Not penalized?... i don't believe it

[thereuare]

My site has been up for a year, has no spam that i know of, is crawled by Google, yet it doesn't show in the SERPs unless searching for my URL. In an email exchange with Google i was told my site doesn't have a penalty and i should 'get more backlinks,' but:

-my site shows NO backlinks when searching link:www.mysite.com (a search without the 'link' reveals i do indeed have backlinks). Difficult to work hard at this when all ones obtained already don't show! Some are very high ranking, and i'm in DMOZ.
-although my site is in the Google directory, searching for it in the directory (via the URL) doesn't show it exists
-i have been at PR0 since September
-200+ of my 3000 pages are indexed (this only after re-submitting my site map)

I am starting to see more hits from refering URLs in the form of:
http://www.theirsite.com/something.c...www.mysite.com
but i've heard elsewhere i couldn't be penalized for this since it's something i have no cotrol over (we don't link to these sites, nor participate in any link exchange or link farm programs)

If anyone could offer advice/suggestions/explanations it would be appreciated. Do i appear penalized; is there any way to tell for certain?

MY SITE

Thank you.

[cbp]

1. You are not penalized (you are in the index)

2. The backlink function on Google only ever shows a sample of backlinks and never all of them - usually only a sample of those over a PR threshold - so do not worry if they are not shown. If Google can crawl the links, then they are taken into account.

3. I can find about 20 links to your site - almost all are very low PR and are not relevant to your site --> poor ranking. (several of the links I foundwas from another forum, but the page does not exist anymore).

4. You will never be penalized because of who links to you (linking back to a FFA link page or links farm MAY get you penalised)

Solution is simple:
You need to get more important and relevant links

CBP

[Mel]

Hi I note that the only page of your site which is indexed by Google is the home page.

Based on this it would appear that you many have a problem with googlebot crawling your pages. This is a common problem with many forum software packages and there are several solutions.

Alltheweb reports that you have 3595 external pages linking to your site, so Google should certainly be finding some of those, and I did find some links from PR5 pages so you should be seeing links when you use the google link: search but I see none using both www.betterbidding.com and betterbidding.com.

Still if Google says you have no penalty that is usually good information. You might try that email again and ask them why with 3500 links and no penalty google is reporting no links.

[cbp]

Alltheweb reports that you have 3595 external pages linking to your site

Did you check to see where most of those are from? - one blog and internal links. Google will count the 100's from the one blog, as one link.

ALtavista is showing 100 links; Inktomi are showing only 30 (a lot of those are internal).

CBP

[thereuare]

Thanks to both of you for looking.

I will concentrate on more links, but i have to agree with Mel... with at least a few sites at PR5+, plus DMOZ, and the Google Directory itself, why nothing showing for backlinks in google? (our site has also been mentioned in a few national newspapers, including the online editions... still nothin')

Any explanation for the site not coming up when searching for the URL in the Google directory? Comes up fine when searched at DMOZ.

Also, how do you search inktomi? I don't see a SE on their homepage, and i know Yahoo is still using Google as a base.

Thanks again.

[cbp]

The DMOZ and Google Directory backlinks are not showing in Inktomi either.

HotBot and MSN use Inktomi

CBP

[Mel]

Originally Posted by cbp

Did you check to see where most of those are from? - one blog and internal links. Google will count the 100's from the one blog, as one link.

ALtavista is showing 100 links; Inktomi are showing only 30 (a lot of those are internal).

CBP

Of course I checked where the links were from and the PR of the site, but I am getting totally different results than you appear to be. I would suggest that you redo your search using the correct syntax (link.all:betterbidding.com -site:betterbidding.com).

