Google SERPS, does this make sense?

[bbott]

Please read this and tell me if it makes any sense to you...

My web site, http://www.ewebdevelopment.net, has 58 backlinks and ranks the following in each type of search:

new jersey web design RANK = Not Found
allintitle:new jersey web design RANK = 3rd
allintext:new jersey web design RANK = 3rd
allinanchor:new jersey web design RANK = 4th



Ok, now here is the info for my competitor www. e mountaindesign .com

Their site has 72 backlinks and ranks the following in each type of search:

New JErsey Web Design RANK = 1st
allintitle:new jersey web design RANK = Not Found
allintext:new jersey web design RANK = Not Found
allinanchor:new jersey web design RANK = 2nd


How come emountain is coming up number one for my keyword and I am nowhere to be found in the top 1000 sites????

FYI - my site is 4 months old.

[bbott]

Originally Posted by bbott

Please read this and tell me if it makes any sense to you...

My web site, http://www.ewebdevelopment.net, has 58 backlinks and ranks the following in each type of search:

new jersey web design RANK = Not Found
allintitle:new jersey web design RANK = 3rd
allintext:new jersey web design RANK = 3rd
allinanchor:new jersey web design RANK = 4th



Ok, now here is the info for my competitor www. e mountaindesign .com

Their site has 72 backlinks and ranks the following in each type of search:

New JErsey Web Design RANK = 1st
allintitle:new jersey web design RANK = Not Found
allintext:new jersey web design RANK = Not Found
allinanchor:new jersey web design RANK = 2nd


How come emountain is coming up number one for my keyword and I am nowhere to be found in the top 1000 sites????

FYI - my site is 4 months old.

anyone?

[jestep]

I would say that you just need to wait longer for your site to be ranked.

More importantly, you also have to have links with that phrase as the anchor text.

[happygolucky]

I assume that you do have the anchor text links because of your allinanchor link. However the rank really depends on when you got those anchor text links. If you got them 4 months ago then something is up at google but perhaps you got the links (or some of them) more recently than that.

For example I have a site that is in a similar position to yours. My search term is not very competitive and the site has been moving up the rankings but is still far apart from the allinanchor etc. As some of my links are more recent I assume that these are in the sandbox and when they get released (assuming 3 months after getting them) I will rank much better and nearer (if not at) my allinanchor place.

So patience and keep getting those anchor links.

[Ecotourdirectory]

Exact same thing is happening to me - http://www.ecotourdirectory.com :

- allintext:ecotour (3rd)
- allinanchor:ecotour (5th)
- allintitle:ecotour (3rd)

I think I show somewhere around 180th for 'ecotour'.

What am I doing wrong? This is driving me mad...

[Stoma]

These "no-serps" posts seem to be everywhere these days. How many of those with problems have been buying "site-wide" style links? I can see Ecotour has, with "ecotour directory" as the anchor.

Search for something in the body text:
guidelines for ecotravel: #1 & # 2

Add one of those site-wide anchors:
ecotour guidelines for ecotravel: #2 & #3

Bumped by a mediocre match with no strength for "ecotour". The site is being killed for those spammed anchors. It's a case of the Sandbox, which is a much more brutal syndrome than most people believe. Basically it seems to kill all your optimisation while not hurting your body-text matches at all.

I don't know how you get released from sandboxing, and I suspect just waiting won't work. Certainly you should get rid of the sleazy linking practices right away.

[Ecotourdirectory]

Hi Stoma,

I appriciate your comments but am confused at what you are saying.

The only links I have ever purchased are directory entires into bluefind and Go Guides. That is it. What do you mean by 'sleazy linking practices'? All the sites that link to me are ecotourism related or speciality travel related.

Also, the directory is called 'EcoTour Directory'. How is that keyword spamming? Also my site contains pages and pages of highly useful and relevant content to 'ecotours'.

How do you advise I get rid of the 'sleazy linking' practises? Is it simply a case of requesting that people link to me using alternate anchor text. I.E without the word 'ecotour' in it?

[happygolucky]

Originally Posted by Stoma

These "no-serps" posts seem to be everywhere these days. How many of those with problems have been buying "site-wide" style links? I can see Ecotour has, with "ecotour directory" as the anchor.

It's a case of the Sandbox, which is a much more brutal syndrome than most people believe. Basically it seems to kill all your optimisation while not hurting your body-text matches at all.

I don't know how you get released from sandboxing, and I suspect just waiting won't work. Certainly you should get rid of the sleazy linking practices right away.

No it is not link practises it is the sandbox. If the term is uncompetitive then the term may rank right away as soon as google picks up the anchor links. But if your optimised term contains just one word that is competitive eg website or directory then its the sandbox for you. The sandbox does appear to affect new sites more as well (ie less than 6 months old).

It used to be that the sandbox was 3 months. I still think that is about right.

In terms of ranking for ecotour - try some anchors with just "ecotour" and miss out "directory". Might be too late though as google may not release it from the sandbox.

[Ecotourdirectory]

Thanks for the advice.

Wish somebody could drag me out of this */?*ing sandbox!! I've had enough of playing now....

[Stoma]

Ecotour,

I know those links look fine to you, but Google really seems to be cracking down on site-wides now. They see them as a way of unfairly manipulating PR and serps (which they are!).

It's the sheer number of them that says Spam. Stick to one link per site, all with the same anchor is OK, vary it if you want.

It just doesn't matter how good your site is, mass linking is cracked down on automatically. I've had three of my quality sites sandboxed like this, but all my junk sites are unaffected!

