Site disapeared, low pr, help please

[mmltonge]

About two days ago now my site completely dissapeared off of google bar 2 or 3 search terms which are quite specific and even thent he ratings dropped to 60's from 7 and 8. The day before it disapeared i had updated my keywords as i had not been recieving very good search results anyway. I was hoping you could check the site and tell me if the keywords i have in meta tags are ok or i have done them incorrectly? am i supposed to use search terms or WORD,WORD,WORD,WORD etc. Also, is there any fast way to get back onto google.

When google was visiting me (the date next to my site in search engine updated almost daily) it was refusing to visit more than just my main page, it was not crawling any further into my site? is there something i can do about this, i heard to put in a robot.txt file but where do i put that and what does it contain?

2 more things (sorry but im a bit of a novice at search engines) how can i see who is back linking me? and why is my sites PR so low despite having some links to me and being very relevant to the topic.
The site is
http://www.reading-festival.org.uk

Thanks alot for any help
Mark Tonge

[mmltonge]

Hi again, i know you guys answer the same questions all the time probably, but please help me with this as im not sure what to do, especially about the keywords and reason for my low PR as i checked through all other PR topics and followed all advice given but no luck.

[minstrel]

For Google, keywords have minimal impact (or perhaps no impact depending on who you talk to). In terms of optimizing them, get rid of most of the generic single words like "2003", "2004", "weekend", "news", etc., because they aren't going to help you - if someone types in "news" and gets you instead of the BBC they aren't going to hang around anyway - and use relevant and specific search phrases instead.

There are several ways to determine backlinks in Google:
link:www.reading-festival.org.uk
allinurl:www.reading-festival.org.uk
@:www.reading-festival.org.uk
+"www.reading-festival.org.uk"

but no matter which one you use you will probably not get a complete list of links in Google. Nonetheless, the lack of links is a problem for you and the reason your site has a PageRank of 0 (or more accurately less than 1). I find only about 13 links listed by Google from 9 sources: the Jayde directory, several forums, and your own site.

You need to work on submitting to more directories and trying to arrange links with other similar or related site.

[mtbot]

Yes, you need to focus on getting more links to your site. You should try to have the text in each link (anchor text) contain your keywords.

There are a good number of Internet directories just for UK sites. You can find them by searching Google, of course.

Sites listing directories:

http://www.search-marketing.info/dir...irectories.htm
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...showtopic=2295
http://www.spheri.ca/directories.html
http://www.searchguild.com/directory/31.html
http://directory-pages.com/tier3.htm

[mmltonge]

The thing is though ive emailed loads of similar sites. with only a few response as so many are actually inactive but still in google (they are say a year out of date) -- i am linked on readingfestivalonline.co.uk which comes up #1 in all searches, reddersville,reading2k.co.uk,leedsfesty.com but im not confident they are all showing up. i subitted for hundreds of search engines and all said i was accepted. What is the robots.txt file thing that i should consider?

THanks
Mark
*i will also erase any of the keywords suggested are incorrect*

[minstrel]

Originally Posted by Mark

The thing is though ive emailed loads of similar sites. with only a few response as so many are actually inactive but still in google (they are say a year out of date)

The links posted above are to directories rather than search engines - submit to them as suggested - you don't need to convince them to link back to you and you don't have to link to them either - they exist to list other sites and the link helps increase your PageRank.

Originally Posted by Mark

What is the robots.txt file thing that i should consider?

The robots.txt file simply provides instructions to spiders as to any directories or files on your website that you don't want to have indexed.

Yours is fine:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This says "disallow nothing", or in other words "index everything".

[mmltonge]

i submitted to a few, red did my keywords and other meta tags and also restructured some of the site so that i had more .htm pages as some of the .asp werent necessary (i heard google doesnt like dynamic pages and wont index them sometimes)

My major concern is that although 2or3 search terms still list me (reading festival 2004 rumours - 49th place i think now) others such as "reading festival 2004" can not be found, does this mean i simply wont be listed anymore for that term or is it google playing games with me? i read on another forum that google has been fluctuating lately? does this mean i should be patient and wait and see. I hope to expand to selling cd's for unsigned bands soon, and obviously with only 100 unique visitors a day im not going to get much business while so low in google

Thanks for your help mtbot and minstrel it is hugely appreciated

[minstrel]

Originally Posted by mmltonge

My major concern is that although 2or3 search terms still list me (reading festival 2004 rumours - 49th place i think now) others such as "reading festival 2004" can not be found, does this mean i simply wont be listed anymore for that term or is it google playing games with me?

