I am ranked very well on yahoo, and I regularly see the google crawler on my forums, yet my ranking with google is wretched. I have no sitemap, and have been altering the pages in the front end of my site over the last few months... I downloaded a program to make a sitemap, but it crawled thousands of pages on my forums and i was hesitant of adding the sitemap it generated to my website directory due to the huge amount of pages it crawled...should I just chuck in what it has done*** also, is there a sitemap creation program which avoids unwanted pages to crawl like the posting page of a forum or the image folders of my website directory, for example... I just checked backlinks...yahoo has 212, altavista has 129 and google has only 4...why is there such difference** google hates my site! i need to find out why.
You would get indexed and ranked even w/o H1 tags. They are, however, a good idea. Google is more strict on acknowledging backlinks to you your site. They tend to take a while to show up, and of course they can be blocked via nofollows in the anchor tag. You should get your sitemap up. It's not hard. Use the sitemap generator then tweak it by hand in a text editor. Good luck!
And you know that your signature link is broken, right? Did you mead /forum/index.php rather than /forum.index.php... Hmm.
There a lot of sites that help u build an effecient sitemap and thn u can submit using webmaster tool
Cheers, Bweller...for pointing out my rancidly composed signature...and also for the advice...i will try a different generator...And then, once produced, I install the sitemap into my public html directory****
if its been a few months then something is definitely wrong. the best way to analyze is to hire a seo expert to look at your site.
a sitemap is not really needed for most.if your site is interlinked good like a fourm,google will find the pages. xml-sitemaps.com is good program for sitemaps. there could be a few problems. first of all,it is illegal in most areas. the site is fast,but going to the forum is slow. google can't index if it is blocked by a login.you need to let google bot in.