Hi, I'm the aforementioned husband.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FSHD$$$
I fear that my site is not set up properly. I can not get anywhere near the first pages of Google searches for my main keywords. ... The bottom line is that my sites are not indexed well for my main keywords so something is not right.
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Some background: The site is basically in two sections, the forum and the homepage area. (I call the "homepage area" the actual homepage, all of the country subsections, plus all the sub-pages.) The forum is a Vbulletin.
I think there are two key points here.
First, the homepage structure changed radically about two months ago. Google is still busy playing catch-up and they haven't indexed the new pages. (Actually a few pages have shown up in the sandbox just in the last few days.)
Second, the forum is really not doing too bad, a few months ago it got about 1500 unique visitors daily, now it's getting over 2000 a day. I don't know how good that is for this niche, but it doesn't seem too bad.
A few months ago we were getting about 1,000 unique visitors/daily to the blog-homepage. Then we gutted the homepage area and replaced it with HTML. Immediately the homepage area dropped down to 100/daily. So now our traffic is coming in through the forum almost exclusively. This was to be expected.
Now, two months after the big homepage area redesign, Google still hasn't indexed the new work. I think a few of our pages have recently shown up in the sandbox but for the most part Google is taking their sweet time. My rule of thumb is to wait 3-6 months, and it hasn't even been three months yet, so I'm not worried at all. I think the HTML is excellent SEO, no fluff and lots of indexable content, it's just that we haven't waited long enough to reap the rewards. My wife however is frantic thinking that something must be terribly wrong otherwise Google should have already fallen in love with our new pages. My opinion is that the best thing to do right now is chill. Just wait a few more months and see how Google indexes the new pages. She agrees, but only for a while. How can I put this gently, "waiting is not her forte."
About link trades:
I never said link trades are "stupid", I just think that they can only help a tiny little bit at best, and in the worst case could hurt severely (950 penalty eeek!).
This site in question actually has an assload of incoming links, maybe 30-40 of them are due to link trades, and the other 2000 are organic. So all the hours spent on link trading here have added about an extra 2 or 3% to our link juice. So yeah, in our case I consider it a waste of time. For somebody with a complete zero of a site I suppose it could help get them on the map, but once your website has grown even a little bit, it's just a lot of work for very little potential benefit.
The good news is that we don't need to worry about laundering our link trades, due to all of the organic links anything we accumulate is pretty much pre-laundered, if you see what I mean.