Google Issue? Any Advice?

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ejb2121

ejb2121

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Aug 12, 2007
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Boston, MA
I have site that is currently PR5 with about 9,000 indexed pages and around 2,500 backlinks. The site is over a year old and I hardly get any traffic from google (under 100 hits per day).

Does this sound normal? The site is a blog with all original unique content (not fake or automated).

Any advice?
 


The number of backlinks isn't always indicative of how authoritative Google considers your site.

Using an extreme example...

If your site is about dog training, 5 links with the anchor text "dog training" from CNN, wikipedia, BBC, dogproblems.com and uwsp.edu would probably count more than 1,000 links from unrelated sites with no authority.

I realize pagerank is an indication of authority, but it's not easy to determine whether the toolbar pagerank (of your site or those linking to you) is accurate.

I'm not an SEO guy, but I do read Planet Ocean religiously.
 
work out what keywords you want to rank for firstly.... do some estimates on available volume out there... work out where your site ranks in the index for those terms and optimise accordingly.

As others have said, 9000 pages themed around, 'buy x-small used poodle nappies' ain't going to get you much traffic as it's too niche. Alternatively 9000 pages targeting the keyword 'insurance' ain't going to get you very far either as it's too competitive.
 
Thanks for all the help so far, I appreciate all the feedback!

I think my problem might just be that there is too much competition. Although, I'm not necessarily targeting a set in stone set of keywords either...

For example say my site was a Sports Blog and every day I would write 5-10 articles pertaining to news and events that happened in the last 24 hours. One article might be about a rumor involving A-Rod and the Yankee while another might be about the Celtics winning the championship and why I thought the Lakers should have one game 6 of the finals.

In this example each blog entry has its own topic and keywords while all be geared towards sports. My blog is in the same exact boat here... the only thing I rank well and get traffic for in google is my sites name. Surprisingly though, Yahoo ranks me well for a lot of the stories/articles I write, and a lot of time I get listed higher than sites that have been around a lot longer.

In the beginning I was patient knowing my site was new. But now that I'm over a year old and consistently getting over 30k unique visitors per day... I'm starting to think the google traffic will never come if I don't make some changes.

Any suggestions?
 
BUMP - Is it possible that I have a google penalty of some sort? I mean all my pages seem to be indexed, but the only traffic I see from google comes from typing in my sites name.
 
Generally they strip PR from penalized sites. Not always though. Search for your article name. Once with quotes and once without. Where do you rank?
Try it with different lengths of titles. If one article you have ranks for it's 5 word title, find another that's 4 words and check that.
 
Thanks for the advice.

I searched for an exact article title (8 words) and without quotes was not on the first 5 pages (thats as far as I checked) and then with quotes I got: [SIZE=-1]Results 1 - 10 of about 21 with all 21 pages on my site! I did this with a shorter title (5 words) and got the same results.

Any ideas?
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Ok. Took a look, and it definitely looks like a penalty. Examining the backlinks briefly, they don't look as "editorial" as Google would like.
One question though. Did it EVER receive hits from Google? It seems low key enough to have stayed off the radar.
 
Thanks.

Not sure about the backlink issue... is that something I can control? I haven't bought text links or anything like that...

When the site first started in the first few months Google was sending traffic and it was rising nicely (over 1k per day at one point), then one day it just kind of stopped and since the only thing we've got traffic from was the sites name.

If it is a penalty, what can I do? And how could I have got this?
 
ejb2121 said:
Thanks.

Not sure about the backlink issue... is that something I can control? I haven't bought text links or anything like that...

When the site first started in the first few months Google was sending traffic and it was rising nicely (over 1k per day at one point), then one day it just kind of stopped and since the only thing we've got traffic from was the sites name.

If it is a penalty, what can I do? And how could I have got this?
Click to expand...
Did you do reciprocol links exchanges or anything like that? I noticed there seemed to be a fair number of links on "partner" and "links" pages.
 
Yeah I've done a bunch of link trades with other sites similar to mine... and also some sites in the same niche have linked to me without asking for a reciprocal.

I'm pretty baffled by this... is there a way to contact Google and find out for sure if I do in fact have a penalty? If I do have one is it possible to get it removed?

Again, I appreciate all the help thus far!
 
ejb2121 said:
Yeah I've done a bunch of link trades with other sites similar to mine... and also some sites in the same niche have linked to me without asking for a reciprocal.

I'm pretty baffled by this... is there a way to contact Google and find out for sure if I do in fact have a penalty? If I do have one is it possible to get it removed?

Again, I appreciate all the help thus far!
Click to expand...
They have a google group somewhere that can help. Make sure you're damn clean about this either way though.
Once you think you have the reason nailed down, reinclusion requests will become the bane of your existance. They do work, but whatever the issue is has to have been fixed. Really fixed.
Filing a reinclusion request has a bit more on it. I'm honestly not much for reinclusion requests simply because any site I have that gets penalized would probably be banned if they looked at it again, and I can't exactly plead ignorance on the rest(they're pretty explicit efforts)
 
Can I jump in with a newbie question? Would it help or hurt if he just changed the domain name? For example, if the site is currently dognappies.com then if he changed it to dognappy.com then wouldn't he escape the penalty. Or would the penalty be tacked on to the new domain name if he redirected the old domain name to the new?

The reason I ask this is because I built a number of sites using the .info extension which Google basically pukes on at present (new .info domains, not aged ones) so I am just thinking of changing them to .com or .net.
 
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