google problems -- meta-tags

Hi Alyssa,

Great looking site! My only comment about the design would be to remove some of the space at the top so everything moves up and is easier to see.

For better search engine results, you should get the free program from goodkeywords.com, and do some research to find out what people use to find sites like yours (The name Monica comes to mind...).

Once you have a list of keyword phrases, then you should:

- Add at lease some text to every page that describes what the page is about. Use as many keyword phrases as possible, BUT! it must be good English and make sense. If you can write good English with the keywords, you should do well.

- Do the same thing for the title tag and meta description tag on each and every page. The text MUST describe what is on the page, or what you want to tell the visitor.

- Submit your site to as many places as possible, especially shopping sites. We have a submission list you can use at nielsentech.com/links.cfm, or there are many others if you search in Google.

This should help get things going for you. If you have submitted to Google, don't do that again for at least 30 days. You shouldn't have to do that, but it's possible that someone you share a server with (about 20 sites) may have done something to get you all banned - it's hard to tell, but you are indeed GONE from Google and it could be just some kind of mistake. I would try contacting Google and ask them. You may not get an answer, but at least you tried.

If it does not work in another month, I would get a free hosting account at 1and1.com (free for 3 years and regularly $29.95 a month until 1/14/04), and either buy another domain name, or just move your site to the new server once it is ready. That will remove the possibility that you are currently on a "banned" server for whatever reason.

OR... it might be related to the "Florida" update problem that loads of people are talking about. A very similar thing has happened to one of my clients. They've been wiped from google for no apparent reason.

Read some comments here for more info:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=google.public.support.general

Thanks for all the advice! I read a bunch of those articles and I'm not sure I understand all that filter stuff. I mean, I'm just trying to get the site listed for when people search "alyssa graves" which should not be a common sought after search term! This google thing is a mystery.

It has shown up on msn and hotbot, so that's something. I think I'll try to really get my meta-tags and titles and keywords in order (if I ever get that much free time) --- and add some text to each page of the site. Then start registering like crazy all over the place.

Thanks!

Well I heard some where a while ago that Google ignores META tags...:S

Can somebody conferm this?

Yes, Google pays no attention to meta keywords and puts little or no weight on the description either. You should still have both on the page though as there are other SEs that do use them.

A wee little thing we in the business like to call... CONTENT!

Less silly answer -- Google looks at the words in the actual body of the page -- the paragraphs, the headings, the title and alt attribute values, et cetera. The actual content on the page that has meaning for a person searching for answers.

Google basically will ignore anything in the html code that the visitor to the page doesn't see, like meta tags, comments, etc as these are what a lot of webmasters used to spam with.

It also helps if you use tags as well to declare your headings. Not something like or or anything of that nature.

Use CSS Positioning also helps as well, because then you can arrange your DIVs with your content first then navigation etc...

You don't need content?! What a fascinating, if somewhat archaic opinion!

Yes, Google follows and appreciates links, however the content itself is indexed and used, which is how Google provides contextual ads. Links that are related to the content and links on the page that are related to the content, and content that is more focused (and has more relevant linkage in and out) will rank higher for relevance.

Else, why bother with search terms, when you can just torture the user with an endless circlejerk of linking text.

Edited to add: Thank you for the updated opinion about 1and1 -- it's always a good idea to check the reputation of a host prior to signing on. Whenever possible, register your domain independently so you retain control of it.

Brian saying other people are wrong is an easy task, saying why is a bit harder and you seam to have failed as you have failed in giving good advice in this thread. Even if you are right in your iteration you don't support them with a logical explanation. By experience i know links do affect youre ranking but i know for sure that content is what give your site a stable ranking even when google change it's algo. If you want to start a war of sementic i don't think your in the good place.

I stated that links are important. Everybody on this thread knows that links are important.

I was called to prove an example of where a site had got itself good rankings using just links - no content - so I did. It's a stable ranking - and for a *very* competitive search term.

