My SmartMoneyDaily.com site gets 80% of it's SE traffic from MSN, and almost zero from Google and I've been wondering why I don't get more from Google. The first clue is when I do a site:smartmoneydaily.com [results here] all the pages that show up in the results look like this [see below]: Which is just my meta description tag as the page blurb. It looks like what is indexed does not contain any of the actual page content. Is it possible that the Googlebot is not finding the actual content of my pages? If yes, is do you have any ideas why? Any other tips for making my site more SE friendly are also greatly appreciated. Thanks for any help, Jon Writing Headlines - "What's In it for Me?" [SIZE=-1]This Site - How To, Writing Headlines - "What's In it for Me?", DIY.[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]www.smartmoneydaily.com/DIY/ Writing-Headlines-Whats-In-it-for-Me.aspx - 26 Cached - Similar pages[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1] [/SIZE]
Some reasons why Google isn't sending traffic: -Google only recognizes a small number of pages on your site, MSN recognizes 110 -One of your meta keywords if "personal finance", there are 50 million sites competing for that keyword on Google. Your other keywords are just as competitive -You have more code and advertisements on your pages than you do actual content, Google doesn't like that -Your site isn't very compliant with the Burboun update. At the bottom of the page you are linking to sites about deisel engines, that has nothing to do with your site on finance, so Google will penalize you for that. Those are the first things that jump to my mind when looking it over.
Thank you, All excellent points for me to consider. I'm curious about the one I quoted. When I did site:smartmoneydaily.com I get 239 results. Are you measuring it differently? Jon
I did that command on Google and it told me you had 40 pages. Something else to note: link:www.smartmoneydaily.com MSN: over 7000 links to your site Google: 24 links to your site
Does anyone have any ideas about why the blurb on my results [see my first post] is only my meta description tag and not anything from the actual body of the page. It seems like something is blocking the indexing of my actual content. Is there a tool or site that can predict what the googlebot will index on a page? Thanks, Jon
Most of your comments are good, but the above comment isn't true. Off-topic links in their own right are not a cause for penalty. IMO.
Google's been doing this for a while - if it finds a meta-description, it may commonly show that in SERPs. DMOZ description is another alternative. If you don't use a meta-description, it will use a description including alt tag content. Overall, if your listing doesn't invite people to click on it - fewer people will do so - thus Google can modify rankings based on clickthrough data. So meta-tags can indirectly impact ranking when most other people had left them. Clever, eh?
That doesn't mean that Google doesn't know about / recognize as many backlinks as MSN -- just that Google doesn't report backlinks accurately (intentionally).