[Stoma]

The links I was talking about by the way are on somuch.com . I see you in every category under 'newest travel links'. Single bought links are fine, on every page it's bad.

One trick worth trying: get a couple of decent links just with the anchor 'ecotours', the plural. (I'm assuming you don't have any of those already.) Don't use the plural in your page title. See if you can then rank top 50 at least for that term. I've seen evidence that this works.

[Ecotourdirectory]

Thanks Stoma, I appriciate your guidance here.
That somuch.com was a free submission I made when I first launched the site. I certainly did'nt expect them to put the site on every page! I'll remove that one immediately. Certainly proves that you have to be careful where you submit a site.

Thanks again.

[happygolucky]

Originally Posted by Stoma

It just doesn't matter how good your site is, mass linking is cracked down on automatically. I've had three of my quality sites sandboxed like this, but all my junk sites are unaffected!

If you get too many links then you may get the sandbox kicking in but you will be out eventually and all those site wide links should count towards your rank.

Links are in the sandbox not sites to the best of my knowledge. The worst that can happen is that the links won't get counted. But I don't see any evidence of this.

[happygolucky]

The somuch website aks you to buy a link. This may be a red flag to google. Any link will probably not count. If you are buying links you want to make sure that the site (or service) you get them from is not overtly selling the links on its own website.

[crashingflwrgrl]

If you do the "allinanchor:keyword" thing and your site comes up first what does that mean? (Me=Duh!)

[Curious George]

When I applied allintitle, allintext and allinanchor to 2 websites I optimized, they both came out well placed? As an aspiring SEO will it be ethical to showcase these result to potential clients as my SEO success. As we all know, no ordinary user searches Google with these prefixes (i.e allin....).

I am just curious and I appreciate any insight.

Curious George

[Stoma]

The allinanchor: search only searches for the words when they are in the anchor text of the links pointing to the page. Allintitle: just looks in the titles of the page, Allintext: the body text.

These are just diagnostic tools to point you to the areas you might need to optimise better and the results need to be interpreted with caution. They can tell you when you've got a 'sandbox' problem with your site, eg. do the allins: with 'Ecotour' and ecoutourdirecory.com always comes out well.

So you shouldn't showcase the results for these unless you're a snake-oil merchant. Just the regular searches matter to a client.

[crashingflwrgrl]

Okay. So I did all three for my main keyword and my site came up first place each time. Does this mean I'm in the sandbox? How can I be when my site is over 1 year old? Also when my site was first indexed I had NO backlinks yet. It wasn't until after I got in Google that I started to concentrate on getting links to my site. How could I still be in the sandbox?

[Stoma]

I'm assuming you mean the site coolights.com and your keyword is 'taillights'.

Try doing site:coolights.com

Nearly all the indexed pages don't have a cache. That's not normal, how long has it been like that? It looks like a ban rather than the sandbox.

[crashingflwrgrl]

Nearly all the indexed pages don't have a cache. That's not normal, how long has it been like that? It looks like a ban rather than the sandbox.

I agree....it's not normal, but it's not a ban because the pages are still there. If it was a ban they would be gone. It may be a penalty or something because it's been like that for some time (4 months or so).

Most of the pages are from my static cataloge coolights.com/browseproducts which is one of the features of my hosting company. They offer it as part of their SEO package and it is working well for many websites.

At any rate, I'm stumped and would appreciate some advice....(cbp? You out there?...lol)

[Stoma]

Still PR4, even in the directory, so no doesn't look like a ban.

Sometimes this problem is caused by duplicate content - having different domains pointing to the same site.

The only thing that looks wrong is all the links from monstermarketplace.com . They're not the sort normally associated with manipulating ranking and getting you a ban.

But you say it's working well for many websites? I checked one other domain on monstermarketplace:

site:popcornopolis.com - 262 pages, all wiped!

You really need to check through more of those sites and if they show problems take this up with your host as soon as possible.

[crashingflwrgrl]

The marketplace was set up for us merchants specifically for search engines. It was designed to get us good listings. In most cases my listing in the marketplace is higher up in the SERP's than my actual site.

Still PR4, even in the directory, so no doesn't look like a ban.

The weird thing is my PR jumped to a 5 recently and two hours later it was back to a 4. I figure with 160 backlinks and a link from DMOZ I should at least be a 5 right?

At any rate I have taken the matter up with monster (my host) and am awaiting a response.

I knew there was a reason I couldn't rank well!

Thanks for all your help Stoma.

[crashingflwrgrl]

Someone pointed out to me that some non-monster sites are having the same results such as: Site:Walmart.com and Site:Amazon.com. It is not nearly as bad as mine though. All the same, I'm disregarding the notion that it has anything to do with my host. I think it's the fact that we are dynamic (.asp) and G. doesn't like that.

Which totally sucks because now I'm going have to get to work on some custom .html pages for my main keywords. I'm told it will help significantly.

[Stoma]

It still looks suspicious to me. Often when a dynamic page appears de-cached it's because it's a rare URL and the spider files it, does not get around to reading and indexing it, and never encounters it again.

Yours are happening with fairly short URLs, many static pages, and with only perhaps 2,000 in total and a year online they really should have stuck in the index by now. And you've still got the mystery of why your Serps are so poor.

One thing I noticed - your static pages mostly have the extension .HTML - extensions are supposed to be lower case and while it's not necessarily a problem it's asking for trouble somewhere along the line.

I recommend gathering your evidence and starting a new thread about this one and getting several independent opinions about what's going wrong.

[crashingflwrgrl]

I recommend gathering your evidence and starting a new thread about this one and getting several independent opinions about what's going wrong.

Thanks Stoma. Will do.