opaque to Google

This may seem a bizarre question, but I'm at my wit's end (not that great a distance granted).

In February of 04, the company I work for added a domain to our plan. Not a subdomain, but not a new plan either. Dreamhost lets you host additional domains for no additional cost. "Nice deal!" we thought.

("We" are FAYFOTO, a commercial photography outfit. Our primary account with DreamHost is www.fayfoto.com Google has indexed the main site)

The new domain is http://www.bostonscenicphotos.com/

I thought it was interesting that both domains' root directories lie at the same level in our account directory, but didn't think much about it.

However, nothing I have done seems to cause our new site to show up in Google. I have metatags with keywords, titles that are relevant and enough pertinent body copy that I was confident in short order we would be indexed.

I checked to see if I had left any robot no-follow files around. I haven't done anything stupid like hidden text. I have done everything with the html I can think of to be friendly to an indexing spider. I requested that Google index us. Three times. Nothing so far.

Being at the end of my ideas I started to wonder if - far fetched as it might seem - there was something about the directory structure of an additional domain that in some way "hides" it from the Google bots?

I would not be surprised if you said such an idea was rubbish (Dreamhost support didn't think this was the problem) but - I can't for the life of me figure out why we don't show up at all in spite of doing everything I can think of to be visible.

It's true that we aren't linked to by many (or possibly even any) other sites yet, and I understand that has a bearing on things (ranking in particular). But come on - Goole pulls up the most obscure sites that can't ALL be linked to by other sites!

Thanks for any thoughts you might have on the subject.

The best way to get Google to index your new site is to link to it from the other site. In the meantime, I suggest you submit your URL to Google directly.

Thanks for your reply Simon.
The main FAYFOTO site does have a link link to the new site. I don't think there are many OTHER (non-FAYFOTO) sites linking to the new site, but one at least does!

I have manually submitted to Google (three times as mentioned).

My relatively limited knowledge in hosting tells me that it has little if not nothing to do with the "directory structure" (or whatever you mean by that); HOWEVER,

> However, nothing I have done seems to cause our new site to show up in Google. I have metatags with keywords, titles that are relevant and enough pertinent body copy that I was confident in short order we would be indexed.

Being indexed and showing up could be two very different things. bostonscenicphotos.com is definitely indexed:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=bostonscenicphotos.com

But whether it shows up with the particular search string(s) is another story. That your first site is doing good does not necessarily makes your second one (with similar SEO effort) rank high: it could be search result #47,501 for "boston scenic photos". Who knows?

A few comments (of questionable reliability), on your homepage, fwiw:

Your keywords are many, and (at a glance) appear to have several that are not otherwise in your body text; this might cause negative google karma points.

Likewise, the title has similar words included, but not quite the same phrases as what's in the body text.

Is the abstract tag common?

I don't know how reliable this is, but your revisit-after tag made me look:

In reply to:

---

The revisit-after META tag is of no value when it comes to developing metadata for a search engine marketing campaign. Adding the code for irrelevant metadata shifts the text to html content ratio which may be that one little thing that moves you into the top positions in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

---

Two words: link exchanges

Lastly, maybe it's true what they say about google running out of index room. :-)

Cheers,

BobS

prufrock: "it has little if not nothing to do with the "directory structure" Yeah, my suspicion too, and DreamHost's. It sounded far-fetched to me, just a straw I was grasping at. Took me a month to get up the nerve to ask it "out loud" as it were!

"Being indexed and showing up could be two very different things. bostonscenicphotos.com is definitely indexed"

Ahh - very good point I had noticed that we did show up when the actual url was put in, but hadn't made the mental distinction between being indexed and anything that could be remotely considered useful from a potential customer's point of view.


Interesting.

ardco: okay, it IS embarrassing to be caught using obsolete meta tags. :) Hmmm. Wonder whose code I lfted THAT from. years ago I'm sure. I'll drop it, but the link you gave didn't indicate that penalty points were assigned!

Likewise the abstract tag. I know I didn't make it up but I don't know if it's relevant any more. I believed it was similar to "description": the text some search engines use to give meaningful text after the link in the search results page. Not that it would be useful for ranking, but would give the searcher some useful sense of what they would be getting into if they clicked the link. I'll look into it more.