I'm not out to start a war - I'm out to contribute to the knowledgebase of this community. Is that so unwelcome?

And why wouldn't any site want to have their pages indexed by Google...? Indeed, it seems that no rebots are allowed to index anything on this site from the instructions of the robots.txt file.... so either the site just relies on linking for all it's good traffic.... or it is doing something that it wants to hide from all the friendly spiders that want to index what it has and bring it traffic.

So no, I don't buy your line that all the traffic and rankings are coming from "JUST" the links... Like I said, if that were true, you could do the same for a blank page with zero content... show me that and I'll join your church...!

[Update] Those of you following this thread may also be interested in another thread that can be found here.

Yes, linking can work to generate traffic. It can also collapse like a house of cards when the algorthyms change, or link farms are detected. CONTENT will not be going in and out of style, it will always be the most important aspect of SEO untill there are no sites left that index content, and all we have left are PPC. I hope to be dead by that time... [/Update

Google knows it exists: http://www.google.com/search?q=webuildpages.com&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

which is different from, say:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=webuildxxxxxxpages.com&btnG=Google+Search

There is no purpose to a site without content. Cached, reported in the index, or not. If the goal is strictly to gain traffic, this is counter-productive. Gaining traffic is not the same as gaining customers or building relationships.

Quality content and consistent focus help the user, and ideally, all this search engine optimization is done to help the search engines point the user in the right direction, not into marketing scams.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Really, who are you going to believe?

Aside from the Google cache not being the same thing as the Google index... I think the main point that is attempting to be made is that links are all the matter.

Or that links are the most important thing and content may only help....

All I have to say is that show me a page without content that can be found for something not on or in the page or the domain name or the page file name; but has only text links for the search phrase, and I'll agree.

No wait, I'll agree right now WITHOUT being shown. How stupid I was....! OF COURSE, we all know that the text links that are use go towards the ranking of a site!!!! But the only thing? Or the most important thing? Sorry, need somekind of scientific proof then I will change my viewpoint.

I think your forgeting something a scientific proof cannot be made by only one example you would need to provide at least another site with similar ranking based only on links(with a domain name register to another entity then this one).

It is also possible that the robot.txt that you've shown use is only there since this morning.

There is also a way in a webserver to provide different content base on the requester IP. I already tought of doing something like this but I guess i'm a honest person so i didn't but there are all kind of possibility here.

Christian_SEO wrote: And why wouldn't any site want to have their pages indexed by Google...? Indeed, it seems that no rebots are allowed to index anything on this site from the instructions of the robots.txt file....

After the Florida update, some SEO's feared that a "SEO filter" had been applied - that pages that were optimised over a certain degree were tripping a filter that removed their sites. That's one possible motivation...

Christian_SEO wrote:

So no, I don't buy your line that all the traffic and rankings are coming from "JUST" the links... Like I said, if that were true, you could do the same for a blank page with zero content... show me that and I'll join your church...!

I have already proven quite clearly that the site in question is ranked entirely on the basis of it's incoming links only.

If you use the Google toolbar then you'll see that there is no page cache - that means that Google has *not* indexed that page.

If you check the robots.txt file you will also see that the Googlebot is entirely disallowed from entering the site.

If you wish to ignore the plain evidence of the situation then that is up to you.

druagord wrote:

I think your forgeting something a scientific proof cannot be made by only one example you would need to provide at least another site with similar ranking based only on links(with a domain name register to another entity then this one).

I've already seen this before on one of my sites - I set up some incoming links for human users and accidently tripped a major search phrase, that was not present anywhere on the page. I don;t have the example now because, naturally, I decided to fully optimise by adding the phrase to the page title, h1 tag, and page text. It's an eye-opening experience.

druagord wrote:

It is also possible that the robot.txt that you've shown use is only there since this morning.

