12 replies to this topic

[upyrj]

Hello everybody.
The question may look silly, but I just need to come to an important decision...

I got a hotel website that has the following structure:
host/ — the site in Russian
host/eng/ — the same info translated to English
host/de/ — the same info translated to German

The site is hosted in Russia.

The Russian part ranks well in the Russian #1 SE Yandex.ru, and not so bad in Google (for Russian keywords).
But the English and German parts rank awfully bad for the English keywords.
The only English or German Google traffic that the site gets is accidental traffic from Google Images. 8)

The task is to improve ranking for the English keywords for UK and USA IPs.

I'm quite sure that my site is in the Sandbox (as some Russian SEOs say, there is no Sandbox for the Russian keywords, so it can be seen only for English keywords). And probably the optimization for Russian SEs played a bad role for my Google ranking, as Russian SEs do not make any penalty for bad backlinks or for fast links, or for non-thematic link exchange, while Google most probably does.

Another bad thing is that the most wanted keyword is «hotel in st petersburg», but not meaning St. Petersburg, Florida, but St. Petersburg, Russia, and I have to compete with the sites of hotels in the USA... But for now it is decided to concentrate on «hotel in st petersburg russia».

So the question is what would be the most effective solution:
(1) Try to get out from the sandbox with this site
or maybe
(2) Buy a new «warm and fuzzy» domain and to pass a sandbox with this one. With American hosting as well.
Surely I could do the both — but it should take twice much efforts, which I can not afford.

Thank you for any advice in advance.

Edited by upyrj, 23 October 2006 - 11:01 PM.

[Jill]

Try to get out for the sandbox with this site

It's easy to get out. Just give it time. No sense playing games or tricks or buying other domains. Simply pay your dues (by waiting 9-12 months) and you'll be good to go.

[upyrj]

Thanks for a prompt reply. 8)

The problem is that the site is rather old (ca. 5 years old — so the dues could be overpaid), and still biting the sand, and Russian SEOptimization could really damage it. It can be not just a Sandbox, but maybe some other penalty (I'm not so sure in terms), but yet indexed. And by the way I definitely can not get rid of Russian-oriented link exchange. 8(
So is that true that:
1. being a folder inside an other-language-site is ok for Google?
2. a new domain is as awful as a sandboxed old domain?

[Jill]

The problem is that the site is rather old (ca. 5 years old

Then it has nothing to do with the "sandbox." You probably just haven't optimized it as well as you could.

Please read the Tips for Newbies here to get started.

[glengara]

*But the English and German parts rank awfully bad for the English keywords.*

How are you doing for links in English/German?

[upyrj]

Well they exist, but maybe too few. That was what one «SE guru» told me recently. But also he said that my ranking is much worse then expected, so maybe my site is under some penalties... It ranks very low even for it's proper name.

By the way, is it possible that some regional 3rd-level domains are pessimized intentially? Maybe it be the case?

Or maybe I did not understand the question?.. 8/

[foamcow]

Who wrote the English and German translations?

EDIT: Actually, I'm not sure that will be of any relevance lol

Edited by foamcow, 24 October 2006 - 06:31 AM.

[upyrj]

Well, I am sure that the texts are at least comprehensible.
And they do contain keywords I need.

[Bernard]

I believe you are on the right track with targeting phrases including the word Russia. Searchers in the USA who are looking for a hotel in St. Petersburg, Russia will most likely tack Russia on to their search after seeing SERPs filled with results for Florida.

I would imagine that english/USA SERPs for hotels in Russia would not be that competitive (though I have not checked), so if you are no where to be found, I'm guessing you've got some issues that need to be addressed.

You could try moving your existing english version of the site to a subdomain (en.host versus host/en), but I'm not sure how much that would help. It's not as easy to get deep links or subdomain links as domain/home page links, so you might be better off building a new site as you suggested. It will be easier to promote it in English only directories and I'm guessing you won't have to do too much work to succeed with your keyphrase targets.

[upyrj]

Thank you, Bernard.

Actually American SERPs are rather competive with thousands MSN backlinks, and with USA adresses in the whois. I wonder is this a real measure... If so, they are tough guys comparing to me.

The American SERPs for the keywords without the word «Russia» are mixed, and most sites in the Top10 mean Russia. The narrowing of the main keyword was made only to have a more reachable target for the beginning. But I may be wrong about the comparative easiness of these keywords.

I may be a bit impolite, if I ask for a link to some list of conditions, in which Google can penalty a site? I would like to be sure that I did not spoil my site for Google while promoting it in Russian SEs, and if I did spoil it really badly — just to be sure I need a new site.

[Bernard]

One other thought occurred to me - did you specify the character encoding for your pages? Are you using a Cyrillic charset for all pages or different charsets for the English and German pages? It's possible the search engines just can't understand your pages if the charset is wrong.

[upyrj]

Actually no: all pages' encoding is set to windows-1251. But Latin letters are the same in both Western and Cyrillic charsets.
And there is no problems in snippets or whatever.
It could be reasonable only if the charset were a characteristic for the regional attribution...
Anyway, thank you, I just changed the encoding. I shall be happy if this works. 8)

Edited by upyrj, 24 October 2006 - 04:41 PM.

[Randy]

I'm not sure how competitive the German marketplace is since I don't target it specifically myself, however much of what you're probably seeing is simply the level of competitiveness.

Those English searches --that most consider to be US, but are really Worldwide-- are usually going to have considerably more real competition than any local/regional market. This pretty much applies to any keyword phrase you can come up with. It's not just the sheer number of sites competing, but also the level of optimization and sophistication. The .COM world is just more competitive and thus harder to obtain a high ranking.