Hi everyone, I know this can come under maybe marketing and web design i decided really who else would know the answer than hosts!

My site www.surrenderonline.com has been up for around 20 days now...

I have used meta tags and all the proper methods to getting the site listed, im not talking about being in the top ten % or whatever i just want my site to be there full stop!

Its not coming up and its getting so frustrating, Last site i put up it took only 4 days and it was up! Is it me?

Does it have anything to do with the box im on?

Or is my meta tagging bad?

If anyone knows the reason, or maybe its just google i would love to know why...

Thank you alll very very much!

Have you actually submitted it to them (http://www.google.com/addurl.html)?

First off all the SE';s are going to $$$$$$.
The days of FREE are almost over.
To bad for me, as I am very good at SE placement.
Which=$$$$ for me.
But, even with Yahoo there are back doors. Study there sites and the big light will come on.
All my sites have top ten. I am not a hosting expert, but now you are in my game.
My worse site today got 2,900 SE hits. Not paid hits.
Flame, beat me, I do not care, take it for what it is worth.
One free tip for you.
Content is KING! Never forget that!!!

I have tried that!

Does also anyone know what company can get my site up with the top say 20 listings!

Your keyword tag is to small.
Add more to it.
I will post some urls to help you.

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/
http://www.bruceclay.com/
http://www.jimtools.com/
go to the bottom of this page
http://www.northernwebs.com/set/setsimjr.html
http://www.selfpromotion.com/
http://www.netmechanic.com/
http://www.cascadeaccess.com/~wizworld/HTML2.html


Hope this help you.
Alot you can do for free or very low cost.

funnily enough,
the sites of mine that have done the best and showed up in all the major engines are the ones I never submitted to search engines and never used meta tags for............

A while back I read that canada.com (I think it was them) was a back door for yahoo, and that you could get your site listed in a couple of days.............probably not true, but who knows.....

Google has always taken 6 or 8 weeks to spider my sites, but once they do, they give a lot of hits.

It will be very tough to get your site in the top 20 of google for web hosting.

Google works for the large part with PageRank - which is basically a measure of how many on-theme sites link to you. Google updates it's index approx once per month so once you get some links you will see your site somewhere in the index within 4 - 5 weeks. Find your competition and type link:www.yourcompetion.com - this will show you how many sites link to them.

Google also uses your title - your title does not have your keywords in it.

nvphone's makes about the most critical point though...content is KING.

There is a section in our site called Web Resources that has a lot of search engine tips & help.

Andrew
FindMyHosting

I've heard people say that link popularity is important... by that does that mean the number of hits you get? Or the number of websites that has links to you? Or did I get it completely wrong...?

Link popularity is very important, not just for Google. AltaVista makes a large use of link pop also.

Link popularity is how many sites link to your site. They must be real links - i.e not javascript redirects & the text of the link has a big impact too.

If you are selling Web Hosting, then links from a flower shop will not be as valuable as links from a site that revolves around web hosting.

There is no quick solution to link popularity. Avoid at all costs FFA's & link farms

Hope that helps.

What are FFA's and link farms? And why are they so bad? (assuming that by summiting to them you will get more sites linking to your page... so... what's bad about that?) Forgive me I don't understand search engines too well...

Can someone recommend any sites that provides good tutorials or something to search engines? Search Engine Watch I know is one... what are the others? Thanks :)

There are a lot of good sites that you can learn about Search Engine Optimization at. One really great forum is part of WebMaster world http://www.webmasterworld.com/index.cgi?action=viewcategory&category=6 This has a ton of stuff about search engines.

FFA = Free For All Pages - basically a list of links, new ones go to the top & then drop off the bottom as more people add. They will drive 0 traffic, fill yoir email with junk mail & potentially get your domain banned from Google. Basically avoid all that type of stuff & work on getting real links over time. If you have great content - you'll have no problem getting links

Obviously, the whole search engine area is large and complex, and too much to get into totally here at WHT. But, just to respond to a few of the things in Choppy's original post and a few misperceptions later:

First, judging by the thread title, Choppy is most interested in Google....

I have used meta tags and all the proper methods to getting the site listed, im not talking about being in the top ten % or whatever i just want my site to be there full stop!Meta tags are irrelevant as far as Google is concerned. Google doesn't read them. Using meta tags is not "the proper method" to get a site listed at Google.

