So, I've been working on a website for about 40 days now. We started August 29th, and were around for the last google update, although we were not assigned any pagerank (from what others have said, it's because we're too new still, but we indeed have 'rank' inside of google still). Our domain is almost as new as the site's content. the site is: http://hollywoodsnark.com We've been building steady content since then, and we are at an average of about 4 new blog posts per day (unique content). I'm looking for some advice on a couple of issues. First let me explain what we have done to optimize our site: 1. all links with www. in them give a 301 redirect to non-www link (did this from the get go, and have always submitted/used our links without www). 2. we ping many sites, including technorati 3. we have a google sitemap that updates with each post, and has been submitted to google (gets indexed regularly) 4. we have been building backlinks by submitting to many web directories, and having friends post our link to their sites/blogs/etc. Some backlink checker tools indicate we have 5. we use a descriptive title, h1 tags for story titles, try to have as much quality content higher up on the page as possible Recently (as in today) i've made more changes. We now have meta description and keywords tags for each page (one for the homepage, and then for each post page, we generate keywords specific to that post). Here are my concerns: a. Duplicate content. When you go to the url http://hollywoodsnark.com/category/oprah-winfrey/ for instance, it will have content from the stories about oprah, so it will have duplicate content from the page http://hollywoodsnark.com/2006/09/25/oprah-for-president/ and other such pages. Does google view this as duplicate content? My gut says yes, since it seems they view www vs. non-www as duplicate content on the same domain. In light of this, I have today made sure all other pages (like archives, search, categories, etc.) have the meta tag to tell robots not to index or follow the pages, while the individual post pages are allowed to be indexed. What are peoples' thoughts on this? b. Backlinks. Currentyl, MSN shows about 3000, yahoo about 2500, and google 52. What is google's problem, and why such the disparity? I realize they work differently, but this sort of shocked me, so I'm looking for opions on how normal this seems. c. Sandbox. For those who believe (I personally feel it's an 'effect' felt from something in google's algorithm rather than an on/off switch), is it wrong to assume we might be experiencing this effect? Like I said, the domain is new, and the site is newer. d. Traffic. We're experiencing about 250 uniques per day on average right now. It goes up and down a bit, but this is probably the average for the past 2 weeks or so. Does this seem rather low? e. SERP's. Of course this is important to us, we place OK on some keywords, but aren't even found on many others. It seems we place OK on the less competitive terms, and we're not even in the index for more popular keywords. Again, is this the sandbox? ------ Anyways, I'd love to hear any comments/opions/advice/etc. that anyone would be willing to give. I know content is king, and we are steadily building more and more content that I feel is of good quality and even better frequency. It just seems that maybe we could be doing a bit better. I welcome all opions and critiques and thank you for your help in advance!
well, i realize that time is another variable in the equation, but what i'm looking for is any and all advice to narrow it down so that time is THE most important variable in the equation. it's simple algebra, if i can 'eliminate' the other variables, it becomes easier to solve for the one that's left.
Your site is very cool by the way,but like HAWK said,maybe give your site a chance to get crawled some more,and remember pagerank isn't always going to help you rank for a specific keyword.
You need to go for some trusted links. Try business.com, yahoo directory, dmoz and http://sbd.bcentral.com Keep getting other bloggers to link to you and you will do very well. You also need to redirect http://www.hollywoodsnark.com to http://hollywoodsnark.com using htaccess.
Your site is not in the sandbox... if you do a search on google for 'hollywood snark' your site appears... whatever makes you think it is sandboxed?
Maybe because it doesn't rank for celebrity news? Although this isn't a case of the site being sandboxed. The site ranks where it should rank, until you get as many links as the other sites then its not surprising you will rank lower than them. If you have more quality links and still don't rank thats when you are sandboxed.
Just an FYI - I can access both the non-www. and the www. version so the redirect isnt working correctly. I would advise in redirecting http://hollywoodsnark.com/index.php to http://hollywoodsnark.com/