Neither. You are going to need to get more links to increase your ranking in Google and you also have to look at the competition for some of your search terms. For example, when I enter "reading festival 2004" (without the quotation marks) into Google.com, Google tells me there are about 941,000 entries for those words - that is going to be pretty hard to break into. The #1 listing for that term has a PageRank=5 and about 225 backlinks from established directories and other websites - that's what you need to do if you are going to compete with that #1 site.

Also be aware that changes you make today won't filter there way into the search engine indices for a while, especially in the case of a low PageRank site.

i read on another forum that google has been fluctuating lately? does this mean i should be patient and wait and see. I hope to expand to selling cd's for unsigned bands soon, and obviously with only 100 unique visitors a day im not going to get much business while so low in google

But if you market for those bands and those CDs instead of just concentrating on the "reading festival 2004" search term, you may find that you'll do much better in the search results... emphasize your strengths and if you don't have much luck competing in one area promote your competitiveness in an area that is better for your website.

[jackson992]

Minstrel:

Do a search for Online Shopping At Discount Prices on Google and you see me at #6 out of close to 6 million sites. Yet my PR is only 4 so that leads me to believe links do not realy affect ranking only PR. Thou I would love to be convinced otherwise::)

On a side note, if I can rank so high for this hugely competitive term why aren't I listed for much lower terms?

[mmltonge]

I submitted to a load of search engines via a company who submits to a top 20 list for free as i cannot afford to pay to be listed in 100,000's of search engines. I also am listed in the Skaffe directory with a rating of 3 ticks (top one) now... the the Skaffe directory any good?

[minstrel]

Originally Posted by jackson992

Do a search for Online Shopping At Discount Prices on Google and you see me at #6 out of close to 6 million sites. Yet my PR is only 4 so that leads me to believe links do not realy affect ranking only PR. Thou I would love to be convinced otherwise::)

On a side note, if I can rank so high for this hugely competitive term why aren't I listed for much lower terms?

That exact phrase is the title of your home page, which is often described as "prime real estate" for SEO - you SHOULD be ranking well for your URL and your title.

As for other search phrases, I don't know which ones you're using but how well you rank depends on a number of things, including how often that phrase is in your page content, the number and types of links pointing to your page, etc. You're correct - PageRank as a reflection of the number of backlinks is only one of the determinants but it is one of them.

[mmltonge]

Hey, just thought id express some happyness, ive been added to the google directory and PR gone from 0-1 but only 12 backlinks being picked up still. My link in the dmoz and the one in skaffe.com arent being picked up at all which is a bit frustrating as those two are quite important i would have thought.

[mmltonge]

hello everyone, thought id give an update
Since i last posted ive updated the site slightly, we've got banners up on 3 other music sites thanks to 1 being paid for and 2 exchanges. We're now linked from a 4th music site and 3 extra reading sites. We're listed in more directories... yet still google does not add us again, and still it does not update its backlinks with our address in them

Mark

[cbp]

still it does not update its backlinks with our address in them

Google will never show them all. Google only ever show a sample of backlinks, usually those with a higher PR (but not always).

If the site that the link is from is in the Google index (check the cache) and the link is crawlable (eg no javascript), you can probably assume that Google is counting the link, its just not publically displaying it as a backlink in the sample.

CBP

[mmltonge]

well im startin to give up with google as it still hasnt put us back into our original search positions approximately 2 weeks on now :(

[mmltonge]

Haha, i just found out why using human edited directories is unfair.

The site which ranks top in google is run by the same guy who runs 3 other reading festival website, all containing identicle news, rumours line up etc. but also, this guy happens to edit the catagory in the DMOZ... so he ranks all his sites the highest. which is completely unfair as other sites (not just my own) will never get the attention they deserve in the DMOZ because of people 'cheating' the system like that, you are not supposed to allow sites with identicle content but his have the same just in different layouts.

Out of interest, how can i make google spider my site? i havent been spidered since 6th March (couple of days before the big kick out occured i think)

[mmltonge]

Well... some weird things happened today, i put adsense on the site this morning and our ranking is google has been going up and down all day, we are at least now ranking high up for some important terms (although not THE most important keywords) in google some of the time it seems all over the place, still hasnt spidered us though (can tell by cache link)

so moral here is
adsense boosts search engine listing

[Mel]

Adsense has no effect whatever on your Google rankings, it may well be that if you had not added Adsense your ratings would have increased anyway.

Google may update your site pages once a month or it may update them more often, but if you make several changes between updates you have no way of knowing what caused the changes, and oftentimes your ranking will increase with no changes to your site.

I know its hard but Google works at its own speed, and you will have to adjust your speed to Googles if you want to understand whats happening.