Hey everyone, I was just wondering if anyone who has knowledge of SEO can take a quick look at my site. www.AceLayouts.com I have a LOT of backlinks and am consistently working on more. I have a lot of text links on various sites with key phrases I want but I don't see myself ranking well on google AT ALL. Is there something you see that may be causing me to be penalized? Any help is appreciated!
Google isn't showing any backlinks for your site: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://www.acelayouts.com/ Google doesn't show all backlinks, but quality, relevant links are what google likes. MSN and Yahoo are a LOT less picky and will always show more. Your site looks less than 2 months old. Google has a sandbox for new sites - and they don't factor in backlinks for competitive terms (like the ones you seem to be targeting). This period can last for 3 months to over a year. You can still get traffic, but for competitive terms it is going to be extremely hard, if not impossible to rank well. I didn't see much original content, and if these programs aren't unique, you will likely have a very difficult time competing against thousands of other sites trying to get the same traffic. You really need to be in the top 20 (especially top 10) before you will see any significant traffic. Quality backlinks, and unique content. That is the key. You might be better off targeting Yahoo or MSN, or try going after less competitive terms if you want to get traffic from google.
Go to yahoo and type linkdomain:www.AceLayouts.com and see what comes up. You will see pretty much every backlink... Oh yeah, there is that sa(n)dbox thing p.l.u.r.
It is common to see sites with 10,000 back links on Yahoo and less than 10 on google. Google discounts, or ignores a lot of links for quality issues. Link exchanges carry less weight, and they can also detect paid links in certain cases, or link exchange networks. A link in the footer with a lot of other links carries less weight than on a page where your link is in the text body. The more natural your link looks to the google bot, the better (i.e. the type of links you would get when someone is putting a link in an article because your they genuinely like your site). As I said, google doesn't show all backlinks they count, but if after a backlink update they are showing zero or a fraction compared to top ranking sites, it is an indication of poor link quality (in google's eyes). Google shows backlinks while a site is in the "sandbox" - they just don't factor them in when calculating rankings for certain keywords (competitive).
ofcourse google dont like huge backlinks at once.first thing u must have only revelant backlinks. seconf thing u must get those backlinks slowly few at a time. even if u buy directory submissions packages and get huge all at once it will not at all help u.
What title tag would be reccomended? I've seen a bunch of sites been around almost the same length of time as me ranking on page 1 of google. I have gotten a lot of relevant links, done some directory submissions, article submissions, bought permanent links. What title would be reccomended?
Every keyword or phrase you add dilutes the individual importance. A page targeting a single keyword or phrase will have more importance. By keyword stuffing, you might not (likely) wind up ranking for any of them - and a site that does have such a title is probably ranking because of their backlinks and anchor text, not title. Each page should have a unique title, if possible. The title depends on what you want to rank for - and many people make the mistake of going after keywords that have so much competition they don't have a chance of every ranking for them. Some highly competitive sectors have in-house SEO's and six-figure budgets. There is no single SEO technique, but if you take enough time to read through the forums, you will have a much better grasp of what you should be doing. It isn't something you can learn in a day. You also don't have any h1 tags - and you should add one to each page and uss css to control the font size. You can have the perfect SEO'd page and still not rank with google due to the age of the site and quality of backlinks. The top ranking site on google for "MySpace Layouts" has 79,700 backlinks. The number two and three have thousands. Looking at the number of backlinks for the top ranking sites should give you an idea of what you need to do to compete with them.
Am I in the sandbox considering it can't find any links to my site? Or it just needs to update for me to be listed?
The sandbox has nothing to do with indexing or showing backlinks. As I mentioned, backlinks show exactly the same regardless if your site is new or 10 years old. The sandbox just means google will internally ignore your backlinks when it factors in SERPs for certain competitive keyword terms - and they don't disclose anything about their algorithm (other than what is in their patents).
All the pages have an h1 tag. The only page that didn't was the home page but that is fixed now. I also changed the title to be shorter, maybe a third of the size.