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

__________________
I am Swiss, born in Vienna, Austria, in 1943 and came first to Costa Rica in 1967.It is the web sites about Costa Rica, where I can apply all the accumulated knowledge I have in advertising, design, photography marketing, three languages and nature.

Dear WebProWorld Contributors,



My name is Forrest Geiger and my ex-business partner, Joern Malek, is making false and slanderous statements about me and our relationship in this public forum. He did this about 9 months ago on WebProWorld. I alerted the moderator, and his comments were edited as violating forum rules. Now, he is doing it again, and although I have complained twice in writing, the comments have not yet been removed.



It do not think it is appropriate to make a professional forum a venue for business problems, and so I have never corrected his earlier comments after the salnder was removed. However, I absolutely need to correct the slander now being heaped upon me, especially when other contributors have started referring to me as a “thief” and my site as being “stolen.” This is not something any of you would want to happen to you.



Allow me to include, in part, the email that I have sent twice to garrett@webproworld.com:



“My name is Forrest Geiger, and I am the owner / webmaster of www.1costaricalink.com which is mentioned in these two posts on these two pages:

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...ghlight=#95310



http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...ghlight=#10183



The truth is that Mr. Malek and I were equal business PARTNERS, and I stole nothing. After working together for awhile on www.1costaricalink.com, it was not enough that we appeared once or twice in the top 10 of Google for competitive keywords, - optimization was my specialty - he wanted to be there 8 or 10 times by building clone and near copy sites. I absolutely refused. He began building them anyway with our partnership money. In the dissolution of our partnership, I retained 1 site, and he retained about 13, including 2 major portals.”



The site I retained was www.1costaricalink.com .



He basically retained these sites, plus many other domain names:

1 Link 2 Costa Rica ( Country Portal 5000 plus pages)
1 Link 2 Hotels ( Hotel Portal 3000 plus pages)
1 Link 2 Yellowpages ( Index )

Province of Alajuela Mini Portal
Province of Cartago Mini Portal
Province of Guanacaste Mini Portal
Province of Heredia Mini Portal
Province of Limón Mini Portal
Province of Puntarenas Mini Portal
Province of San José Mini Portal







As proof to my contribution to the total site, and as proof of our equal partnership relationship, go here:

http://www.1costaricalink.com/eng/web/equalpartner.htm The frivilous and inconvenient charges he has filed against me will be dropped with this and other evidence.



Additionally, the present name he is using, www.1-costaricalink.com was NEVER a name previously owned by him. I was the original owner, and merely bought it to keep someone from buying a similar name to www.1costaricalink.com. I gave it to him during buyout negotiations that eventually failed. After the partnership dissolution, he then used my original logo design and began building yet another clone / near duplicate site - www.1-costaricalink.com! (Also, the dash – in the logo was put there by me during the original design so that the name would wrap more around the parrot. It had nothing to do with any domain name we were promoting at the time. Recently, I took out the – and mad the “1” red in my logo to eliminate some of the confusion his new site is causing with the public.)



When Joern and I split, his three major portals above were climbing in the search engine ratings, and he showed up 13 times out of 20 in Google results for “costa rica spa,” with all his various "portals", an accomplishment of which he was very proud. He also had nearly killed www.1costaricalink.com in the search engines with his bad optimization and linking techniques during buyout negotiations, when I had no control. I warned him again and again of the probable consequences of his near clone major portals and mini-portal doorway sites. He refused to listen.



So, to answer his form question: “What’s wrong with Google, or is it me?” , it really is you, Joern, not Google. In fact, Google has tried o help Joern in another post: http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic...hlight=#102996

Ignoring Google’s warning about his keyword stuffing, the following day he increased his keywords at the top of his home page from two long lines to 6 lines!! Google had no more success in reasoning with him than I did. Another poster had it right when he said that optimization was an ongoing process to Joern’s complaint that my site was older, more seasoned, and had better links, etc.. Joern doesn’t have a clue as to how many hours I have spent to correct what was wrong, and then to carefully tune in www.1costaricalink.com until it is now #1 from many keywords. Those are my ongoing efforts, as well as new material.



Unfortunately for Joern, he is a textbook example of what can happen when you violate search engine guidelines, and now, he's complaining. I predict that as Yahoo begins to fold in stronger duplication filters, he will be in trouble there, too, more than he presently is.



There is so much more that I am tempted to say in anticipation of Joern’s next volley of fraudulant statements, but once again, I think it is tacky to deface a professional forum with ongoing bickering. It would be better if the moderator deleted all of this, or at least edited out the names and slander.



Sincerely,



Forrest Geiger