Google Images and Site Disappearance

[surfing-mtber]

Can any one help?
Have recently published a holiday cottage website and initially (for the first two weeks) it ranked in the top 20 for at least 6 of our targeted search phrases. Then, it completely dissappeared for all but the most obscure terms! Why?

Secondly, absolutely no images from this site appear on Google Image Search. What is wrong here? All my other sites with the exception of one fine art site, enjoy a healthy number of hits from this source.
This site has been up and running for around 6 weeks.
Thanks.

[texxs]

what's the url?

[Webnauts]

If you are about the site in your profile:

1. Some guys here might say that having a clean and valid code is not necessary. Myself and Google, Yahoo and MSN do. You have 36 errors: http://validator.w3.org/check?verbos...ine-art.com%2F

2. Your description and keywords are not 100% relevant to the page content. Search Engines check Meta Tags to see if you are trying to spam them.

3. Some guys here might say that Text Content Ratio is not important, while Vanessa at Google said it is not important. Well I still insist it does. Google and all other search engines do not give any weight for code. They only pickup the text. And from your whole page weight, you text is only 20%. So I would say you need more text.

4. I do not know if you are using Google Sitemaps. If you do and you did not choose preferred domain http://antique-fine-art.com/ or http://www.antique-fine-art.com/ then you have a canonicalization problem.

5. Repetition of words can be considered spamming. You have repeated 1 word: map

6. Google will crawl pages with question marks in the URL, but will index dynamic content and will crawl pages with question marks or cgi references. While Google does crawl dynamic pages, they usually go only one level deep into a dynamic system. So be sure and include your dynamic pages URL on a site map, using text links to each of the dynamic URL's. Also, pages with question marks often find their way into the Supplemental Index and set up permanent residency. You may want to consider using mod_rewrite or other options of rewriting your URLs for Google.

7. Place where possible your JavaScript in a separate file to avoid ranking problems.

I hope all above helps.

Maybe others here can find some more issues I missed. :)

[surfing-mtber]

Originally Posted by texxs

what's the url?

The Url of this site http://www.holiday-cottages-south-devon.co.uk

[surfing-mtber]

No, sorry, http://www.holiday-cottages-south-devon.co.uk
Thankyou for your efforts, useful information for my own site anyway.
---------------------

Originally Posted by Webnauts

If you are about the site in your profile:

1. Some guys here might say that having a clean and valid code is not necessary. Myself and Google, Yahoo and MSN do. You have 36 errors: http://validator.w3.org/check?verbos...ine-art.com%2F

2. Your description and keywords are not 100% relevant to the page content. Search Engines check Meta Tags to see if you are trying to spam them.

3. Some guys here might say that Text Content Ratio is not important, while Vanessa at Google said it is not important. Well I still insist it does. Google and all other search engines do not give any weight for code. They only pickup the text. And from your whole page weight, you text is only 20%. So I would say you need more text.

4. I do not know if you are using Google Sitemaps. If you do and you did not choose preferred domain http://antique-fine-art.com/ or http://www.antique-fine-art.com/ then you have a canonicalization problem.

5. Repetition of words can be considered spamming. You have repeated 1 word: map

6. Google will crawl pages with question marks in the URL, but will index dynamic content and will crawl pages with question marks or cgi references. While Google does crawl dynamic pages, they usually go only one level deep into a dynamic system. So be sure and include your dynamic pages URL on a site map, using text links to each of the dynamic URL's. Also, pages with question marks often find their way into the Supplemental Index and set up permanent residency. You may want to consider using mod_rewrite or other options of rewriting your URLs for Google.

7. Place where possible your JavaScript in a separate file to avoid ranking problems.

I hope all above helps.

Maybe others here can find some more issues I missed. :)

[Webnauts]

Surfing-mtber, maybe those tips can help you with the site you posted too late too. :)

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by surfing-mtber

Can any one help?
Have recently published a holiday cottage website and initially (for the first two weeks) it ranked in the top 20 for at least 6 of our targeted search phrases. Then, it completely dissappeared for all but the most obscure terms! Why?

New pages (websites) commonly rank well in the first 2-3 weeks of their existence. It is Google idea of having fresh content appear in the SERPs as quick as possible. If they find the this new page is growing at a normal or above normal rate with IBL's you can sometimes expect this brand new page stabilize in the rankings with pages that have been ranking for some time. If this new page is not acquiring relevant in-bound links you can expect the page to fall far, far, far down into the SERPs until it acquires them.

[JohnX]

I picked up your keywords in the meta tag: "holiday cottage,south devon,cottages,self catering,dartington,totnes, holidays,country,thatched,vacation, ast minute,Christmas,Easter,spring, summer,autumn,winter,pretty"

I'm not sure how important keywords are anymore but it's my opinion that yours are too vague. You are kind of asking Google to bring back any pages relating to "easter" "spring" "summer" "christmas" etc. I would recommend "spring south Devon holiday" "christmas south devon holiday" "summer south devon vacation" etc.