Since I used the external links search in ATW at none of the links repported were internal links. Here are the first ten results at ATW:

WebFlyer :: View From the Wing
Description: The leading source on the web for travelers interested in learning about the best travel deals on the web and managing reward miles. WebFlyer.com has consistently been named a Top 100 website by PC Magazine.
more hits from: http://www.webflyer.com/blog - 41 KB Pr=6


Newsletters
Description: Published by e-mail once a month and posted here. I try to keep it to two pages. I've removed content from the archives that is no longer relevant or valid. I welcome questions (they often become part of my newsletter
http://home.netcom.com/~rcowen/newsletters.htm - 331 KB Pr=5

Welcome to Avalon Park Travel!
Description: Orbitz - Expedia - Travelocity - SideStep - Cheap Seats - Cheap Tickets
http://www.avalonparktravel.com/ - 193 KB PR0

Ken Liffiton: links
Description: I use this collection of links as my home page... perhaps you'll find them interesting as well
http://www.liffiton.com/links.php - 7 KB Pr=4


Favorite Links Page
Description: I have no affiliation with any of the folks whose links appear below - they're simply a few of the places
http://espressotravelguide.com/favorite_links.html - 8 KB Pr=4


Attorney Collier H. Swecker Auburn, Alabama AL Lawyer
Description: Law Office of Collier H. Swecker, Auburn, Alabama - Federal Taxation, State Taxation, Tax Audits, Estate Planning, Business Planning, Limited Partnerships, Real Estate, Civil Litigation, DUI, Real Estate Law, Corporate Law
http://www.auburndui.com/CustomPage.shtml - 10 KB Pr=3


Travel Tips Cheap Family Fun
Description: Fun filled getaways for families on a budget.
http://www.cheapfamilyfun.com/TravelTips.html - 34 KB Pr=4


www.oratory.com portal/travplan
Description: Travel (planning/booking) from “One Bag” Resources | TraveLinks | Industry agencies (general) Air Outlet Center Air-Supply Travel bargainholidays.com [UK] Council Travel (students) ebookers [EU] Europebyair.com [EU] Excite Travel Expedia Flynow [EU...
http://www.oratory.com/portal/travplan.html - 17 KB Pr=2


KTNV - Action News
Description: For coupon discount codes click one of the following: shoppersresource.com, findsavings.com, jumpondeals.com
http://www.13insidelasvegas.com/news/missednumbers.asp - 39 KB site no longer listed


Michael's Various Links
Description: Work Stuff: PayCycle School Stuff: The Anderson School at UCLA The Anderson School at UCLA - Alumni University of California at Berkeley The Daily Cal Monta Vista High School USNews MBA Stuff Shopping: mySimon Find It Now...
http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~mikl/links.html - 8 KB Pr=2


Now while I do agree that there are lots of blog links (listed on later pages)there are no internal links since if you search correctly you get only external links. So here we clearly have six links that Google should be reporting (yes I have checked to see that these sites are listed in Google but any page that shows PR in the toolbar has to be listed) but are not. This could be due to a penalty (but google says not) or it could be that the Google links database is not quite up to snuff yet. I would suggest that theruare wait a few days and if things do not get better report the discrepancies to google via the search suggestion form at the bottom of the page after you do a link:www.betterbidding.com search

Regarding your idea that Google is now lumping multiple blog links from one site as only one link I would be very interested in anything you have to substantiate such an amazing claim.

[Mel]

Originally Posted by thereuare

Thanks to both of you for looking.

I will concentrate on more links, but i have to agree with Mel... with at least a few sites at PR5+, plus DMOZ, and the Google Directory itself, why nothing showing for backlinks in google? (our site has also been mentioned in a few national newspapers, including the online editions... still nothin')

Any explanation for the site not coming up when searching for the URL in the Google directory? Comes up fine when searched at DMOZ.

Also, how do you search inktomi? I don't see a SE on their homepage, and i know Yahoo is still using Google as a base.

Thanks again.

As CBP mentioned you can get results from Inktomi database from either Hotbot or MSN but the database is just that and both these sites have the ability to modify the search rankings to suit thier own algorithms.

For an example search each of the above for the term

priceline winning bids

and you will see that all three return different results from the same database.

I prefer to search the inktomi database directly at http://search.positiontech.com.

[cbp]

I think we must be looking at something different.