If that were the case then Google would still have a cache of the page if it had been indexed.

druagord wrote:

There is also a way in a webserver to provide different content base on the requester IP. I already tought of doing something like this but I guess i'm a honest person so i didn't but there are all kind of possibility here.

That's called cloaking, and is where a different page is served up according to the user agent type or IP. But even then, note again that Google is not allowed on the site regardless, so this option could not occur.

There is no indication that Google is unaware of the site, only that it has no cache of it. This is actually possible while still being aware of the content. You can request that your content not be indexed and not be cached.

If it wasn't aware of the site at all, you'd get the results I showed you in the second link.

Certainly the nocache tag can be used to ensure that pages are not cached. However, I don't see the nocache tag on the site. I was referenced to this site before - a couple of weeks back, and the situation remains the same.

Google *is* quite aware of the site - it knows that there are thousands of links pointing towards it, and have ranked it on anchor text alone. But Google is unaware of the site content.

Monster and other large corporate sites may be able to pay for a huge number of inbound links (who links to Monster or Pizza Hut? ) but the small operator, or the smaller company achieves better results by optimizing the content than paying for inbound links.

Yes, inbound links are important! Most especially, they are another way to draw people to your site. For most sites and most users, this is very important, but at the heart of it, you want to solve a need. I don't go searching on Google for "jobs". It's a ridiculous search term. I would go searching for "kitchener web development" and then research the companies. Or thanks to the offline advertising of companies like Monster and Pizza Hut, if I were interested in employment I'd try Monster and if I were hungry, perhaps Pizza Hut.

Looking for companies *like* Monster? I'd look in a directory, not a search engine.

Of course you're also neglecting to consider the cumulative effect for indexing an entire site and only returning the main page -- the content on Monster and Pizza Hut is extremely focused (for jobs and pizza respectively) and each additional page that supports the main page contributes to its ranking such that instead of a page being returned, the main site is returned for the results.

For instance, #4 for pizza is http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~pizza/ -- how many inbound links for that page? (that page doesn't exist -- however the text on the missing page points to a new url that redirects to http://pizzacompiler.sourceforge.net/ so if you want to check THAT page for inbound links, go ahead).

Hi Suzanne:
Interesting take, but wherever did you get the idea that you have to pay to get links? Most webmasters and SEOs solicit links or gain links by having content that people want to link to. Personally I have never paid for a link for any of my sites in my life.

As far the the links to Monster.com and Pizzahut, sorry those are not paid links, they are Unpaid links (unless you consider Pizza Huts monthly one pizza giveaway as a payment) are not reciprocal links and are from many many small sites that consider these sites to be worthy of a link.

I would be interested to learn more about your theory of the cumulative effect of a large site getting higher rankings than smaller sites. So far as I am aware each page is indexed by search engines on its own merits (if you don't count the inbound links, that is) but it is true that index pages normally rank higher than internal pages, but that again is an effect of inbound links (Plus internal links), because most people link to the base URL or to the home page of a site.

I am talking about the effect that properly constructed inbound links can have on your Google rankings, Not about the fact that they also draw customers to your site.

Please help me to understand why you would abandon search engines in favor of directories if you wanted to search for Jobs or Pizza ?? I find that most search engines and Google especially do a much better job of finding and presenting relevant sites than most directories. I would also assume that since this is an SEO forum, it would follow that you are trying to understand better how to use search engines more effectively.

IMO you seem to be missing the point that it is not only possible to get ranked well with very little page content, and more particularly, that it is about the only way you can get ranked well if you want to contend for competitive one word keyphrases.

With regard to the links on that supposedly missing page, (which I can see just fine thank you, and no I do not see any redirect) Why on earth do you think its missing and/or redirected?? The page comes up just fine in my browser, with the correct URL in the address bar, and Google confirms that the page exists and that they can index it by showing it in their cache, and also confirms that they have 512 pages from that site in their index. With regard to the links to that page the link popularity tool shows 32,142 inbound links with Google reporting 199 inbound links, and yes that page too is a bit short on content. Do you think this page is making it on its content?