You really think the discrepancy between the keywords and body text would generate suspicion? Gads. I figured the more (pertinent) keywords the better my chances were, but I see what you are saying. Never thought of myself in the league with porn sites that load "coca cola" in their keywords, but maybe that's what it looks like to a bot. Sheesh.

"Two words: link exchanges" - okay, I hear you. I wasn't convinced that that mattered as much as or more than well made pages, but I'm becoming a believer.

And Google running out of indexing room???? That's a scary thought!

Thank you all for your suggestions.

Not crazy I guess:
http://www.submitcorner.com/Guide/Meta/abstract.shtml

I may be wrong, but I always thought Google doesn't care much (if at all) about the keywords meta tag because it can be so easily abused.

In my experience, having many links from other sites (the higher ranked, the better) seems to be the most important factor in ranking :)

> Ahh - very good point I had noticed that we did show up when the actual url was put in, but hadn't made the mental distinction between being indexed and anything that could be remotely considered useful from a potential customer's point of view.

Yeah, MOST websites are indexed, it's just that when it comes to searches (i.e. from the end-user's perspective), it's the ranking that matters. I don't know which (or which several) search string(s) you are using (I assume it would be "Boston scenic photos" or "Boston photos" for bostonscenicphotos.com), but doing good in Google is not something we can take for granted (even with *some* effort), or all those SEO specialists will be out of their jobs. LOL! :D If you are not doing this full-time, don't be greedy; pick your best search strings (start with a single 3-word phrase) and optimize your website with that. Just my two cents.

"pick your best search strings (start with a single 3-word phrase) and optimize your website with that"

I was once naive enough to think I had a clue what I was doing.
:(

When you say "optimize your website with that" - are you suggesting that (aside from links from other sites) title and body copy in particular should include the terms I want us to be "found" by? And that keywords and description meta tags are of secondary importance, at least to Google?

If I put "Boston+scenic+photos" into Google, the first hit on the first page is a page that violates most every rule I know. Forget contemporary design practices (no doctype, no CSS, no semantic structure of any sort) - the keywords aren't even comma delimited! But it's the first one. Go figure.

If I put in "Boston+scenic+photo" I get an entirely different group of sites, these a bit more sophisticated.

Sigh.

Okay. Thanks for all the suggestions. I think I'll leave the code on the pages as they are for now and focus my energies on getting us linked by other sites.

> embarrassing to be caught using obsolete meta tags.

Hey Steve,

Don't give it a 2nd thought. I don't know that it makes any difference, and you obviously haven't looked at my site. :-)

> the first hit on the first page is a page that violates most every rule I know. Forget contemporary design practices (no doctype, no CSS, no semantic structure of any sort) - the keywords aren't even comma delimited! But it's the first one. Go figure.

If you're talking about home.earthlink.net/~swensonstudio/boston.htm, I thought it was interesting that it redirects to http://home.earthlink.net/~swensonstudio/index.htm. The old page obviously had "boston" in the URL, and had "Boston" and "Scenic" in the page Title. Maybe your domain would work better as boston-scenic-photos; maybe google doesn't recognize the 3 words as is?

Look at google's cache for pages near the top. See how many times each word is highlighted and/or used in links to the page?

I don't know if this matters much, but I wonder if your page Title is a bit long - it runs off my display - for Google's tastes, since they seem to use titles a lot in their results?

Not saying you don't, but I'd also make a plug for good intentions or fair play, or whatever you want to call it. Have good content, with good words/descriptions, and you'll find your way to the top (maybe). Gaming google too much is a little, well, you know... like trying too hard. :-)

As for css and such, not using it hasn't made a difference (in google) AFAIK for most of my stuff, although maybe that's why my page ranks are only fair to poor. :-)

I also think relative uniqueness helps. Unfortunately for you, there's going to be a lot of pages out there with boston, scenic, and photo(s).

> focus my energies on getting us linked

What's that expression? Think globally, act locally? No time like the present...

Boston Scenic Photos, baby!

