Domain: t35.com I'm hoping someone can figure this out because i'm stumped. Our site, t35.com, is one of the top free web hosts around. Alexa always in top 5,000. PR always above 6. hundreds of thousands of back links (check yahoo). And the domain is 8 years old. Since about 2 years ago we dropped in rankings for our keywords (free web hosting, free hosting) from top 10, to top 200. At the same time we are still top 10 on other search engines like yahoo. What seals the deal for me is when you search our company name "t35 hosting", t35 hosting itself is usually not even in the top 100!! What is making me look into this now is that one of our new sites we JUST launched (helpingwebmasters.com) comes up top 10 for "t35 hosting" while t35 hosting itself doesn't make the top 100. Something has to be up. We never did any kind of SEO stuff (so no blackhat stuff that I have been reading about on here). Never sold links. Never did anything wrong. Any ideas on how to proceed? I really hope someone on here can figure it out :\
More than likely Google seems to have multiple versions of your site indexed and as such it tanked your rankings. You are not banned. But you can see Google sees different things about your site depending on the URL in question. Most of your links are pointing to the short cut URL and not the absolute URL as one would like. Results 1 - 10 of about 1,330,000 for t35.com Results 1 - 10 of about 23,700 for www.t35.com Results 1 - 2 of 2 for http://www.t35.com This can be fixed via .htaccess Also your robots.txt file is built wrong so this may have thrown things off a bit....basically allow is not a recognized command in robots.txt There are some other issues as well it seems.
I already have .htaccess making t35.com go to www.t35.com. I also selected that preference in the google webmaster tools. Our hosting members get *.t35.com though.. that might be it? But most other hosts (like 50megs.com) do the same thing and don't get penalized. I'm going to check out my robots.txt and see if that helps. Thanks! Anything else it can be?
Extend your domain registration 5 to 10 years. You're under a year and I am pretty sure Google spam filters domains with a year or less in registration time.
My thought is that Google looks at your domain registration length as a business lease. If you rent building or commercial property it usually has a five to ten year term. Also in mid level management positions and higher, one of the interview questions is, where do you see yourself in five to ten years? However, that being said it seems anything is better than a year or less. Their patent noted that "most sites that spammed their index were registered a year or less". No conclusive proof either way, but I always advise better safe than sorry.
Good advice! Thanks! I'm going to register it for a few more years and then see if it helps anything. Thanks!
Actually, renewing the domain registration (and changing nothing else) moved me from #11 to #10 on yahoo for our most competitive keyword and from #92 to #90 on google. We haven't budged from those spots in weeks... so it does look like the domain registration age might make a small difference in the rankings! I was very surprised! Too bad it seemed to have helped more on yahoo then on google.. :\
Google takes time to fully score things so it can take a while longer, maybe even a couple months. I'm never paranoid about Google since they put all my sites on the front pages