Ok, so, I'm pretty wary of putting this site up for review. Not that the site sucks, but I'm not exactly a professional PHP programmer. (I'd like to find one at some point and see what it would cost to rewrite this site so it's better, I mean... I see the flaws in my code and stuff, I just suck at OO, etc). Anyway, off on a tangent, but it relates because a lot of content is generated with php. Basically, do you guys see anything I could do to get up on google? I've made some changes recently that probably aren't reflected in my current google rank. The real problem, I think, is google never crawls me. Only about 5 pages a day. It got stuck on a phpbb sid... crawled that 6000 times, then it seems to have given up, or flagged me badly. I believe I have fixed that problem now though. Yahoo and MSN rank me pretty well for my target keywords, but google won't index over 150 pages and my rank is awful, so any tips would be great! http://www.nddb.net ALSO http://www.rateyourdoctor.net That's another question, I got this second domain because it has keywords in it, and it's easy to remember. But the search engines ignore it. I guess they know it's the same site? I wish they would list it however, I think it would help the rank perhaps? Thank you all very much for your time and help, you guys rock! ben
Yea, it's drupal, i like that template. Heh. I can add titles to links, which ones, if I may ask... I'm sorry. =) I should know, but I don't! =)
Site is ok. Avoid use of CSS tricks for hiding text for SEO. Be natural and use ethical ways .It will help really for the long term
Good intuitive navigation, I don't like the colors, but that's just me I didn't quite understand the rationale for these lines in the "find your doctor" page: This is a list of doctors to be indexed please disregard : (Long List of Doctors listed on www.nddb.net.) If we're supposed to disregard it, why display it? the links in the footer don't seem to do anything Lastly, it doesn't validate as xhtml: http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A//forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php%3Ft%3D14211
Yea, the I think I should change the colors. It's too bright I think. But, the list of links, is because google seems to love pages in the format of http://www.nddb.net/misc/name.php?id=xxxx, that is, the page without the template around it. However, there's also http://www.nddb.net/node/view/13&id=xxxx AND http://www.nddb.net/node/view/13/xxxx. So basically 3 formats of URLs to access each page. I wonder if I will be penalized for that? Anyway, google seems to like the plain pages, and not like the template around the content. ALSO, google seems to crawl in depths, so this way, 800 or so docs are linked directly from the first page. Google never seems to get to it via : main -> rate your doctor -> state -> town -> doctor So, I was hoping on it's next crawl it would go : main -> list of doctors -> doctor. It doesn't seem to do the depth, that is why I linked them off the front page. If you think it's pointless I'll remove them, and just keep the non-variable link (/node/view/13/xxxx) to everything. =) Thank you all for your input! EDIT : I'll work on the validation. =) Especially if it's important in rank. Also, the footer links all go to the same place. I was hoping to associate a broader range of keywords and phrases with the site. But if that is a waste effort, I can fix that too. =)
OK - I don't know anything about google ranking and penalizing (personally, I don't care, since my site is non-commercial, and since I quite dislike the hidden ideology behind google - http://www.dylanchords.com/blog/?p=4), but I understand the need to get a high ranking, sortof. BUT if it leads to including stuff that is confusing on the page, it might be bad for usability, and then I suppose page ranks will drop anyway.
So, I read the article on seochat about stealing your way to the top of google. I did some checking and "rate your doctor" is a horrible/keyword phrase, I think overture said 3/month. Anyway, so I'm thinking I should optimize for "find a doctor" as that gets something like 18k in overture searches. So, I've made a lot of changes last night, moving the navigation to the right, as the article suggested, using some header tags, improving keyword density above my competitors. I don't have a lot of backlinks though, and I also still need to add some titles to my links, but is there anything else I should be aware of? Just for reference : www . nddb . net is the site. Also, I've got another domain rateyourdoctor.net, but nddb.net got indexed first. So the SE's seem to ignore the former. Is there anything I can do about this? Having keywords in the URL seems like it would be an advantage... any hints or tips would be greatly appreciated! Thanks again, you guys are extremely helpful, there's an amazing wealth of knowledge here!
Alright, I have changed links, changed colors, got it to validate (for the vast majority of pages so far, still a few annoying ones left to do.) MSN shows with this query : link:nddb.net -site:nddb.net - 3135 backlinks (a bunch of directories, and a lot of co-op ad network stuff). Google has added about 100 pages to it's index, that's positive improvement. Yahoo got up to 1540, MSN is about 11k. Anyone else I can do to improve the rate at which google crawls? It went on a crawling spree (100 pages or so), and then quit again for 5 days. It loves links I put in my dp posts, it followed and indexed mysite-com/node/view/13/xxxx lol, and it rarely adds those pages, and that one doesn't even have any content, just says "Ummm... you need an ID". Any ideas would be great, if you guys have any more, I'm glad to take them. Thanks about the color, was impetus to change it, and I like it a lot better now. =) That orange was harsh!