Comments on Reality SEO - Search Engine Commentary: 60 Day Sandbox for Google, AskJeeves. MSN Quickest...

Thanks for the feedback.CyberNoggin.com actually w...

2006-03-20T07:57:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the feedback.

CyberNoggin.com actually went through an entire re-write, so all old pages on Google (and any other search engine) would generate the 404 errors. I obviously didn't handle this correctly with redirects on the new platform.

I do utilize Google Analytics and have set up a Google Sitemap (via. modules in a CMS called drupal - drupal.org), so I can see where people are hitting me from and whether Google is pulling the sitemap (which they do several times a day).

I'm hoping that since Google knows the exact content of my site via the sitemap, that I get totally indexed soon.

Strange thing is I get different results depending on which Google server I hit... For example, I go into Google Sitemaps and look for indexed pages and it varies from 7 to 38 (most often is in the single digits).

Hopefully I'll get out of the sandbox soon and see if drupal's SEO optimization provides similar rankgings on Google.

Thanks!

Cybernoggin,Google currently shows 8 pages indexed...

2006-01-30T09:19:00.000-08:00

Cybernoggin,

Google currently shows 8 pages indexed at your site. You can find this by using the "site:cybernoggin.com" query operator (without quotes) and doing a search at Google. The biggest problem right now is that all but two of those pages lead to 404 errors when clicked on from the Google results page. You will clearly suffer in the rankings if your site leads to 404 pages from all search results.

Secondly, once you fix those errors. It will simply take longer to get indexed by Google. Your site shows 676 pages indexed at MSN and most of those I clicked on landed on good pages on your site. This may simply be because MSN indexes more quickly and updates pages based on the new crawl.

Take heart though, if you are seeing the Googlebot crawler on your site recently and it is NOT generating 404 errors, the links will update in Google once they add newly crawled pages and links to their index.

Last, Yahoo shows only 15 results for pages on your site using the site:cybernoggin.com query operator. Once again, those links lead to 404 errors, so early crawls apparently were retrieving bad links and indexing them. Again, this will change as newly crawled pages are updated in the Yahoo index.

If your site is dynamic and generates changing URL's for the same pages, that will delay indexing and ultimately destroy ranking. URL's cannot change and you can't rank well if there are multiple paths to the same content due to duplicate content penalties.

You need to figure out if it was simply the early crawls that lead to bad links currently listed by Google and Yahoo. Then be patient. It takes a long time lately to get indexed and then even longer to get ranked well.

One of the biggest problems you will have is competing with other affiliate sites selling the same security software. That is a competitive and crowded market segment - as you can easily see by doing searches for any of those products.

Good luck with the battle!

My site CyberNoggin.com was replatformed in early ...

2006-01-30T06:06:00.000-08:00

My site CyberNoggin.com was replatformed in early January 2006. I have seen a delay in the new content showing up on the major search engines exept MSN. MSN has ALL site content and new content shows up days later.

Google, Yahoo and AskJeeves bots are very active, but indexed content, to this point in time (30 days later) is only the homepage.

Our site is dynamic with MYSQL, and PHP, and MSN does seem to index quickly.