Hi, this is my first post on this forum. I am a web developer and have taken on an SEO job for a friend who has the site http://www.prioritycarrental.com.au. I am trying to achieve a good rank for keywords of 'brisbane car rental', 'brisbane car hire', 'car hire brisbane' and 'car rental brisbane' for the domain www.prioritycarrental.com.au (within google.com.au) One of the major problems I am having with the site is the homepage has a pagerank of 4 while the internal pages have zero pagerank. When I took the site on they had tried a few things themselves which I believe had harmed them or maybe invoked a penalty from google. They had duplicated a number of content pages and just renamed the .html files - then linked these from the homepage, they had heard that having more pages on the site helped, but the cookie cutting may have invoked a penalty. With these duplicate pages removed and some content optimization they have improved on the rankings (from around 150 up to about 60, but have now slid to 80-100 for the keywords mentioned above.) Even with these duplicates removed, the remaining pages had a large block of duplicate content (about 2-3 paragraphs) at the bottom of each page, this block of content would have been most of the text on the page so I belive duplicate content was still a problem, I've been progressively changing this content or removing it from each page to solve that, there is still more to be done there. They had participated in some link exchanges and FFA sites, and if you check googles 'similar pages' it was previously finding a lot of FFA sites, there seems to be one remaining coming up (quickregister.net) on the google similar page search, but we are not linking to them and I cant find a link from them to us.. is this similarity causing problems do you think? Is it the content on the page being too similar or is there some linking (perhaps cached) going on? Also I have started adding more content pages which link from the homepage (the about us page, and FAQ) which have good content - I believe part of the strategy is to update the site throughout with better text content (I understand 'content is king') however after recently adding these pages the ranks slid for the first time in months. I wonder if this is because the internal pages are banned on google (penalized?) and Im just bleeding more pagerank from the homepage to content pages that arent passing any back? Also note the internal pages do seem to be indexed by google and can be found.. so I still wonder why no pagerank? (I have also heard the google toolbar can be out of date, but its been showing zero for 3 months whereas other sites i monitor have shown fluctuations over the same time) The two main issues I am trying to resolve are 1. why the internal pages have no pagerank. 2. Get the site into dmoz .. Regaring dmoz, I have submitted the site several times over the last 3 months but still not in. I at the same time submitted my site www.ebondi.com.au to dmoz and its still not in, however I run a quirky side to my site called the starwarswebcam (www.ebondi.com.au/starwars.asp) - I submitted that to a different area and was in dmoz within a few days! I suspect the 'unique' content was an easy one for dmoz, likewise a different customer was placed with dmoz who has a quickly product and I suspect it is because of their unique product they also got in quickly. I am thinking of suggesting adding a non-profit section to my car rental client such as reviews on 'Places to visit in Australia' - that visitors could contribute to, somewhat relevant to the car rental business and try and place that in a different area of dmoz, will this help do you think? I understand google treats dmoz links like gold no matter where in dmoz they come from. I know this is a bit long-winded for my first post, I wanted to provide as much detail as possible. Any advise would be very helpful! Kind Regards Dylan
Google is not showing the correct PR on the toolbar, and hasnt for a few months not, so forget PR and concentrate more on getting the website ranked high, which is what you want isnt it? Getting the site in DMOZ - well you'll have to wait a while, personally I'd submit your website after reading the guidlines and then wait for 2 years before going back to see if the site has being listed You haven't mentioned the "one" of the most important factors in getting your site ranked well - links! Contact webmasters and get them to link to you
You need more links to the site in a format like this brisbane car rental < A href="http://www . prioritycarrental . com . au" >brisbane car rental< /A> (you need to fix that by removing spaces - I entered them so you could see the basic layout) Get as many links as possible for each of the keywords you are targetting, and the site will climb in the rankings. Read posts on this forum relating to Anchor Text and you will learn a lot. There are some lists of directories in the Directory section on this forum. Those directories will allow free submission and will gain you backlinks with the correct "anchor text"
Thanks for that. I do need to work on incoming links more. I did read about the keywords in the anchor text recently, I changed the links from my own site to work that way & intend to use that method in future. I also understand outgoing links bleed pagerank so I setup the outgoing links to go via a redirect asp script, other things I've read suggest this could be a bad thing to do as well but not specifically this method I think, perhaps I should leave the few outgoing links as natural links on the links.htm page? They receive a lot of incoming links from webwombat.com.au where they have a link on every page of their site to prioritycarrental.com.au with the anchor text "Car Hire Brisbane" - from every test I've run they seem to have very good incoming links compared to their competitors (link popularity). I have added them to a lot of australian business directories to help with incoming links, I guess the next thing to do is start sending requests for link exchanges to other sites .. and from what I've read the approach is to get links from pages with good to high pagerank who have few outgoing links from.. their page or their site in total? and approach the top ten sites that link to my competitors and then the top ten that link to those.
As far as DMOZ, every category is different and sometimes it takes months to get in. You need to go to the http://www.resource-zone.com/ As far as your internal pages, how new are they. I noticed your links page has a PR of 6 which is higher than your homepage. Also, you may wish to include a robots.txt file on your site telling the spiders to follow all links. Probably won't solve your problem but it wouldn't hurt and ya never know.
Hi, yes i noticed the links page has a PR6 compared to the homepage PR5 - I thought maybe this is due to the link structure within the site - ie the homepage links off to various other pages - whereas the links page doesnt have as many links to other pages (and I think almost every page on the site has a link to the links page). I was thinking of trying to swap this around, but then you end up with a hompeage that doesnt link off to much (and effectively becomes an intro or splash page).. hmm Maybe the homepage should just link off to 4-5 main sections. cheers! Thanks for the reply & advise. Kind Regards Dylan
buy a domain name brisbane.something or www.brisbane-rentals.something then you put subdomain name : car-hire.brisbane.xxx car-rental.brisbane.xxx hire-car.brisbane.xxx rental.brisbane.xxx car.brisbane.xxx after few months you will be able to see what sub.domain are working anf wich arent...than u tweak some links...and hopala you are No1 U must link with these themes : cars, rentals, regional brisbane, reginal car sites...