Find a good keyword phrase generator find out what keywords your clients are using and insert them.

Just a thought : )

[JohnX]

Webnauts: do you know of a good tool to help me determine page weight?
Thanks :>)

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by JohnX

Webnauts: do you know of a good tool to help me determine page weight?
Thanks :>)

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

[swirt]

You need incoming links, and you need more text on the home page.

Also by having your "home" link point to a page other than your root index page, you are nearly creating a splash page only without the fluffy but useless animations. Ultimately your home page is taken out of the linking structure of the site therefore it gets no link-love from the internal pages. You seem to be going after keyword dense filenames which seems to be why you have orphaned the actual home page. Don't starve what should be the star player of your site.

[Mads Dam]

How has the traffic been so far..?

Links are important, but I think traffic plays an increasingly important part. The google toolbar is popular, and their cookies last for decades. So they certainly have an idea of where people go, and how long they stay.

Some months ago I noticed one of my subpages rank no 1 for the intended search-word. Then, some weeks later it suddenly dropped to the bottom. My best guess is that Google changed its mind after noticing that traffic didn't match the link; no real value if lots of visitors arrive at a site (or subpage) if they leave at once...

In this case, a new site may start highranking, based on link-analysis only. Then, after some weeks of actual traffic, it's position is modified by the visitors traffic-pattern...

PS: A related aspect is growth. If a site is too static, many may arrive but quickly dissappear again, if they repeatedly noticed no new content...

[texxs]

New pages (websites) commonly rank well in the first 2-3 weeks of their existence.

I gotta agree with that, some call it the google sandbox.

As far as optimizing for images.google.com if you have a google webasters account they have a way you can submit the images in a site to be labeled (ie; a photo of a bird might get bird, sparrow, flight, sky labels attached to it), in the webmaster tools section. It sounds promising.

[surfing-mtber]

Thanks to everyone who took the trouble to reply, all suggestions duly noted.

Do you have any idea why this site www.holiday-cottages-south-devon.co.uk

and one other site
www.fine-art-sales.co.uk
have no presence on Google Images?

Yet all my other sites (including www.antique-fine-art.com) have numerous images included and receive many visits from this source.

[texxs]

Optimizing images/ pages for images.google and other image search engines is mostkly a mystery to me. The only things i've found that helps are:

a descriptive text link from some pages with some decent page rank.

descriptive text in the file name of the image

If you find some more good advice drop me post it somehwere here at WPW and shoot me a PM will ya?

[swirt]

Likely too new. I don't think the images index is updated as often or as vigorously as the standard index.

[texxs]

I dunno about that, I was able to a get the infamous "newsworthy" britney upskirts from them, a day afyter i heard it on the news..It's research, I swear!

[Pascal77]

Originally Posted by texxs

Optimizing images/ pages for images.google and other image search engines is mostkly a mystery to me. The only things i've found that helps are:

a descriptive text link from some pages with some decent page rank.

descriptive text in the file name of the image

url of the page
title of the page
other sources linking to the photos
surrounding text
(just analysed some image pages which attracted visitors)

[texxs]

IT sounds obvious, but I have a long exsisting phot site that does those things, and I get very little traffic from images.google.com Of course they have like PR0 for most of the pages.
check out this album of bird photos for example.

Maybe all that's helping me get what little traffic it does get from images.google.com. You know google though, it's all about inbound links, I suspect it's pretty much the same with thier image SE.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by texxs

If you find some more good advice drop me post it somehwere here at WPW and shoot me a PM will ya?

Add the title attribute in your "img src" too.

[Papoloko]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Add the title attribute in your "img src" too.

Webnauts is right on, that's the alt tag, it's very important one, and a most, if you want to get a page W3C validated.

Here is my experience with image and Google searches.

I had a site that was getting great traffic with a bunch of keywords in the first and second SERP but almost no result from images. I didn’t work on the content for about 6 months, the traffic from SE, on my keywords, went down but, at the same time, it was getting an alarming, and increased, traffic from google for images on my site.

Overall, the site traffic went down about 50% from SE, mostly google. For a while, most visitor came only from images search results on google. It was hardly surviving and I had the feeling that google was just keeping my site alive and waiting until I came back to it!

I did some work on the content, mostly, moving around the same content almost every day. The SE traffic went up to normal again but without the increased images search results. What happened to the images search results from my site? I don’t knows, it’s still using the same images and content. One thing I know… I was a lot happier getting bigger traffic from keywords than a low one from images!

Lucky Papoloko