I offer a week of Deluxe beach vacations for 2 in Costa Rica, and I only need some input or problem solving on a few pages of our big Costa Rica Portal in return. I posted the text below in the Google Section but did not get any responses so far, maybe it was too much to read, that's why I post it here again.
What’s wrong with Google, or is it me?
Several months ago I submitted a post called
“Winning the Search Engine War” . I received many useful suggestions at that time, to some people I even sent some money . For new readers a short recap: in August last year an Ex-Webmaster stole our complete 5500 page Costa Rica Country Portal that took me 3 years to build. If you want to read about it go to our
January 2004 Newsletter.
In the meantime we rebuilt our site again (we could not just use a copy of the old one of course) with the original domain name:
www.1-costaricalink.com. The webmaster that still uses our stolen site had recommended to take the “-“ off after the “1” and registered it in his name.
Our new site now has over 18,000 pages and produces twice as much traffic as the original one. One can do just about any hotel search in Costa like “hotel-name+Costa Rica” and we are in first spots. But are getting our traffic from completely other search results as we used to get them with the old page. I don’t want to go into more detail about this, because competitors may read this post too.
Here are the facts: We have several thousand pages with hotels with thousands of pictures and ten different ways to
find a hotel on ten different pages. But if you search for “Costa Hotels we are nowhere. Using an optimization analyzer, the only mayor correction suggested is, that I have too may same site URLs with “costa_rica” and “hotel” on the file name.
But the same seems to apply to other main searches: For Instance being the biggest site with the most information on Costa Rica we should at least appear if you search for “Costa Rica” or at least be on the first page with “Costa Rica Information” and not on the second one. I seem to have a similar problem with “Costa Rica Tours” and “Costa Rica rent a Car” (with “Rent a Cars” we show up in fifth position. What are we doing wrong with these few pages and why do so many of our other pages work so perfectly well.
If you go and look at some of the web sites that produce the first results (except the stolen one which is
www.1costaricalink.com) you start to wonder even more. Among the first search results for “Costa Rica Hotels” is: 1.) a page with a list of hotels and links to about 50 hotel web-sites. 2.) our old stolen site and for instance in 4.) a small 2-star hotel on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica.
We list over 600 hotels on our portal. Only in the province of Puntarenas (one of seven provinces) we have over 3,000 hotel pages in three languages on our site. We have tons of links pointing to our site and on all these pages we carry AdWords. We really don’t know where the problem is. Google indexes us about twice a week, so any change can be seen pretty fast.
To get somebody interested in this we would like to make the following offer if this is permitted here:
We pay for accommodation and breakfast for a one week beach-front vacation for two people at the famous
Flamingo Beach Resort on the Gold coast of Guanacaste if somebody can help us to regain this four positions on the first page of Google.com: “Costa Rica Information”, “Costa Rica Hotels”, Costa Rica Rent a Car and Costa Rica Tours. The results have to show without Google-Cookies on the computer.
Maybe it is possible to feature our site as the website of the month to get more serious attention. I am sure, that I am not the only webmaster our there struggling to survive all the changes of the ongoing search-engine war. We all would like to spend more time to help our customers instead of analyzing, why a certain page is not recognized by spiders.
Have a happy day
And thanks for your time reading all this.
Jörn Malek
FlamingoLink, S.A
Costa Rica