5 replies to this topic

[Akuta]

I've noticed that one of my store websites that I'm testing out is eating dirt when it comes to ranking -- It's been up for about four months now and it's optimized and has a few good, quality links (not just directory links!), but it's not even in top 100 pages. I can search my exact title in quotes and it will come up about 5th down the first page where forums that talk about my website are above it. I'm assuming this is some kind of aging delay/sandbox issue, but it just seems weird that with as many quality links as I have it wouldn't be SOMEWHERE in 4 months.

The other issue I stumbled upon today with it is that if I do linkdomain: on Yahoo, it shows only one link to a category landing page. This makes me think that there is some duplicate content problems, as that page isn't linked to at all and it's one of about 20 category landing pages. I guess this could be possible, as my header/footer and left columns are all the same on my index/category pages, but each category page and the index page is very different on the main part (although not a ton of content). If duplicate content is the problem, I'm really screwed, because it's done so well as it is now.

So, are these two separate issues going on, or is it all related to the aging problem (although I didn't think Yahoo was so bad about it)? I always figured that a few quality links + good optimizing would get a site going in under 3 months, but I guess I'm living and learning (and dreaming, haha).

Thanks again, all.

[torka]

Assuming the aging delay is still working the way it used to in Google (not necessarily a valid assumption, but I haven't launched any new sites lately to test), you're looking at probably somewhere around nine months or so before you'll start to rank for useful terms. As I understand it, it's not usually a gradual thing where you come out of it slowly over those nine months. Rather, you're nowheresville for ages then in fairly short order BINGO! And there you are.

So at four months, you've likely still got a ways to go with Google.

As to the Yahoo issue, forgive me if these are really obvious questions, but I have to ask:
Did you make sure you'd selected "show inlinks not from this domain" in the Yahoo Site Explorer? (Internal links to the page from elsewhere on your site may count as links otherwise.)
Did you visit the page that was reported as a link to see if it does, in fact, have a link to that category page on it?

You might find some useful information in this article from SEOmoz: Expectations and best practices for moving to or launching a new domain.

--Torka

[Scottie]

If you are only talking about Google, 6-9 months is not uncommon for the initial waiting period. Some find it takes up to 12 months.

Duplication issues within your site can stop the spiders from crawling further- but they don't penalize you for it. Having the same main site template shouldn't flag pages as duplicates, but having the same title-description on all of them can.

[Akuta]

Argggg. I just realized I had the same description for all of them (not used to looking at this) -- I'm going to assume this is a big part of the problem.

About Yahoo; I was using the regular search, not site explorer, and typing in the brand company name in quotes, which only brought up one of the deep links, but not the home. I think that it's a mix of the same descriptions + 85% of each page is the same causing this... I'll make some meta description/category description changes today and hopefully that does the trick.

Also, every landing page is connected to every other. This isn't bad, is it?

I have multiple PR6/PR7 links (yea, yea, PR is irrelevant) and two related Wikipedia links... I'd think this would do something rather fast. The site is being visited by Google very often, but it's not going anywhere, still. But, I will eventually accept the waiting period and shut up about it!

[torka]

About Yahoo; I was using the regular search, not site explorer, and typing in the brand company name in quotes, which only brought up one of the deep links, but not the home.

I highly recommend using the Yahoo Site Explorer. Much more convenient than typing in all those commands. Plus I think you'll find it easier to ensure you're really looking at what you think you're looking at.

Also, every landing page is connected to every other. This isn't bad, is it?

Not necessarily. I have plenty of sites out there that link every page to every other page with no problems noted. Generally it's not the greatest for usability unless they're fairly small sites, but no worries from the SE standpoint AFAIK.

--Torka

[Akuta]

Little update on the situation, I'm now ranking, in Google, top 9 for the most competitive phrase (two words) in the topic my store is on, but, oddly enough, the name of the company shows up as #299. In fact, the top 10 listed for the company name are pages about my page (which was an original problem for everything, but only the company name, now). Ask/Yahoo/Others are ranking the site #1 for the company name and top 5 for most competitive phrases, but Google just doesn't want to deal. Any reason the company name wouldn't show at all like this? I read something about the +-300 penalty... but I don't really see how that would be relevant to me. It's a very clean site, no ads, no spam (haven't tried any spam... YET). The only thing kind of fishy is I had two links to the homepage in the H1 tag, the first being the company name and the second having all the keywords (I took it out since it's pointless/spammy, I thought).

Anyways, back to do some more link building and then sleep! Thx for the all the help.