Cheers,

BobS

> When you say "optimize your website with that" - are you suggesting that (aside from links from other sites) title and body copy in particular should include the terms I want us to be "found" by? And that keywords and description meta tags are of secondary importance, at least to Google?

The use of keywords and description metatags is just a small part of nowaday SEO effort (if any at all). True, it WAS important back in the older times, but with more "intelligent" search engines like Google (which basically scans your whole website for search strings in coherent context in order to decide your ranking in their search results), these metatags have much lesser roles (again, if any at all).

And your search strings matter. Only you (as the industry insider or a person with specific knowledge re: your website topic) can tell what your potential clients or visitors are looking for. Using the example of bostonscenicphotos.com again, your best bet would be "boston photos", "boston pictures", etc. And yes, plurals or not incurs VERY different results, so does using quotation marks or not.

Like I said, there are A LOT that could be done or have to be done in order to get to the top, and that's why there are professional SEO specialists who are charging hundreds, and some even thousands just to get your website there. Hope this explain a bit more. :)

Thank you all very much for your input. You've given me a lot to chew on and I appreciate all the suggestions.

"there are A LOT that could be done or have to be done in order to get to the top"

You know, the phrase "get to the top" sort of put my whole question in perspective. Here's why. I could live without being at "the top". Put the search string we have been discussing into Yahoo and we come up #31. Not great, but out of thousands of matches not so bad either. I look at that and say "with some effort and planning I can do better".

When we don't appear even after 15+ pages of Google results ... I look at that and say "something is seriously wrong here". Pulling our rankings up from #31 to, let's say #15 is an achievable goal. But when there aren't ANY terms I can put in a search (other than the exact URL) that returns us, even exact phrases from the body copy.... That seemed so peculiar. I just wanted to see if anyone had any insight as to why we don't appear at all. I got tips I can really work with and I thank you for that. I'm still wonder why we don't even exist as far as Google is concerned.

#31 on Yahoo is actually not bad at all. Like I said, people pay thousands to get to the top 10. I personally don't browse beyond #60, so anything worse is like absolute zero to me: doesn't matter. Allow me to brag about a bit (disclaimer: not soliciting business though). I have successfully "pulled" a client's website out of nowhere (a.k.a. beyond #60 at Google; could be #61, don't know) to #1 in less than a week. Of course, it really depends on your target search strings. You could guess that "web hosting" or "new york restaurants" are way much more difficult to "optimize". Fortunately, my client is in the business of distributing a special kind of machine (so special that you won't see it in your local Home Depot store), so their preferred 2-word search string is only known to industry insiders. But my point is: it CAN be done. :)

You may also note that Yahoo and Google are using 2 very different algorithms.

One thing I notice is that the phrase "boston scenic photos" does not appear anywhere on your page. Your masthead uses a graphic and Google does not read your alt text. Google seems to give preference to sites that have content that matches (or closely matches) a phrased inquiry. If you changed your homepage text to include those words your rank might also improve. (Maybe create a footer with the phrase and a link back to your homepage and put it on every page)

Links to your site from others also make a huge difference.

I also notice that longevity seems to play a role. Some sites of dubious quality may rank very high in a Google search just because they have been on the web for years.

> When we don't appear even after 15+ pages of Google results

I see the site's now at page 3 and #27 in Google for that search, and seems to be fully indexed/reported.

Google doesn't report many links, but MSN (yuck! :-) does.

Even if Google doesn't show it, I think it was Jason's links or mine above that did the trick. :-)

> Your masthead uses a graphic and Google does not read your alt text.

How about the title text for images?

Cheers,

BobS

Well shame on me for not staying in touch with this thread.
:(
Thanks for the comments and suggestions. Motivated by the last 2, I modified the header to be a level 1 heading with an image replacement, so now "Boston Scenic Photos" is the heading text, but it's not displayed as such - the page still looks the same. Hopefully that will make sense to an indexing bot. We'll also make a greater effort to get links from related municipal sites.

Thanks again for your comments and help.

> Some sites of dubious quality may rank very high in a Google search just because they have been on the web for years.

Hey, I resemble that remark. : )

I'm always mystified by which of my pages climb high in Google's rankings for certain search terms.