You have a nice forum here, and lots of members so a bit of research into what really causes pages to rank well should not be amiss, would it?

"jobs" and "pizza" are very vague -- to get accurate results when researching (or searching) multiple keywords achieve a better result. For something that is a category, such as temporary employment firms, or headhunters, the more reputable/larger firms are usually in directories and the results are more helpful.

I'm not interested in an argument, so I'll agree to disagree. I think it's short-sighted to encourage people to develop inbound links to something that has no inherent value for the user. Content with no inbound links is as daft as all inbound links with no content. It is, as always, somewhere in the middle where things make sense.

Edit: Google has been collapsing results so that multiple results from the same site, or sites with different domain names but the same content, et cetera, are listed as one listing. While multiple domains with identical content wouldn't increase rank, it appears (from casual observation) that they are attempting to improve the quality of their results by doing this and the SITES that appear to rank high often have many pages that are focused content for the same keyword. PAGES that rank high do not have the index linked.

There has been a lot of discussion about whether blogs add to the noise or provide niche expertise and the discussions around the web regarding these things have lead to my observations.

Hi Suzanne:
I guess you misunderstood, I am not trying to get people to build pages with no content (in fact I have taken pains to state that content is very important for users and somewhat important for search engines) but my point it that when you are talking about search engine rankings especially in very competitive areas, links are a vital component of SEO.

As for jobs and pizza being very vague terms.....

Well, I understand what they mean and I am very pleased that google does too, and gives us the best sites in response to such a search.

[edit]
Google has had a policy for some time of only showing two results from any site in response to a given search term, but each page ranks on its own and does not get a better ranking because there are more pages on the site that rank for the same term, except of course that if those pages link to the listed page, such links will contribute to the PR and ranking of that page.[/edit]

With regard to your edit, I'm pretty sure we're saying the same thing, just with different words.

Thank you for your clarification about seo, as well -- I do agree that for highly competitive areas that's the case. However I personally believe that the path to success in a highly competitive arena is to step out of the path of the hoards and provide superior or unique service/product. I think that SEO has taken on a mythical proportion for *some* people and companies, out of line with their ROI.

As for pizza, I prefer non-corporate pizzerias, so the results are not actually relevant for me searching for "pizza" alone. The user is fickle that way. heh.

Hi Suzanna;

I guess I view it a bit the same and a bit differently. I totally agree that success in any web based project is what I usually call the Unusual Selling Proposition, which means that you have to be good and you have to be unique if you want success, but no matter how good or how unique you are, you can still fail if no one knows about you.

Thats where SEO comes in, letting more people know what you do and why you are so good.

Putting a $50,000 billboard inside a barn is not going to do you as much good as if you put it alongside a busy freeway, and having a great website and great products/services is not much good if no one knows about it.

I would like to think that Internet Marketing ecompasses a great deal more than just SEO, but SEO (good SEO that is) can return some of the highest ROI for you, and Adwords and Overture can also produce great ROI, but this needs a bit of expertise which is often beyond the average webmaster, who often is much more concerned with the physical aspects of running a business.

Word of mouth and reputation are great, but most of the clients I accept have great sites and great selling propositions, with great reputations and testimonials, but in one instance a recent client lost 65% of his considerable revenue when his site lost its Google rankings.

SEO put him back were he deserved to be in the rankings, but we continue to work with him on other aspects.

As far as Pizza goes the best in my neck of the woods is Dominos, and fortunately they have a great ranking also!

Agreed that a solid Internet Marketing plan includes a strong portion of good SEO, and that links are a vital part of that.

I respectfully disagree that Domino's is the best pizza, though. ha!

What does the google equation look like.

does it count pages?
key word rich pages?
anchor tag link keywords
link popularity

neurotic google.

There has been some discussion regarding whether inbound links are vital to being listed high in Google.

