I've never been that into SEO, but I recently noticed that our website is ranked VERY low on google, while at the same time ranking high on all other engines. The website itself (www.t35.com) is a pretty large free hosting with an alexa ranking in the top 5k. The domain itself is over 8 years old... shouldn't that be a big plus for google? We also have backlinks on all the member pages linking back to us (over 500,000 of them).. i thought that would help too! In any case, for our keywords like "free web hosting" we usually rank top 10 on yahoo, etc.. but more like #95-110 on google. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly welcomed!
How long has the site actually been live on the internet? Web hosting is probably the most competitive market out there on Google. Also, check the integrity of those backlinks - are they from other relative sites, or just a bunch of PR0's from random sites of any category? Those internal member page links won't do much help since they're from the same network. How long did you register your domain name for (1 year, 5 years, etc?) These are all things to look at
The domain and site have been active/live/registered on the internet for over 8 years. We've been providing free web hosting since 1997, under that domain since early 1999. Used to be in top 10 for all they keywords 3-4 years ago.
I've heard that before - the length of time you register a domain has an effect on your pagerank. Is that for real or is that just a ploy domain registrars use to get you to buy more than one year at a time?
Sorry, I should have reworded that - how long did you last register the name for? The longer, the better (supposedly). Your site has a good rank (PR6). It could just be that web hosting is intensely competitive. My friend has a web hosting business and site that was released in 2000. He got a PR5 and is basically nowhere on Google.
You need to start to get into seo, web hosting is a competitive business especially for a high ranking in Google What Google like: -content -Keywords optimization -links -site age You have a pr6, site age, and links (which is good). You need some content and keyword optimization. This is what I have noticed from a quick review of your site.
Wow, I think it's interesting how low it ranks even though: - you're in DMOZ (here) - yahoo says you have over 800,000 inbound links (here) - the domain's been reg'd since 1999 (here) I'm looking forward to seeing what the SEO experts say... Best of luck
Also: - have you ever done anything to be penalized by Google? -Do links pointing to your site have your desired keyword in the anchor text?
Thanks for all the feedback guys! I have never paid attention to SEO, so i have never done anything to get penalized by Google. Having a site that's been around forever with LOTS of links back usually guaranteed us a high ranking without any effort. The last few years we dropped from #5-6 to #10-12 on yahoo. At the same time we dropped from #5-6 to #90-200 on google. Keywords are "free hosting", "free web hosting", "free website" and "free web site". The drop in traffic has really hurt.. we went from 1000 new free hosting sign ups per day to about 300. So if anyone can shed some light on this mystery I would really appreciate it! Oh, and to the last question, yes, all the links pointing to the website have the "free web hosting" anchor text. Actually the links on the member pages are actually a small icon, but the img alt txt is "free web hosting". Thanks!
Also, we edited our front page a few months ago and added lots of content & text. (Well a lot more then we used to have... everything above the 3 plans is new and used to just be an image). Unfortunately, it didn't help a tiny bit. I thought about getting the site listed in some directories, but looking around I found we are already in most of them... lol what's funny is that we are in top 5k on alexa, and are ranking lower in google for "free hosting" then a lot of personal sites and sites that are no longer even operational! (especially for the keywords which we are like #200 for).