SEO Help for an Established 10yr old Site

I've never been too good at SEO (and have never done too much of it), so I want to see if anyone can help me out with SEO for our free web hosting business.

The site is T35 Hosting: http://www.t35.com and our main keyword is 'free web hosting'. We've usually been in the top 10 for that keyword on most search engines, except Google on which we have been almost dropped for the last 2 years. In fact, we don't even rank well for our company name "T35 Hosting"!

Any free advice would be appreciated... and if anyone offers SEO services please let me know. I'm looking for something on a pay-per-performance basis. (Ie: I pay when I see improvements ). We are a big and well established site (alexa top 5k with hundreads of thousands of customers), so I'm sure if you help us with SEO, using us as a "past client" should get you enough publicity to make it worth your while (not even counting the money I'm willing to pay if there is substantial performance).

The domain itself is almost a decade old. We should have tons of backlinks.. not only from 5,500,000 member pages (site:t35.com on yahoo), but also from being around so long. Our yahoo rankings are still pretty good.. top 10 for all our keywords.. and even #1 for a few (php free web hosting). What hurts is the google rankings; I don't understand how we aren't even top 50 for "T35 Hosting".

 

Build backlink with that anchor text

 

I tried.. we have tons of backlinks with that anchor text. It doesn't help. We don't even rank well for the site name (which is very unique)!

 

This is a tough cookie? Your site looks ok, but than again "free web hosting" is going to be a tough nut to crack! Out of the 22 million results in Google, I would wonder what keywords would really bring traffic? Your in a tough spot. Doesn't look like anything wrong with the site though? Good luck. I'm curious as to what others might say on this...

 

Google Hates your site and omg.. i have seen that host before lol. Try Great Quality Backlinks and do some better seo with it

 

http://www.webmonkey.com/06/16/index3a.html, hope this helps

 

Don't ever say that you're in sandbox for a years? Contact google then

 

I've heard that Google looks for h1 tags and I don't see any on your home page.
I would redo the home page with at least one each h1,h2,h3 tags, use some underlining with your bold test and put more information on the home page, maybe elaborate more on the benefits of a free hosting site and make sure that the main keyword that you rank for is at the first part of the home page content like in the h1 tag and then use it again at the end of the content.

My 2 cents

 

budhanes ... "free web hosting" is tough, but we've been in business for almost a decade with that keyword and used to do good with it. Still top 10 on yahoo.

bweav ... I should have some H1 tags in the site. I don't think it would be bad enough that it would cause me to not rank for "t35 hosting", right?

aolaybar ... sandbox for a decade? How would I contact google?

 

Hello amelen,

I had a quick look to your website and does not find any big problem with the website at the first instance. The only thing to worry can be your linking strategy, check if you have any reciprocal links, or if you ever involved in any paid listing. Also check your backlinks where are they coming from. And the last but not the least check our hosting server for any bad neighborhood.

All the best.

 

We never did any paid linkings, but we do have a 'hosted by t35' link on member pages (which we recently changed to 'free web hosting'). Most other hosts do the same thing and I don't think any have been penalized for it. In fact, we sell links next to our 'hosted by' now and all of our advertisers have done very well in terms of SEO by getting the 5,000,000 back links.

 

what did you made until now? did you completed on site seo?

 

I'm not sure what you are asking? We haven't done too much specific SEO work. Since the site is so old and so established, we've gotten by without any specific SEO.

 

Anyone else? Any SEO professionals out there that want to take on another client?

 

Yeah i see, things are definitely not good with your site. I also see back in about the second week in Oct 07 you started to take a hit but it really started at the beginning of 2007 correct?

Seems you are the victim of a couple of Google algo tweaks:

* The first being the nulling of the Googlebomb, which coincided with your first big downswing. It appears these millions of subdomains with identical backlink anchor text triggered it.

* The other was Octobers paid link crackdown/smackdown, same thing millions of footer text links with identical anchor text.

* Also to a lesser extent, Google's recent changing on how subdomains are handled and presented in the SERP's. Considering 99% of the T35.com real estate is made up of xxxx.T35.com subdomains this applies.

My first port of call would be to get with your script developer, and setup a database that works with your wildcard subdomain creation and assigns the anchor text to that particular subdomain from a list of 15-20 variations.

For example:

Web Hosting
Free Web Hosting
Free PHP Hosting
Free Hosting
T35.com
T35.com Free Hosting

And so on, then that anchor is assigned randomly from the list to the specific subdomain for life upon creation. Be sure not to assign it randomly on pageload, but rather to the specific subdomain for life so it never changes.

Anyhow this is by no means a complete solution, it's just based on a 5 minute look at your site and info stored in the gray matter about what's happened historically and how it applies to you. However what i have mentioned should go a long way towards tackling the biggest obstacle.

 

Bingo! If your not even ranking for your name t35 then you have been penalized. And this post says it all. You rank in yahoo but not Google, and Google is getting real serious about paid links and your selling 5 million pages worth.

If you want to get back up in the rankings you need to stop selling links or add nofollow to them, contact Google and pretty much wait.

 

Thanks for all the info guys! I'm going to review all of it this week. How would I go about contacting google?

 

Ok I just checked www.archive.org. And from seeing from May 6, 1999 you were not a free web hosting site but a illegal downloading site. In 12/2001 your site was a porn site. In 2/2/02 in archive.org your site was down due to servers. Did you get the domain as a dropped domain?

The way I see it is you have some bad badlinks to illegal downloads and porn links that have not been remove and have been archived since 1999. As well as few times that you were spotted by archive as not being up. Maybe this maybe the issue.

 

Hmm.. The domain WAS originally used as a topsites list (not specifically illegal. and never a download site), hosting was done on hosting.t35.com at that time. There was never a time it was an adult site of any kind. I have owned the domain since day one.

 

That may be true, but a lot of the stuff on your subdomains are not good backlink material. Because it's free hosting, people take advantage to make pages on all sorts of undesirable content with links to even more undesirable content.

Having backlinks from these pages won't be doing you any favors. It seems the content on these subdomains isn't really moderated.

But do what i said in my first post, i'm sure you will find it brings vast improvements.