Ok, here goes... Our domain is over 2 years old and we cannot penetrate G and Y. We once got as High as #59 then disappeared. For the sake of writing, site is optimized, deccent backlinks, no spam, fresh content, interlinked etc etc etc. My question is this... Can the company that we host with be affecting our rankings? They host "p o r n" also. The server We've been on has been DOS attacked twice. We saw the website spidered by G without the proper domain but as the domain of the server... dns44.dizinc.etc etc Can some site on the shared server cause a blanket ban of C blocks by the Se's? We have a static IP, but maybe someone with a similar IP ( last two numbers being different etc) may be causing a ban somehow? And we got caught in it? Or if not a ban, but a triggering of a filter punishing us all?? Any ideas much appreciated, btw, been a while since last post, hope everyone is well Bri
I dont think it matters. Some of my sites that rank well for certain terms are on a shared host. And yes they host porn (one was mine) If its your travel site your talking about, you must realize you are in a hyper-competitive market. Looking at your backlinks vs. the #1 on Google for grand canyon tours you apear to have more back links in google, msn and yahoo. Of course the number 1 site has keywords in their domain. Focus on getting better quality back links. Search through the backlinks for those in top 10 and hunt for good quality sites. Relevant (sites about grand canyon, not nessesarily travel), high PR, older domains. Your on page optimization need LOTS of improvement. That keyword, i assume the main one you are targeting, only apears a couple times. Its fine in your meta tags but in the body it only occurs twice. Once as a link and once in the text. You need more occurances of this term and some variations of it. Plus it should be in bold in a couple places, maybe underlined, and inside an <h> tag, at least once. P.S. are you really as cute as your avatar pic?
According to http://tools.legco.net/serps/index.php , your site ranks: MSN Search 16 Google 66 Yahoo! 85 for grand canyon tours
Hi Bri, I personally do not think it would be fair for SE's to penalize a site for who they're hosting with. I mean... if a majority of the network serves blacklisted sites or something along that line, then I imagine it is possible (thinking on the SE's point of view). But then again, look at all the garbage sites that still rank high in SERPS. I wouldn't think that's the case. I would focus on increasing quality of content, optimization, and links, as stated by others. If you do that, and are sure everything is good, then you might consider asking google about the matter if nothing changes in a while. Finally, it could just be your competition is working it's way up. I would take a look at your site, but can't find any url. Hope this helps. Good luck!
Tyler thanks for the tool tip, but it is not accurate, on google we are 109, and god knows where we are on yahoo, out there in the boonies i suppose, but this tool and others I have used for some reason are not accurate... thank you just the same...
That's strange, it normally works, but when I ran it again, I got a totally different set of results. I guess the one good thing (which you probably already know) is that your blog is at #80. I really think that if you do some quality keyword op, along with trying to obtain a few high pr links from relevant sites, you will be able to move up. I know this doesn't answer your original question, but just thought I would give a few words of encouragement
Thanks to everyone for their ideas...I appreciate everyone taking the time to give their personal thoughts on our company site, thank you!!! Some of the things troubling me about the site lately (i would love your opinions; do we need a separate thread for site reviews?? ) Blog problems: --- We have blog that is using with permission an RSS feed from another site that we are friends with. They have been around for over 7 years and we are 2 years, so I think we may have triggered a duplicate content penalty?? --- The blog postings are of Las V e gaS Trip Reports thus posting in lots of words that may be triggering spam filters...i.e. gambling, casino, poker, texas hold-em etc --- many of the blog posts have a site signature at the bottom of the post. I think this may be triggering an onsite duplicate content filter. These bots see similar signatures on eacch post and site design etc, and determine the page is 60% duplicate content (the 40% being the blog posting) ? We are thinking of removing the blog (400 pages or so that MSN has spidered and loves... =( 3 days ago Yhoo removed 10,000 pages that we had indexed and only now have about 20 in there. Maybe someone said our blog was spam ?? Thoughts on removing the blog all together? We also have Show reviews being fed in from a partner site with adsense. Basically, we are so terrified of tripping any new filters, we are thinking of trimming our site down to 30 or so pages for the tours. Removing the blog, we feel we will be free of being considered gaming spam.., just basically going back to old school ways, making an honest website with simple content and no gimmicks or anything remotely looking like spam. We tested after June 8th removing all alt tags and H1 tags and jumped to #59 on G, when put back a month later we were back at 109. We are very interested in finding someone who can code our current template entirely in css. Goodbye tables and hello Divs. With content on top of course. DMOZ: we tried for 1.5 years and got nowhere with the corrupt editiors that worked the LV travel sections. Still not listed today. =( I'm afraid anything more specific I will have to IM privately, I'm sure you all understand. Aside from the basic SEo stuff, KW density, backlinks etc... any thoughts on our possible new direction... PS: what started this thread was the possibility of going to a new hosting company, new set of IP blocks etc, thanks for your help on that... and seriously many thanks for taking the time to help us here..this is by far the best WM board I have seen. --
Also note... since there are many servers at google, at different times and locations, you will get different results. Example: Person in LA, Cali AND Person in NY, NY At the same time perform the same search... will get different results. Bri... can you PM the url?
If you want to PM me the url of the site and a few terms you want to rank for I can produce a report on exactly how you should move forward and make best use of the content on your site. I will also look into the hosting issues. Patrick
Thank you patrick for the offer. I hate to waste anyone's time creating reports on our site, I personally have ran many SEO tools and noodled with webCeo etc etc... if you have any new insight that the software out there doesn't provide, I'd be most grateful in reading about that, but have been quite familiar with SEO software reports... thank you!! =)
Currently we are hosting with a company in Florida, do you think if we moved our hosting to Vegas that would help in the rankings (relevancy etc) ??
I don't believe you been on a server with porn will hurt you, unless they are involved in illegal activity like sending out spam which would get the IP blacklisted and effect your sending of email's.
SEO software is not worth the disk space its stored on. I would never use any SEO software. My offer was to personally review your site and make some recommendations based on my experience as a professional SEO consultant.