Hello, you all did a fairly extensive analysis on my site a couple weeks ago but I have some new information that I would like to have clarified. My site is finally showing up for most of the keywords I have targeted. It is top 10 in yahoo and MSN for "hip hop wav samples" and its in the first couple pages for "hip hop drum samples" and some other searches, BUT it is not showing up in the top 500 for any of those searches in google. You all thought I wasn't being penalized before, but this sure looks like it. There are three things I can think of that might be penalizing me. 1) Text is too keyword dense (I'm scared to change this because if it's not I could drop severely) 2) I have too many tables in my html code. 3) The text on the left and right sides of the page is black and the background is black (but the text is readable because it is over top of a picture). If anybody can think of anything else that could be stopping me from showing up in google let me know. Thanks
Hi rapdrums, If you have a url I can take a look at it for you. If this is a new site it may take google some time before you will see the hits. How old is your site?
http://www.rapdrums.com The site itself is about 3 years old but it was remodeled in the fall of 2005
I notice you are using a 302 #1 Server Response: http://www.rapdrums.com HTTP Status Code: HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 13:32:43 GMT Server: Apache Set-Cookie: UserTrack=216.154.235.143.1142775163703797; path=/ Status: 302 Location: catalog/ Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Redirect Target: catalog/ I would switch that to a 301 is you plan to continue with the redirect. Related reading http://www.seotoday.com/browse.php/category/articles/id/477/index.php http://www.google.com/search?q=302+...ient=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official I would also recommend getting more links from related genre's. You can start here http://www.web-directories.ws/General/Free/
In Firefox the layout is a bit messy for the left and right blocks. You're using tables very heavily. Instead, try using <div> rather than table all the time. A single table can be good for doing the initial layout and then use divs for the rest of the page's layout. A SE can't read graphics so a combination of graphics and text is a good idea when there's text content in your images. Use div to overlay text on graphics. Plenty of nice effects can be done on text when using CSS. For an idea of how your site looks to an SE, get the webdeveloper toolbar for firefox (I think it's also available for IE) and with it you can see your page with graphics and CSS disabled. Also, viewing the page in lynx is a good idea too. It's a text browser... if your site is readable and looks OK in there then you know an SE's bot is going to find all the information you want it to. Mod_rewrite can be used to make the urls more SE-friendly, e.g. rapdrums.com/Sound-Kits (note the - rather than a _, for an explanation of why google prefers - read Matt Cutt's blog). There's a good mod_rewrite faq on this forum (written by Nintendo).. Use the title attribute on links, and use the alt tag every time to describe an image. But be careful that you don't use too many words for alt/title or it mike look like keyword spam to googleboot. Good luck, mate.
I forgot to mention: google really doesn't like this. Check Matt Cutt's blog (he works for google) for more information. I don't know if Google'd algorithm checks for hidden text but as googlebot can't read images it would understand the HTML colouring as black background and text, therefore hidden text. I'd suggest using a div and setting its background to white (or whatever colour you prefer) and text colour to black. Just make sure the text can be clearly distinguished from the background colour and then there should be no problems if your site ever receives a "human review" from google. Good luck with your site, mate. The design is nice, now you just need to ensure that googlebot can collect as much information as possible about the content when crawling your site.
Thanks! Great advice so far. Does anybody see a problem with keyword density I used for the term "hip hop samples"?
You can use a keyword density checker such as this one: http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html It's a useful tool because the report is very customisable. Aim for about 3-7% density.