Or is my meta tagging bad?Nope. No such worry, since Google is ignoring your meta tags completely.

Someone else asked, "have you actually submitted to them?" But Google, while they do offer that "add url" page, won't add a page submitted through that service unless they can find a link to the submitted page from elsewhere in their database. In short, there's no reason to bother submitting to Google. If there are links to your site, they'll find it. If there are no links to your site, they won't add you even if you do submit. You need to get some other sites to link to yours. There don't seem to be any incoming links to your site as of now.

My site www.surrenderonline.com has been up for around 20 days now...Google does an update about every 28 days, right around the end of the month. The February database update hasn't yet begun. If your site's been up for 20 days, it may have been visited by Googlebot (their spider) already, if there are links to it from other sites. Have you checked your logs for the appearance of googlebot?

NovaW said: "If you are selling Web Hosting, then links from a flower shop will not be as valuable as links from a site that revolves around web hosting."

If we're, again, talking about Google, that's sort of misleading, and probably untrue. PageRank does not include a theme component; that is, a link from any site (or page, more accurately) is worth exactly as much as the mathematical PR evaluation of the links on that page, combined with that page's own PageRank, says it is. It's a measure of links, not of theme.

But, other elements will come into play at Google that might make links from a related site more valuable to you than links from another site. Among them is anchor text (titling) of links... that's easier to do, usually, with sites topically related to yours.

It's certainly true that FFA pages are worthless as sources of incoming links. Such pages will have low or no PageRank values, so they won't help you much. Even a page on any site that is nothing but outgoing links will not distribute much PageRank to the linked sites.

The way to good placement at Google (and elsewhere) is simple: include real content, and get real links. Links will help build your PageRank, but don't overestimate the value of PR: it's just one factor in the ranking process. On-page content is even more important (once you get past the fact that you need some incoming links even to get into Google).

One more tip: PageRank is PageRank: pages within your site can distribute PR to other pages in the same site. Keep that in mind when developing your internal linking structure.

Really excellent post JayC.

I think the Feb update is done - our site, that we launched last week, had a PR of 0 the day before launch & a PR of 4 the day after. Purely coincidental on the timing - but it moved between 0 & 4 for a few days (was listed in www2) then settled at 4. Incidentally I read somewhere that Google is going to bi-monthly updates.

On the relevant link part - I agree, technically PR shouldn't have any tie to the theme of the link - but Themes are what the SE are moving toward. Technically the text link shouldn't have any impact on PR but it does, so I think it's fair to say that on-topic links from relevant sites are better than not.

Originally posted by Omni
What are FFA's and link farms? And why are they so bad? (assuming that by summiting to them you will get more sites linking to your page... so... what's bad about that?) Forgive me I don't understand search engines too well...

Can someone recommend any sites that provides good tutorials or something to search engines? Search Engine Watch I know is one... what are the others? Thanks :)


I gave you 7 good links above.

Wished I'd seen this earlier. Right, to get into Google, you need one quality link - meaning a link from another site already in the index.

That will get you in.

To rank well, Google relies on the following things, in approximate order of importance:

i) Keyword density - a high keyword density in the body text works well. Supplemented of course by your keywords in the title tag. Whoever said that surrenderonline doesn't have its keywords in the title tag is talking rubbish, btw.

ii) Link Text of inbound links - as someone below said, the link text of inbound links to your site can make a massive difference to your rank

iii) PageRank - This is used to judge the 'importance' of a page or site and is a small part of the Google algorithim. People tend to confuse these last two with Link Popularity - they are slightly different things, but obviously if you have 500 links in that all read 'affordable web hosting' you are going to do well.

Meta tags make no difference to Google and despite what that self-proclaimed search engine expert below claims, your keyword tag is far too long for those search engines that do read it (such as AV and Inktomi).

Try to concentrate on no more than 2 keyphrases per page, don't use hidden or invisible text, don't stuff your page with keywords avoid what Google calls 'bad neighbourhoods' (link farms, ffa pages, etc.), and you will be okay.

That's it. Message over.

Originally posted by NovaW
Incidentally I read somewhere that Google is going to bi-monthly updates.Yep, that's the rumor... maybe beginning in March.