I put forward that single search terms aren't ideal, nor realistic. I should qualify that to explain that a great deal of searching is done using human language structures, not computer search terms. That's part of why a search engine like Google filters out common terms.

To provide anecdotal evidence (as indeed, all this is as we are not privy to the Google algorithms):

http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+stem+cutting+split+leaf+philodendron&hl=en&lr=&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&start=30&sa=n

This is a search query that came in to my site. I get a dozen or so of these a day, on my personal site, which is not rich in relevant inbound links, doesn't have focused content and if it's remotely optimized for search engines it's by accident. In fact, I wouldn't know what a relevant inbound link could possibly be given the diverse content on the site.

And yet, this [edit]previously brought[/edit] up my site in the top 10. [edit]As noted in another post, this is no longer the case with the new links -- teaches me to check my referrers more closely![/edit]

Another search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+html+entities+display&hl=en&lr=&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&start=50&sa=n

and another:

http://www.google.com/search?q=pain+killers&hl=en&lr=&ie=utf-8&start=30&sa=n

VERY diverse subject matter, no inbound links that I'm aware of from other sites, and yet in the top ten.

Why?

Relevant content for those terms.

Do I *want* to be found for those search terms? Not particularly, it's a personal site, I don't have an SEO strategy for it. But if I were, I'd be improving the content for the areas where I'm already getting hits, building the relevance and the importance and providing something worth linking to.

Of course from a business perspective, I'd be an utter fool to rely on search engines alone for my business traffic.

Hi Suzanne
I'm glad that you are not aware of all the links you have to your site and even more so as it tends to prove the point that you don't have to pay for links (or even solicit them) if you have good content.

Here is a list of the total number of links that the Link Popularity Tool finds for your site:

Inbound links for synapticimpulse.com
Total inbound links 8701
AllTheWeb 2723
AltaVista 3537
HotBot/Google 124
HotBot/Inktomi 1173
MSN Search 1144

You probably have even more than this since Google only reports backlinks from PR4 and above sites.

A little more research into the content of those links will give you a better idea of why you are ranking for such terms, but here are some other reasons:

For the term how to stem cutting split leaf philodendron there are only 615 results returned and you are ranking #35. It probably appears to you that you are ranking in the top ten when you click on the link, but notice the bit that says start 30? That means to display the pages starting with the #30 ranking and can be confirmed by looking at the top of the page where it says Results 31 - 40 of about 615 .

For the term javascript html entities display you no longer rank in the top 100

For the term pain killers you no longer rank in the top 100.

I still agree that content is necessary to a good website but not for a search engine ranking.

To use one of your search examples above javascript html entities display do a google search for this term:
http://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+html+entities+display&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&start=20&sa=N

and look at the #27 ranking:

prognosis.lib.ece.ntua.gr/dimitris/Linux%20Docs/O'Reilly%20Reference%20Library%20(29%20Complete%20O'Reilly%20Books)/web/html/ch13_03.html

Notice that this page has only a URL in the listing with no description? This indicates a page which Google has found a link to but has not yet indexed. So here is a good example of a page for which Google has no idea of the content and yet has ranked it #27 out of 29,300 results for this term. You can verify that this page is not in the Google index in a couple of ways; one is to search for a cache for that page which returns:

Your search - cache:prognosis.lib.ece.ntua.gr/dimitris/Linux%20Docs/O'Reilly%20Reference%20Library%20(29%20Complete%20O'Reilly%20Books)/web/html/ch13_03.html - did not match any documents.

What then did it rank that page on? The only thing that Google knows about that page is that there is a link to it, and it therefor follows that the ranking is soley based on only what it knows - the content of the inbound link since the search phrase is not mentioned in the URL.

Different people search in different ways, and while you might prefer to search on very long and descriptive terms, many searchers do not. This is a topic which is necessarily near and dear to the heart of any SEO who wants to have his clients found for competitive search terms, and in fact wordtracker.com has founded a business on recording just exactly what 325 million actual searches conducted in the past 60 days were for.

