Sorry in advance, I just stumbled on this forum last night and am all excited that I may finally get to ask someone who knows about these things. I had someone build me a site and then I took it over and changed everything. Site is here http://www.killanoon.co.uk/ It is a site that promotes my barn conversion in Cornwall. I was contacted last year by a SEO, I paid them a couple of hundred pounds for a link campaign. ( I was even greener then than I am now ) Turned out though that my site was number 1 on MSN and Yahoo and near the top of most of the others for the search term 'cornwall self catering'. i was amazed, as all the other top placed sites were big directories offering a choice of loads of holidays. I could not get on to google though, and although I was getting an average of about 15 unique visits a day from the other engines, (including about half of those coming from 'imgres?imgurl' which bald welsh guy is helping me with hopefully) I hankered for more and set my sights on google. I wasnt even in the top 1000 on google for that search term, and discovered that google doesnt like links from sites that are nothing to do with what I am doing, doesnt like repetition etc etc. and will even black list people who try this sort of thing. Also my page rank wasnt too good, so I went through all the links and got rid of the rubbish, and changed all the text on all the pages till I got a page rank of 3/10 on all pages. Basically, I concentrated on good content which is fair enough. This was months ago, and I am still not on the top 1000 sites of google, but am now dropping away from MSN, Ask and most of the others also. (Still number 3 on Yahoo though.) Am I right in sacrificing all else in trying to appease google? If my page rank is 3/10 on all pages, why am i still not ranked? other sites with less page rank are quite high up the rankings. . Sorry for going on, but i dont know any one who knows of such matters, so I really am pleased to have found you lot.
Hi - Welcome First you should understand that the PR of a page was deprcated some time back...that means it does not have the importance that it used to have ! That being said I have a feeling that more recently it is having more importance again, however, that will not make one iota of difference when it comes to the SERPs. Pages of PR 0 can rank number 1 above pages of a lesser standing, however, if all other things are equal, then a page of PR 5 will beat a page of PR4. The other thing that you should be aware of is that Yahoo is quite large in market share [I think it is 30%] MSN is smaller [15%] and Google about 40% So if you ignore Yahoo etc you are ignoring quite a lot -equally..... However as far as the UK is concerned Google is more important.
Actually the UK market share of the search engines gives Google 75% and Yahoo and MSN about 7% each. So if you want UK visitors then you need to target Google. Having said that if you get google right then the others are easy. If you have paid a couple of hundred pounds you can't expect great results. Google is clever - you can't get a good ranking unless you deserve it (most of the time). How do you deserve a good ranking? You need more relevant links than your competition and you need to have a better website. If you have the best site with the most links then you get to the top sooner or later. Checking your links I can see that Google reports 6, Yahoo about 50 and MSN 203 so you are on your way. I suggest employing somebody to submit to a few hundred directories and syndicating a few articles about your subject matter and then starting a link exchange campaign.
I appreciate greatly your comments. Having looked at a few other threads I think I am probably sandboxed, my keywords are very popular. I am still looking to find out how I can determine if I am or not, but I am of the opinion, as you say, that content is king. The only thing I am concerned about is if I have something hidden in my HTML that I dont realise is bad in googles eyes. I have another site that was written for me, that I havnt touched at all, that is number 1 on google for the search 'roofing cornwall' and has been for a couple of years ( http://www.jsroofing.co.uk/ ). The content has never been changed since it was written, and other companies even use the pay per click to get on the first page. The only difference with that site is that it does not have any outgoing links at all, would this make a difference? Anyway thanks again, and if you need a roof doing or a holiday I will do it cheap! Cheers Stuart
Outgoing links to relevant sites have been proved to help your rankings. For instance if you have a site about a holiday house in cornwall you should be linking to local attractions and the tourist information centre.