May 13
A few weeks back we launched a site we’ve been working on (Royal Arsenal) for one of our developments in London - I’ve followed just about every hint/tip to make sure it’s good for search engines, it meets Priority A accessbility, HTML is all valid, CSS validates yet a simple search for ‘Royal Arsenal’ on Google doesn’t show the site anywhere in the results! And yes, it was submitted weeks ago! Google indexes the site daily but still nothing…
May 13th, 2005 at 5:26 am
Hi mate,
How strange! Just looked at the HTML, and noticed you use H1 twice on the home page. I’d suggest changing the second H1 to an H2.
That probably won’t do anything but at least you’re then creating a hierachy of headers.
Cheers
Niklas
May 13th, 2005 at 9:55 am
I think Google has recently introduced a probation period for new sites in an effort to cut down on spam. Google the term "sandbox effect."
May 13th, 2005 at 10:57 pm
Hey John,
There’s a few issues here. Yes, Google does seem to have a "cooling off" period (sometimes up to eight months) for new domain names - but during the so-called "sandboxed" period you should still be able to find the site when searching for it’s exact name - it’s only "competitive terms" which are filtered out from the general results. If you run a query excluding about 13 nonsensical terms - eg, "royal arsenal -asdf -asdf -asdf" etc - you should be able to see where the site would be ranked if it were outside of the sandbox (I prefer the term "ageing filter").
If you do a search in google for "site:royal-arsenal.co.uk" you’ll see all the pages that google has for that domain - and you’ll see there’s lots. However, the location of the text on each page (way down in the source order) and the lack of distinct meta tags are causing those indexed pages to not have any information other than the URL. Google has visited the pages but hasn’t indexed them properly.
If you click on any of those links from Google, you’ll see the style information isn’t being applied - you might wanna check into that. Also, when I try to type in royal-arsenal.co.uk (without the "www") my browser tells me that page cannot be found - another issue you might wanna check.
Next, do a search in Google for "link:www.royal-srsenal.co.uk" - that shows you some of the pages that are linking to the site that Google knows about. Google won’t show you everything but other search engines do a much better job. You need lots of links to the site using the target keyword in the anchor text in order to get good rankings.
Finally, if your company or client decides to hire a professional SEO, be very very careful to get someone who understands how dynamic sites work and what can be done on the technical side, and also someone reputable who won’t try any dirty tricks with Google - once you get banned it’s very difficult to get un-banned. There are some real bozos out there! I’ve been handling SEO where I work for nearly 18 months now, and while the challenge is great fun, reading what other people in the industry do and recommend to others makes my skin crawl on a regular basis
May 23rd, 2005 at 7:54 am
Good tips Kay, thanks for sharing!