You can get a free membership and do some limited research there yourself, but after spending a few hundred hours researching keywords for clients in their database I am of the opinion that single word searches on are the most popular, followed by two word searches, then three word searches.

Just for information here are the top ten most popular searches at Google in the past week:

google.com
Top 10 Gaining Queries
Week Ending Dec. 15, 2003
1. saddam hussein

2. survivor

3. jennicam

4. 50 cent

5. internet explorer
vulnerability

6. beyonce

7. earthquake

8. gift guides

9. santa claus

10. orlando bloom

Searchers can and do search in wierd and wonderful ways, but they all search differently.

IMO of course

Ah ha!

Thank you for the clarification (and for showing your chops). Also thank you for taking the time to explain where I was in error in such a way that all the lurkers and future visitors to this thread will walk away with a more solid understanding of how it all works, and how to interpret referrer information, et cetera.

I suppose, lol, that it just shows that searchers don't always pay attention to the top 10 results, ha! I have noticed over the last few months that a great many of my referrers come from deep results in engines like Google and AltaVista. There is one image of me breastfeeding my son that is a regular referrer, and yet is about 20 pages in the images results on AltaVista.

I was #1 for ages for "rollie pollie bug" however I have now dropped off. Since it was two posts and they are now deep in the archives and not updated (nor focused, nor submitted, et cetera), it has done what I would expect it to do -- go down in relevance as other things come along. And they have.

Most of those inbound links are likely from comments on other blogs, and as such, are somewhat self-promotion, and I don't credit those as valid, though it's possible/likely that my comments have their own value to someone.

I'm quite serious about not promoting this site or optimizing it. Until recently I had 100 visitors a day (solid for a personal site aimed at an audience of a dozen), but my own lack of posting and lack of focus have resulted in both a drop in rankings on search engines, and a drop in traffic (unrelated to search engines, which have started to become about 30% or more of my traffic, as opposed to about 10% before I stopped updating so regularly).

I just remembered something else -- I changed my archive formatting and almost all the search engine results for a month were returning 404s. I've gone in and am fixing the problem, however some of the drop off is likely related to the pages being delisted (as they should be) and links no longer being accurate (which they aren't) and should speak volumes to the benefit of having a strong strategy when changing the location or naming of any deep pages!

Perhaps it would be a good thing. a number of people I know with higher-traffic blogs have had real issue with their comments being spammed, linking to porn sites.

Some of them are considering membership only to avoid it. I think I would welcome comment links being discounted.

Maybe this is old hat, but I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the weight that Google assigns to having the targeted keyword in the url. From my observation, this seems to be a huge boost in ranking.

I know Google discounts meta tags, but what about title elements? Together with domain names containing keywords?

Though I have to admit the www.keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword.com urls look ridiculous to me as a user and I tend to discount them as spam or sneak-thief sites.

I'd far rather have the reputed company/site reputation than a keyword frenzy as a user from a trust point of view (which is, of course, very important to me as a developer, user-centric development).

Suzanne,
That wasn't exactly what I had in mind.
I was thinking more along the line of vertical or niche sites picking the directory category name and incorporating that into the domain name.
widgets.com would be the ideal domain name for a Yahoo or DMOZ category of widgets, but it looks like widgets.mydomain.com would work nearly as well with Google.
I certainly wasn't thinking of a mile long domain name.

Restraint and moderation? I can get behind that.

What are the variables in the equation?

1. Quality of sites linked to you?
2. Content?
3. Linked from dmoz.org?
4. Key words on the site?
5. Key words in the domain name?

Can yall list some more variables?

Whee, a new list of referrers, this time ACTUALLY in the top ten...

http://www.google.com/search?q=feed+houseplants
http://google.com/search?q=puzzle+script

Interestingly, these are fairly important to my site, or will be in the near future.

So... content does have a strong effect on the results, at least for 2-4 keyword searches.