a) would get more SE visitors but it doesn't, in fact site (a) brings in less than 100 uniques a day. Most of these are from Google images, Yahoo and link exchanges. Site (b) however brings in almost 1000 uniques per day and 98% of these visitors are from Google, the most popular phrase is 12 out of 79,000,000 with lots of other phrases bringing in 1st page positions. Please can someone explain how this new site, less than 3 months old with 0 seo done to it (no meta tags) can be so much better than a supposedly heavily optomised site. Also what should be my first steps to improve site (a) ranking? Please help!!!
well it depends on the site, site topic and target audience. To be honest we can speculate but I see that you avoided posting your url. I really can't offer any specific advice without knowing a bit more information about the site. Telling us the PR doesn't mean anything as the PR you see in the toolbar is not related to your rankings at all. having 17 backlinks is really low, you might want to work on that that is not really indicative of the difficulty of the keyword so the site that is ranking might have weak competition.
The 12 out of 79,000,000 keyword phrase is for watch tv online. I don't really want to point out the URL's but site (a) is about adult cams and site (b) is of course about watching tv online. I really would like to work out where I am going wrong with site (a). I am even considering doing a 301 redirect, I have heard that it passes on PR but I am unsure as to whether this affects the positions in the serps. It feels like I am blacklisted by Google and whenever I try to inprove the site it just goes worse.. what do you think?
Always an invite for trouble in the eyes of Google. I would carefully inspect every out going link on your site. You might have one thats harming your ranking with them. That's if your not spamming keywords or back links.
Is their a good free tool that will inspect all backlinks and outgoing links. As far as I am aware I have no spam on my site, it's all very ethical, well written content with some repition of keywords and phrases but not too many. I have used IBP to optomise amongst others. The optimization has taken place over 2 years and has been a natural progression.
There is Google Banned Tool but I am not too sure how reliable it is. I just spotted under a post by Old Welsh Guy. How can I identify a bad neighbourhood. For one thing, over two years later you should be at least have some trust with Google with good positioning in the results. Unless the site has been hit with a massive filter process (the sandbox). My "guess" is that Google would be more strict towards an adult site rather than one about watching tv online. Have you spoken with anyone in the same Adult niche about their experiences with Google and adult sites?
I have seen that Google banned tool before but it isn't very suitable. It would be better to have a tool that spiders all links and checks for bad neighbourhoods. From my point of view all the sites I have traded links with are PR3 or PR4. I have traded at least 40 - 50. How I only have 17 backlinks in Google I just don't know. I despair sometimes. I haven't talked to anyone directly regarding their experiences with adult blogs in Google but I have read a lot of forums and I can't see any real reason why Google would sandbox a 2 year old site just for being adult nature.