Case in point - I recently wrote a short post to my blog about some cool boots that had a Day of the Dead pattern.
http://www.wombatnation.com/2004/11/wicked-cool-boots
For some bizarre reason, this page is #2 on Google for the search term "cool boots". All I can figure is that "cool boots" appeared in the title and that I update my site pretty frequently. I am fairly certain that no other sites link to that page.

I also am #1 on Google for the search term "incinerator toilet", but that is totally justified. Unfortunately, the first link goes to my old blog (one of these days I will master mod_rewrite). The #2 link goes to my current blog, though.
http://www.wombatnation.com/2003/01/i-google-own-incinerator-toilet

And if you're thinking I got to the top of the incendiary waste disposal pile by brown-nosing (no pun intended) and putting Google's name in the title, try searching on "incinerating toilet", where the link to the real story appears at #3.

Robert
http://www.wombatnation.com/

Despite all the discussion about pagerank using automated methods, I wonder if being part of the "largest human-edited directory on the web" doesn't also play a significant part. Those links may get extra weight in the pagerank scores. Your blog is there in the directory with respectable pagerank.

BobS

Well, at least I edged out "Will Smith Nude", but I've got a lot of blogs to surpass in googularity before catching up to "What Kind of Sick Weirdo Are You?"

Hmmm, if I create another blog, I think I will try to find another starting letter that is even more unpopular than W. I'm thinking a Q blog is in my future. Yes, yes, domination of the Q category is there for the taking.

Robert
http://www.wombatnation.com/

I am just starting on the web business ..small time.

I also submitted my site to google but it doesnt show up evenn in the end..it has been more than 3 weeks. (when i type the key words). What does one do ??

if i pay google to show my site up on the sponsored links (with diff keywords...the one I use currently are very expensive) , will it help showing up in page ranks also ?

> it has been more than 3 weeks...What does one do ??

http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/1.html

"crawl the web on a monthly basis"

Has your site been crawled already?


"2. Submitting your site

We add thousands of new sites to our index each time we crawl the Web, but if you like, you may submit your URL as well. Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given the large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through the URL submission form. We DO NOT add all submitted URLs to our index, and cannot predict when or if they will appear."


"2. What else can I do to get listed in Google?

If you are having difficulty getting listed in the Google index, you may want to consider submitting your site to Yahoo! or Netscape. You can submit to Yahoo! by visiting http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/. You can submit your site to Netscape's Open Directory Project (DMOZ) by visiting www.dmoz.org. Once your site is included in either of these directories, Google will often index your site within six to eight weeks."

> if i pay google ... will it help showing up in page ranks also ?

"Google does not accept payment for inclusion (known as "paid inclusion") of sites in our index, nor for improving the rank of sites in our results. We do offer advertising opportunities adjacent to our results, which are always clearly labeled "Sponsored Links." "

Good luck,

BobS

if your site uses frame will that cause google to not index or rank your site properly? If so are there options to optimize your website

Steve,

Your site is given a PR3, so it is definitely being indexed by google and when you type in *boston scenic photos* in the google search box, your site is listed #3 :S

I am not sure what your question is.

Your metas could be a little better (less keywords/more keyphrases) and a better meta description...but other than that, i am not sure what the problem is.....I do SEO work on occassion and I simply do not understand your frustration.



IAmAtMyWitsEnd

Steve started the thread 5 months ago, it's only recently been resurrected by someone else, yes, it's doing better now ;)

jason

Update: Hey, look who's now #1 in Google for both boston+scenic+photo and boston+scenic+photos !

Cheers,

BobS

hoo-rah baby :)

jason

> Update: Hey, look who's now #1 in Google for both boston+scenic+photo and boston+scenic+photos !

Okay Steve, you'll get my invoice very soon. :D

Oh my goodness. That's somewhat astonishing. I guess part of the SEO equation (for some small sites anyway) is patience? I haven't really modified anything significant since the first round of reactions to my initial post and yet - it is performing better! Huh.

Well - thank you all again for your suggestions and for keeping your eyes on this thread.

they figured out that your content was relevant ;)

jason