Problems with Google ranking

hi Ozymandias, thanks for your post!

I am quite confident that my titles are close to perfect, I have paid a lot of attention to them. Same goes for URLs, they are very friendly, and there are almost no numbers (well, there are some), mostly plain english words. So I think I fare much better on these points than 99% of the sites in SA. My pages are indexed quite well, they are *almost* as good as they can get. I mean, in the two days it worked, I had 30-50 clicks, which I think is not bad for a brand new site with less than 400 pages listed (at the time). So basically I see no problem with my indexing, listing or anything else, everything is perfect, except that my site dropped dead after 2 days.

About the ajax, I understand the problem perfectly, but I am not sure what to do about it. I tried to make some of the cotent render differently when googlebot access it, so it is all rendered right away, but I believe that this could have also lead to google blacklisting my site (learned that a bit too late).
 
swordfish1 said:
hi Ozymandias, thanks for your post!

I am quite confident that my titles are close to perfect, I have paid a lot of attention to them. Same goes for URLs, they are very friendly, and there are almost no numbers (well, there are some), mostly plain english words. So I think I fare much better on these points than 99% of the sites in SA. My pages are indexed quite well, they are *almost* as good as they can get. I mean, in the two days it worked, I had 30-50 clicks, which I think is not bad for a brand new site with less than 400 pages listed (at the time). So basically I see no problem with my indexing, listing or anything else, everything is perfect, except that my site dropped dead after 2 days.

About the ajax, I understand the problem perfectly, but I am not sure what to do about it. I tried to make some of the cotent render differently when googlebot access it, so it is all rendered right away, but I believe that this could have also lead to google blacklisting my site (learned that a bit too late).
Click to expand...

The initial clicks could be traffic from spiders as they crawl your site. Do you have good statistics software - these should differentiate between search engine traffic and human traffic. If Google isn't indexing your Ajaxed content - duplicate that content onto static pages and have a sitemap index link on your front page. On the other hand, your pages might already be static in which case, no duplication is necessary - just add the sitemap. You can also try Google sitemaps www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ . You would need a program like CoffeeCup Google Sitemapper to crawl your site and the upload the resulting XML file to your site's root.

I wouldn't be overanxious at this stage. I have seen sites that move slowly up the search resultset ranks without intervention. It can take quite a while but ultimately it's worth the wait.
 
thanks Ozymandias!

the traffic I was refering to is human, there is a lot of non-human traffic but I have discarded it.

I have done the whole sitemap thing as well.

About the site index with static pages, I have only 1 problem with that, and I would appreciate if somebody can tell me the anwer:

Ok, lets say I will crate this nice static index for google and submit a sitemap with links to that, or put a link to it somewhere on the site. Now, isnt't that mean that google will show the "static" links in its searches? and when somebody does search, and click on a link to my site, he or she will land on the static page rather than on the normal one? Or am I missing something?
 
my conspiracy theory is that google is not doing anything about supporting ajax, so only they can use it for their web applications ... effectively killing the competition in all areas
 
swordfish1 said:
thanks Ozymandias!

the traffic I was refering to is human, there is a lot of non-human traffic but I have discarded it.

I have done the whole sitemap thing as well.

About the site index with static pages, I have only 1 problem with that, and I would appreciate if somebody can tell me the anwer:

Ok, lets say I will crate this nice static index for google and submit a sitemap with links to that, or put a link to it somewhere on the site. Now, isnt't that mean that google will show the "static" links in its searches? and when somebody does search, and click on a link to my site, he or she will land on the static page rather than on the normal one? Or am I missing something?
Click to expand...

You're 100% correct there. They are going to land on the static page as a point-of-entry but if all the links on your static page point to your Ajaxed pages, vistors will move eventually to your dynamic pages. I know this is not ideal and it is merely workaround to get Google to index your content. Google will also follow the links on your static pages and hit a dead-end when it encounters your dynamic pages. It will then head back to the sitemap and follow the next link (well hopefully). There could well be better solutions than this and it would be wise to invest the time investigating alternatives.

I don't know if this article would be of any help.
 
thanks Ozymandias!

I am doing some research as we speak ... but it isn't very encouraging, mostly I find articles telling how Ajax is going to get killed by the search engines, just like Flash ... it doesn't look good
 
swordfish1 - take a look at Google Webmaster Help on Google Groups. That link is for Ajax + Sitemap or try Google Webmaster Help for search results on Ajax alone. Just had a quick look there now and I read some interesting workarounds which sound quite feasible.
 
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thanks Ozymandias!

been there, even posted a topic asking about the problem, got the usual "this is normal google behaviour", which I can't really believe ...

some of the stuff they suggest I've used already. To me the biggest problem is now knowing what precisely is the problem and what caused it. Solving the problem will probably be not that difficult.

in summary, if you think about it, we have the following:
1. you can't use tabs because they require hidden text
2. you can't have client side dynamic content because it requires JS
3. you can't generate special pages for the search engines as this is pecieved cloacking
4. you can't render your page differently for seaech engines, again cloacking ...

it seems to me that you have to either be happy with a 20th century site, or you just have to give up on search engine
 
swordfish1 - saw your post on Google Groups. Really nice site you have there. I'm impressed and it loads super quick. I see that your site has 414 pages indexed with Google and they are all product pages. Taking your home page and the digital cameras category as an example. The underlying code for the link to this category page is
href="/category/photooptics/digitalphoto" onclick="return loadCategoryPage (this, 168);"
Click to expand...
This is fine because a search engine sees the href="/category/photooptics/digitalphoto" and ignores the Javascript onClick event handler. As long as there is a static HTML page behind all your HREF links, then I cannot see search engines being unable to index all your pages. Your visitors, with Javascript enabled in their browsers, will see the Ajaxed content.

I don't think that your site is in the Google suplemental index. You are at the bottom of search results because you are competing against established sites which have been allocated PageRanks by Google. Despite your titles, until you have a PageRank allocated to your site, the others have an advantage over you. I would guess that when you have a PageRank, Google's algorithms come into play. That algorithm could then determine your search result ranking according to a combination of how high your PageRank for that particular page, as well as the relevance of the search term employed against your title or content.

Google should allocate you a PageRank soon. Usually it starts off at about 2 or 3 but it can take ages before all your pages get one and then, these can often be much lower than the PageRank on your home page. However, listing your products on comparison shopping websites, will provide valuable inward links to all your static product pages. You can even list your products on places like Bid or Buy with a links to the specific static product pages. Listing in directories such as dmoz.org and others will boost your home page rankings but not help much with your product pages. I would also add links to your static product pages into your MyADSL signature. Keep changing your signature link periodically to point to another static product page until they are all covered.
 
swordfish... care to share the url? by pm if you are concerned about the mods deleting the post. In this case I'm sure they won't. The topic is fairly interesting and I don't think it would be taken as spam.
 
Well listed site, of all referrers Google will make up most probably about 40%.

swordfish1 said:
by the way, does anyone have any stats form a reasonable sized web site as to what is the percentage distribution of clicks by referral, e.g 50% come from google, 20% from yahoo, 10% from MSN ... or something like that

I just want to see if I am totally doomed or I can somehow survive in this highly competitve market without even being listed on google.
Click to expand...
 
hi Ozymandias, thanks yet again :)

very helpful post, will be doing all these things in the next couple of days

hope you right about google!

the bad thing about the comparison sites is that they don't list your URLs but theirs and it is a redirect to your site, so basically they are good for clicks but not for improving rating on google ... but will try them too, want to know what the conversion ratio is, will be interesting

thanks!
 
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