You're right about the February update. I was out of town last week and was a little out of touch, and sort of lost track of what the date was! Just checked on that, and on the status of Google. But the point for Choppy remains that if his site has only been up for 20 days he shouldn't yet be worried about it not being listed.
Technically the text link shouldn't have any impact on PR but it does, so I think it's fair to say that on-topic links from relevant sites are better than not. My view would be that the title of a text link has no impact on PageRank -- but it does have an impact on the rank of the page in response to a given search query.

The best link, as I said earlier, is a real link. Anything that wouldn't reasonably be helpful to a user is, from the search engine's standpoint, spam. As such, while they might bring a PR boost to the targeted site they might also bring what a great number of site operators have discovered in the past couple of months: PR for the entire site reduced to zero by a Google spam filter.

Especially risky would be to cross-link a number of sites that are not related by theme. Best links? Links from pages on a related topic, that have a high PageRank themselves, and that have no or few outgoing links other than the one to your page.

Your help has been appricated im sure by everyone on this FORUM...

I do have around 4 linked sites you can find out what i have just by going to google and typing in my company name surrenderonline this comes up with links of sites i have helped or some sponsors!

From what i have gathered i should put more links up like this from OTHER sites... And also my pages in my site should be related also, just to promote this...

Im sure i can get another 10-20 links from other places...

I will leave my tags in place for the time being... I hosetd a customers site and there site was listed in 4 days FLAT! Without meta tags.

If you take a look at my actual website on the index page i have used light gray keywords at the bottom of the page, can you see them there not the same colour (color for my US mates) as the background either...

Does this help at all?

I know not to use ffa cause your just going to get abused from spam.. it took me a year of unsubmitting my self from these links to make my email address normal again... THANKS TO SUBMIT WOLF!

Oh and another thing,, you know all these sites that list your service on them e.g hostingindex and things like that are they counted as links?

Keep the dicussion going im sure all people in WHT are intrested and so am i!.

Thanks once again!

Be careful with text that is a very close color to the background - chances are you will be ok with it - but personally I wouldn't risk it

the phrase "web hosting" is by far the biggest search phrase for hosting - it's in your keywords (Google ignores these) - but it's not in your title, but you have "affordable hosting" in your title which is a good phrase to have. Going for Austrialian hosting is probably a much less competitive search phrase - try to put the words in the order they would be used in a search - i.e the word australia would I'm guessing come 1st instead of last - but you can use the overture search tool to check your phrases

All the posts from JayC, nvphone & markymark are really spot on - they gave much more coherent advice than I did - but have patience - you'll show up in Google seeing as you have links already - it's just a matter of time.

Originally posted by Choppy
I do have around 4 linked sites you can find out what i have just by going to google and typing in my company name surrenderonline this comes up with links of sites i have helped or some sponsors!I don't want to get too much into specifics of yours or any one site in a public forum where the best value is in information anyone can use. So to keep this in general terms that might help anyone reading here, links are what are needed; not simply plain html mentions of a domain name. And, again, links from pages with a good PageRank are what will pass PR on to you.

Your site is lacking in both those areas, and from what I see on Google there's currently no way for Google's spider to find your site.

I've PM'd you with more specific info.

Speaking of Google to by-monthly spidering.

google spiders my site everyday. i thnk they just started doing this to my site like about a few weeks ago.

http://www.google.com/search?q=dealspree


Don't know what suddenly changed. My content does change on a daily basis so it's a good thing. just surprising.

Originally posted by DealSpree.com
Speaking of Google to by-monthly spidering.

google spiders my site everyday. That's not exactly the same thing, and doesn't indicate a change in the schedule of the regular major update.

Google runs an algorithm that identifies pages that are relevant for frequent updating. There are several million that are refreshed every day, and more sites that are spidered every day to check for changes.

Also, don't confuse being spidered with the occurence of an update. The googlebot is always active, and may arrive at a given site just by following links to it. Seeing a visit from the spider on your logs doesn't mean that anything is being changed in the Google database immediately. Often you'll see scattered google visits, but then see a deep-spidering visit just before the monthly update.

In the case of those pages that have been flagged for a daily visit the cache of your site or page will be updated immediately, but you won't see major shifts on the SERPs until the regular update -- changes in things like PageRank, for example, will only happen with the major update.