Here what I get at alltheweb:
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cs=u...&avkw=fogg&o=0

If you scroll through the pages - 1000's of the backlinks are from the one blog --> that is going close to being spam. A large number of the links on the first page (could not be bother counting them) are intrnal links, so there are not 3000 links.

CBP

[Mel]

Hi CBP

It appears you are searching by just putting the url in the ATW searchbar which will return any page that has that text on it or in the url.

Try searching this way,input www.betterbidding.com into the ATW search bar which will return the home page of betterbidding.com and underneath will offer you the option to provide a list of external pages that link to betterbidding.com click that link,
and at the top of the page ATW will tell you this:
1 - 10 of 3,595 Results for link.all:betterbidding.com -site:betterbidding.com


Or you can do the same thing by searching link.all:betterbidding.com -site:betterbidding.com which returns the same results.

This exact searching combined with a large index is one of the reasons I like to do link research at ATW.

[thereuare]

I would suggest that theruare wait a few days and if things do not get better report the discrepancies to google via the search suggestion form at the bottom of the page

Can you explain further where this "search suggestion form is"? I don't see any such link at the bottom of the page after doing a search. I'm going to do this now since my problem has existed for nearly 6 months, it's not like something has changed recently and will likely reverse itself if i wait a few days.

FYI, the reason why there are so many blog links is because the blog's page layout is daily text in the middle of the page, and useful links in a column on the righthand side of the page. Therefore, each time the blog starts a new page all the links in the right column get recorded as a link on a new page. I don't know that much, but i don't think this is considered spam.

Also, if you look at this search:
http://www.google.com/search?num=30&...e+bidding+help
the top position is held by a site that only has about 10 pages of content and is about as old as mine. The owner has another, similar site, top listed here:
http://www.google.com/search?num=30&...ne+bidding+fun
(i'm not posting links directly as i'd prefer they not see this discussion, maybe we can refer to them as BH and BF?)

I don't believe they have any non-affiliated backlinks shown for either site, they're not in any directories, nor or they as extensive of a site as mine (or the other top player in our field)... yet the owner is doing very well for a variety of search terms on all the search engines.

Here is info from the last time i wrote Google concerning the external link problem (pretty canned):

We also understand your concern about the Google link search results
for your site. Our link search does not currently return a comprehensive
set of results. The results show a sample of the links that point to your
page, but this list is in no way indicative of the link structure
utilized by Google to formulate a page's PageRank.

I have no problem writing them again though :)

Thanks for the insightful discussion so far.

[minstrel]

Maybe I'm missing something with AllTheWeb - if I do a search for backlinks for my site - www.psychlinks.ca - using AllTheWeb and Google, I get MORE from Google than I do from AllTheWeb, using various syntax forms...

Why would that be?

[Mel]

That is very unusual Minstrel, but a part of that is that the external links search on ATW excludes all internal links while the link search on google includes them,

If I search ATW for all the links to your site (Internal and External)
with link.all:psychlinks.ca I get 202 results from ATW and with the links search on google returning 138.

If we search only for external links on ATW I get 101 but I can't seem to find a way on Google to get only the External links except by eliminating manually the 120 internal links to your site, after which google shows only 18 external links to your site.

[Mel]

After you do a normal search on Google at the bottom of the page you will see this line:

Dissatisfied with your search results? Help us improve.

click on the link and fill out the form, BUT when you search for links to your site and get no results this line does not appear, but you can still fill out the data from another search page I guess.

[thereuare]

I have been giving this a lot of thought (for a few months now, but more-so today). I read the whole Hilltop article and have a possible explanation:

My host has domain preview turned off (so i can't view my site by using http://xx.xxx.xxx.xx)

According to the Hilltop article, host address is a factor in determining if two sites are 'affiliated'. So, if domain preview is disabled, can Google and other search engines still see this number?

If not, they therefore can't check if my backlink is affiliated with me or not, and may not count it.

Perhaps this would explain why my site shows no backlinks?

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Mel

If I search ATW for all the links to your site (Internal and External)
with link.all:psychlinks.ca I get 202 results from ATW and with the links search on google returning 138.

