Help with Google

[savvydog]

I've been working hard to get one of my clients sites to rank well with Google, and its still not even on the map (like page 50+ for most key terms). Obviously I'm doing something drastically wrong and I'd love some help from a seasoned googlemaster.

The site is at www.tiffany-outlet.com. It performs pretty well on Inktomi engines, but Google seems to hate it. I know we need to build page rank for it, but I figured it would be able to overcome the linkpop defecit for less popular keywords at least. But even for the most uncompetitive keywords, Google prefers just about anything else over our site.

Suggestions greatly appreciated.

David

[nickc]

You appear to have a PR of 0/10 which would suggest that you need more sites to link to yours. Hope this helps.

Nick

[minstrel]

Yes... the only links I can find to your home page are from your own site and one from the Jayde directory.

Submit to more directories and try to set up some reciprocal links from related sites.

[savvydog]

Thanks for confirming that page rank is the biggest problem the site has a the moment. Thought it was our SEO work...

Minstrel - you say that you found a link from Jayde -- how did you find that? I know that google has a utility for finding links from other sites, but they don't currently list anyone linking to tiffany-outlet.com...so I presume you used something else to determine the links to the site??

Thanks,

David

[sonnie]

Nice looking site. I guess I would have to agree with minstrel and nickc, the site (code wise) looks very good. You have provided proper Meta info related to content (for those SE's still using this info). Page Rank is only relevant for Google powered searches, there are other SE's still alive out there.

[minstrel]

Minstrel - you say that you found a link from Jayde -- how did you find that? I know that google has a utility for finding links from other sites, but they don't currently list anyone linking to tiffany-outlet.com...so I presume you used something else to determine the links to the site??
There are three ways to directly see what backlinks you have in Google, although none of them will necessarily list all of the ones Google has in its index - enter these into the Google search box:

link:www.tiffany-outlet.com (shows the fewest)
allinurl:www.tiffany-outlet.com
+"www.tiffany-outlet.com"

Using the last one I see this:

Reproductions Directory
... http://www.tiffany-outlet.com. Featured Links. Jayde.com is an iEntry,
Inc.® publication - 2003 All Rights Reserved Privacy Policy and Legal.
dir.jayde.com/73755.html - 29k - Supplemental Result - Cached - Similar pages

Another method recommended sometimes is to use the "allinurl:" syntax with AllTheWeb - that may show more backlinks but it doesn't guarantee that they are backlinks considered by Google.

[brucemcc]

Very nice job. Site looks great. Clean, crisp, not all cluttered up.

What are the key words that you are trying to optimize for?

Bruce

[savvydog]

Minstrel - very useful information about Google and tracking links -- thanks again.

Bruce and Sonny -- thanks for the kind words about our site. We sruggle with creating nice looking sites while still making them functional, user friendly and inviting to search engines. Quite a balancing act.

We are primarily targeting the following key phrases in order of importance:

tiffany lamps
tiffany lamp
tiffany style lamps
hanging tiffany lamps
tiffany desk lamps
tiffany ceiling lamps
stained glass lamps
dale tiffany lamps

There are others, but they are trivial by comparison.

David

[savvydog]

Minstrel,

Another question about links -- www.tiffany-outlet.com links to our website (www.bluedogcomm.com) in the footer, but this doesn't show up on a link check for our site.

I'm curious why this is the case? I would presume that linking from anywhere in the site (especially the home page) would count for google. Am I missing something?

David

[minstrel]

Another question about links -- www.tiffany-outlet.com links to our website (www.bluedogcomm.com) in the footer, but this doesn't show up on a link check for our site.
Google seems to have a lower cutoff for backlinks that it will display,

Both your sites - www.tiffany-outlet.com and www.bluedogcomm.com are PageRank=0 (or at least PR<1).

There is an SEO problem with the bluedog site as well - what gets displayed is a splash page with only two links (choice of flash or html) and nothing on the page itself for spiders to index...

[compar]

Thought it was our SEO work...

It is your SEO that isn't working. The most important part of SEO is getting backlinks. SEO is only just started when you finish the on-page stuff. Gathering links is what will get you into the rankings.

You seem to be getting a lot of imprecise information on this thread. The explanation for links not showing up is that the Google backlink search normally only displays links from pages with PR4 or greater.

The other search that can be used to discover link from any page is -site:www.yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com.

This search says to Google don't count my site -- hence the "-site:" -- but show me every other site you know of that contains my domain name.

[minstrel]

You seem to be getting a lot of imprecise information on this thread. The explanation for links not showing up is that the Google backlink search normally only displays links from pages with PR4 or greater.
Excuse me? Would you care to elaborate on exactly what "imprecise information" was provided to bluedogcomm in this thread?

With all due respect, I don't see you adding anything of substance that wasn't said above your post...

[savvydog]

Minstrel - so you are saying that even though Google probably knows that www.tiffany-outlet.com links to www.bluedogcomm.com, it is not showing that link because the former site has a PR of 0? This would make sense to me given the evidence.

Also -- there isn't a problem with the SEO for bluedogcomm.com as we have purposely NOT done any optimization for the site. Its simply a flash portfolio that is up there as a place holder while our commercial site is in development. But thanks for pointing that out :)

Compar - I used your suggested "-site" command and it still fails to show any sites linking to www.bluedogcomm.com even though I know there are at least a dozen clients of ours who link to us. I have to presume that even the "-site" format limits site links to those with a high enough PR.


It is your SEO that isn't working. The most important part of SEO is getting backlinks. SEO is only just started when you finish the on-page stuff. Gathering links is what will get you into the rankings.

Yes -- I realize that backlinks are a critical part of the SEO process. Sorry if I was imprecise with my terminology. Let me rephrase -- I thought we might have done a poor job of coding the site and inserting keywords and that this resulted in our poor google search engine results.

Anyway - thanks to everyone on this thread for your suggestions. I've got a much better idea about our Google issues now.

David

[minstrel]

Compar - I used your suggested "-site" command and it still fails to show any sites linking to www.bluedogcomm.com even though I know there are at least a dozen clients of ours who link to us. I have to presume that even the "-site" format limits site links to those with a high enough PR.
David,

The only thing that format does differently than what was previously suggested is exclude internal links from the site itself. I rarely use that format because if there is a problem with your site you want to know if any internal links are showing up - a case in point was a problem site in another thread where it was determined that a bad robots.txt file was in fact instructing spiders NOT to index the pages.

[Mel]

Your linking is what is holding you back as NONE of the major search engines reports any backlinks to the site.

As Minstrel indicated there is a link from the Jayde directory, but that is from a PR0 site with lots of outbound links and while that is not reported as a link by Google they certainly must be counting it as they are showing 12 of your pages in their index.

Work on getting inbound links, especially anchor text links.