i had done link exchange with many sites to boost my search engine ratings and it started to work my site started getting notice and used to get some hits through the search engines, but after two month or so all the pages of my site suddenly vanished from the search engines??? but google bots regulary visits my site, though it doesnt scan through the site just the robots.txt file??? any ideas y?

whats the url of your site

Did you change hosts/IPs? That changes your SE rankings and stuff IIRC.

Originally posted by illusionist
but google bots regulary visits my site, though it doesnt scan through the site just the robots.txt file??? any ideas y? That's normal googlebot activity (it's probably reading both your index file and robots.txt) -- there's a deep crawl once a month, and between those cycles you'll often get a visit just to the index file... and possibly then a "fresh" crawl, which doesn't hit all sites and doesn't crawl as deeply as the monthly crawl does.

As to the first point, what kind of sites did you do a link exchange with? Google doesn't like link farms, and has been known to penalize sites that use or link heavily with sites that use tools like "zeus."

When you say "suddenly vanished from search engines" do you mean you're not in the database at all, or that you're ranking much worse than before? And does the plural "search engines" mean that you've seen a change in more than just Google?

no i didnt link to any link farm i was very picky with the sites i linked it ( http://www.iomx.com/links/links.htm ) have a look. yes i saw a change in google and yahoo and msn could it be my meta tag? http://www.iomx.com there hasnt been a crawl of anykind in two months just the frequent visits to the robots file?

If you really want top rankings and no BS the go to www.handsubmit.com

To get high SE rankings, a site needs to be about something, not everything. And the external links need to be from sites on the same topic.

That iomx link given seems like a nicely constructed site but it covers a multitude of sins. The site is unlikely to be highly ranked and having a link on that site is not going to be particularly useful either.

It was ranking good on the search engines b4, i want to know howcome only the index page shows up on the search engine while the rest arent there. Its a portal, its supposed to cover a lot. what u mean it wont get higher ratings?

Originally posted by Gordo
To get high SE rankings, a site needs to be about something, not everything. And the external links need to be from sites on the same topic.While there's some validity to that, certainly there are many high-ranking portal sites. And Google's prime measure of links, PageRank, doesn't care what kind of sites the link come from (while some other search engines do). Redesigning the site, though, with a themed approach would be a good move. That iomx link given seems like a nicely constructed site but it covers a multitude of sins. It does, but not only in the way you mean. That's about as far from valid html as you can get and still have a site "work." Illusionist, you should validate your html and get it at least close to valid; the site has many serious errors and some of those could cause search engine problems.


One of the problems is that you aren't enclosing the "content" attributes of your tags with quotes. More than likely search engine spiders are being stopped, then, by the invalid meta robots tag. You don't even need that tag if you're going to stick with the default value of "index, follow" -- so you may as well just remove it.


The problem is not your meta keywords tag if that's the one you mean; most search engines now ignore the meta keywords tag completely (so you should stay away from any search engine "optimization" service that uses their meta tag "expertise" as their main selling point).

But you still do have to focus on keywords -- not in the meta keywords tags, but in on-page elements like heading tags, link anchor text, alt attributes, and of course page text, to name a few. Incoming links are definitely important, but the content of the site itself is more important; and I really can't see any search term for which I'd expect this site to rank well. You say it used to? For which terms, and at which search engines?

terms such lyrics, hindi lyrics, hindi tabs, funny animation, funny clips, sharing software, etc etc .

Now to improve the rankings what do i need to do...i am working on whole new layout and changing mostly eveything on the site. Are there any tips i need to follow to get better rankings ????

Originally posted by illusionist
Now to improve the rankings what do i need to do...i am working on whole new layout and changing mostly eveything on the site. Are there any tips i need to follow to get better rankings ???? Again, validate your html. Many validation errors won't matter to search engines, but some will. Be sure to read my edit to my previous post. Also, spell check. "Astronomy" is misspelled on the link on all of your pages; that's not going to help in rankings for astronomy-related searches (although, going after traffic from misspellings is a reasonable strategy). As another example, "LimeWire" is misspelled as "Limiwire" in your Morpheus article. There are a lot of similar misspellings, and when they involve your keywords they are important.

Search engine friendly pages have several paragraphs worth of text content, and have heading tags, text links, a descriptive title, etc. -- content that search engines can digest. Minimize the use of javascript, Flash, etc.

On a portal site it can be challenging optimize the home page because it has to cover a wide variety of topics and changes constantly -- but realize that most search engine traffic will come through other pages anyway, so you should pay great attention to optimizing your internal pages.

In which page did you find this error -
One of the problems is that you aren't enclosing the "content" attributes of your tags with quotes. More than likely search engine spiders are being stopped, then, by the invalid meta robots tag. You don't even need that tag if you're going to stick with the default value of "index, follow" -- so you may as well just remove it.
can u give me the page url???? and also what is a link anchor text ?