The reason is not because they are internal links, it is because they are also reporting the domain without the 'www' prefix. I get 202 for links without the prefix (just like he is using in his signature above). Google is reporting 138 for both versions (on my end anyway) and appears to have resolved them....while ATW has not yet.

[Mel]

I really don't think this is possible thereuare since browsers can find your site and the search engines are spidering your site.

But since you appear to be hosted on a shared IP address (216.127.92.42) a possibility might be that another site that shares that address has run afoul of Google and that IP is blacklisted.

I always advise my clients to host on a dedicated IP address to avoid any such complications.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by Mel

Or you can do the same thing by searching link.all:betterbidding.com -site:betterbidding.com which returns the same results.

...and try this search at ATW that knocks out one more site:

link.all:betterbidding.com -site:betterbidding.com -site:www.webflyer.com

This returns only 161 links, which means 3,434 came from Web Flyer.

One thing I noticed about some of the pages that are indexed at Google for his site, a lot of them had this www.betterbidding.com/show.php/act/Track/f/174/t/1696+allinurl:www.betterbidding.com&hl=en&ie=UTF-8]cached version[/url] for them. I don't think Google is coming up with too much content to spider on this site. It is an Invision Bulletin Board, btw....and that may be hanging it up. Even the Site Map has links that are not in the cache or are too complex to follow.

Also, if you look at the Google Ads on the site....my goodness, the ads are not relative to Travel at all. I looked at ads for record players (they still sell those?) and needles, cartridges, turntable accessories. So that is a sign right there that Google cannot read the content too well.

Also...this site is on a cheap host with 230+ other sites on the same IP address. This may explain some of the bad "cached" pages...possibly googlebot coming in while a couple of these other sites loading the server down. Or possibly one of the sites on this IP address has a bad reputation, and you are getting dinged for being in the same neighborhood.

But I think it may be a server issue and the bulletin board software in combination that is the problem here, just by what I am seeing with the Ads from Google on the pages.

[thereuare]

Thanks for the thoughts thus far.

I believe that the majority of the ads are indeed travel related, but granted i don't know what is considered an acceptable amount of 'off-topic' ads. I had assumed that i'm getting record player ads because there is an error page in InvisionBoard that states, "Sorry, the record you were looking for can't be found". I have recently changes my .htaccess page to send errors back to my homepage, so perhaps that will help in this regard.

The cached page that you refer to insn't really a mistake, it comes from the fact that google bots search the page as a 'guest', and guests don't have posting priveleges. Therefore every time it hits a link "Reply" or "New Topic" it creates the page you posted as a cached example. Although less than ideal to have these pages indexed, is it a problem?

An InvisionBoard hack was performed in order to make the URLs search friendly. If you place your mouse over forums, threads, or topics you'll see that the URL is in the form of www.domain.com/S/394/T/932 which should be easily searchable by google (click on the link and in the address bar you'll see the actual URL before hack). This hack is NOT applied to the "last post" in each forum so you can also use that as example of the pre-hack URL. Anyway, my point is that i don't think the software not being searchable is the problem since this hack corrects it, and if you notice the pages that are indexed they are in the 'hacked' format. But i also don't know as much as the rest of you, so please feel free to disagree (as it's the only way i'll learn).

I have 2 other hosts that i have space and bandwidth available on (both shared hosts as well). Moving the database is a major pain, but perhaps it'll be worth the effort to do so, at least for a few months to see if we suddenly reappear and get higher rankings. If i did so, i assume any IP related penalty would disappear once we move?

For whatever reason, i'm beginning to think that this may indeed be a server related issue. If i write google and tell them that i'm on a shared server and not happy with the SERPs for my domain, would they tell me if i'm in a 'bad neighborhood' and if switching servers would help?

Any additional thoughts?

Thank you.

[Mel]

Its not likely that writing to Google will elicit much more than a formmail response.

Why not shift your site to a dedicated IP address?
This is not expensive (I have customers on dedicted IPs with solid hosting and full featured plans for $14 per month) and gives you control over problems or potential problems of someone else getting in googles bad graces and you getting caught also for being on the same IP.