I'm having quite a time getting some decent rankings on Google & Yahoo for my site - http://www.drhfinegifts.com On MSN, I'm rated at or near the top for my keywords - designer perfume, discount perfume, discount designer perfume, brand name perfume, brand name fragrances, designer cologne, ETC. Most of my traffic from Yahoo comes from my directory listings, ads, and press releases. Also, Google isn't showing any of my directory listings in the backlinks, such as JoeAnt, Seniority.co.uk, top100biz.com, bigall.com, tygo.com, abilogic.com, and many more! Just wondering if maybe Yahoo & Google might think my site is 'spammy'. Any ideas? I revamped this site in September 2005 from an old electronics website I had back in 2004, so the domain age is fairly decent.
Yes, but even though I'm listed on Google (I know I'm not banned!), I don't even show for the 1st 1000 listings for my terms! On the Google sitemap stats, I only have a very few hits on some VERY obscure terms. What gives? And my Awstats have very little traffic coming from Google, and only a bit more from Yahoo. Here are my February stats so far: Links from an Internet Search Engine - Full list - MSN 545 744 - Yahoo 129 130 - Google 48 90 - Dogpile 42 42 - Unknown search engines 31 31 - Mamma 17 17 - AOL 2 2 - Excite 2 2 - Splut 1 1 - WebCrawler 1 1 - Ilse 1 1 - AltaVista 1 1 - Netscape 1 1 - Lycos 0 2 Any ideas on what could be the problem? Is my site "spammy" or is it just too much competition?
I have seen some real spammy sites in Google so do not think spam is the only key. Think one problem is the newness of the site. Since you changed content I am not sure there is a value to an old domain name or much of a value. Notice your decscitption tag: Save over 80% on discount designer perfumes, colognes, and brand name fragrances at DRH Fine Gifts. Free designer perfume and cologne samples. Free shipping offer. I would start my description with my most important keyword phrase, possibly discount designer perfumes ... I think tweaking the page and time should help with indexing problem. Shannon
What I first see on your site, in a h1 one tag, is this: "Discount Perfume - Discount Cologne - Discount Fragrances. Brand Name Perfumes. Authentic Designer Fragrances. Cart Contents" and one word per line. MSN might love it, but looks like spam to the human eye. I'd move a header to within the main body. Something like: "drhFineGifts.com - Your Discount Designer Perfume Store - The Lowest Prices....Guaranteed!" And your site "blows out" the side of the screen. OK, I'm only using 1024x768 and maybe it was optimised for a higher resolution such as 1280x1024 but it would be a good idea to make my account/my cart/checkout fit within the page, this appears to be what's causing the "blow out". Move the "quick glossary" to its own page and have a link to it under "policies and info". The front-page is too overloaded.
The overall appearance of the site is spammy, it kind of shows your intention behind how you design. It's far too blatant IMO. You're turning off visitors. I would not be as concerned about rankings as I would be whether people will trust you with their credit card info or not Mike
Okay, some of you may have been looking at the site while I was playing with the header tags and it looked really weird! I fixed the problem now. Please have another look and let me know what you think.
Yes I do have pages - dynamic pages -for all these. I use a Google sitemap but strictly for Google. With about 5,000 products, it's a little hard to put a sitemap up on the actual site!
Oh, and the products are listed by inventory number, not by name, on the actual webpage for each product. Yes, this is a turnkey site, but it works pretty well for me so far. It is simple for me to load up my inventory to it. If I ever get rich, I will hire a professional webdesigner and totally redo it! Until then......
Soo....maybe I should do a sitemap with possibly just the designer names? That might cut it down to about 200 or so. To do each fragrance would just take way too long and be kinda redundant I think.
In case you haven't gotten the point yet, let me simplify it for you: Stop being tricky and focus on making a good site!
I'm not trying to be tricky. But if someone is doing a search for 'discount calvin klein perfume', I will show up somewhere with the text at the bottom. If someone is just searching for 'perfume', it's not a big deal. Don't you get a little more explicit when you do a search? I mean, if you wanted to know about 'raising german shepherd puppies', wouldn't you key that in? Or would you key in 'dogs'? I have tried to take out some of the duplicate words in the bottom text & cleaned it up a bit. As far as the header tag goes, I thought you were supposed to put in your keywords in that tag. Maybe I'm wrong on that one. I have also moved some of the links over to the left hand side and gotten rid of alot on the bottom of the page. I'm not really expecting people to scroll all the way down, but I would like to keep the banner exchanges going and some of the other links, since they are reciprocal. I think it looks quite a bit better now & maybe not so 'busy'. Any other ideas folks?
I will go look at site in moment. I did an e-commerce site that was extremely well indexed. If you did a search for a particular item in our inventory you found it usually at the top of the SERPs. Our site was laid out with category pages and item pages. Say a category page might be Caron perfumes. One of our item pages and from the Caron page linked to each particular Caron fragrancce. Thus we would be indexed for Caron, and all sents such as Caron Bologa. Each page was target one keyword or phrase, not trying to hit all keywords on the homepage. I hand coded all the pages and spent as much time on html between <head></head>.
Thanks, Blogmaster. I think it does too. Thanks to everyone who put in their 2 cent's worth! It's nice to have people give non-biased opinions. When I show my friends & family - they say 'looks nice' but what the heck do they know? Hopefully by getting rid of so many occurances of 'perfume' and 'discount' it will look better to the SE bots. And I think it is more navigable with all the links to the left menu.