SEO Tycoon

**scorpioserve** · 02-05-2009, 12:22 PM

Ok so here is my little story, I coded my own website in php and did not even think about search engines or that they would have any problems with what I was doing, but I was wrong. This was about 2 years ago, then after I learned enough to get the site up I realised that I needed to make the site SEO friendly, so I read through these forums and thought ahh thats not so hard, so I recoded most of my site and then my database to be more SEO friendly, so now I sat back and relaxed and a year later I still have a page rank of 0. PLEEEESE HELP ME. I will try explain what I have done and could someone tell me what is wrong.

I have multiple pages on my site that I want Google to look at so I made sure that I have meta keyword tags and description tags and a page title on all of those and image alt tags, on some pages that change often I put a noarchive tag, then the pages I did not want Google to see I made a robots.txt file and put it into the root of my site full of disallow statements, and on those pages I made a meta noindex and noarchive. I then made a sitemap and decided that all I needed to submit to Google was my homepage and my sitemap page as that has all the links to the other pages this way I only have to submit my sitemap once and I am done, maybe this is the problem I am not sure. I then went and signed up for Googles Webmaster Tools but I had more than one domain name linking to the same site so I submitted 3 sitemaps one for each site, I am not sure if this will be seen as duplicate content. And well that is it. I tried submitting the site dmoz and they did not list it at all, and nobody told me why either, so now I am a bit stuck.

Any advice would be appreciated

BTW I also have pages that have links to other peoples websites on I do not know if this is a good or bad thing they do not have links back to my site in return, I am basically advertising their companies on the net even though some of them already have their own websites so what I have done there is make a link on their advert page to their website and gone to their website and copied their own page description and keyword tags and used those with their advert page, Would this also be classed as duplicate content.

If I check my pagerank on my homepage it says
PageRank in Googles view of the importance of this page [0/10]
however on the advert pages it just says
No PageRank information available

I hope this all make scense to someone

TIA

**vangogh** · 02-05-2009, 07:27 PM

PageRank is a measure of links pointing into your page. More specifically it's a measure of the PageRank of pages linking into your page. If you want your PageRank to go up you need to get other sites to link to yours.

Does Google know about your site? If you search for site:www.yourdomain.com do you see results? If so you should have some PR simply based on your pages existing and linking to each other. However it could be less than 0.5 meaning Google might still show 0 in the toolbar.

If you post a link to the site we can take a look and offer more information.

The most important question though is why worry so much about PageRank? Do your pages get search traffic? Toolbar PR is just one signal about what Google thinks of your pages and site, and not the most accurate one at that. It's not the end all and be all of seo.

**seolman** · 02-05-2009, 07:50 PM

Going along with Vangogh's point, when you go out to place links, think about whether anyone will see it. I got a call yesterday from a guy trying to pay me to place links on my home page because "man you have huge PR you could be making big bucks!". I turned him down flatly for obvious reasons but he suffers from the same disease many do. It's not about PR, it's about traffic.

That particular site has over 10,000 incoming links and gets about 6,000 visits per month. It is a highly targeted site and the traffic is very specific. I have another site with a much lower PR that gets about 50,000 visits per month and is growing in traffic almost exponentially. My link placements are related to getting traffic, not PR.

**scorpioserve** · 02-05-2009, 11:59 PM

Thanks for all your time guys, I do appreciate the help so much maybe you could take a look at the site for me and see if you could clear up any of my other questions or confusions such as about my sitemap.

http://www.higuide.co.za
OR
http://www.homeimprovementguide.co.za
OR
http://www.thehomeimprovementguide.co.za

They all link to the same site.

Thanks again, I look forward to your replies.

**scorpioserve** · 06:57 AM

Just reading through my initial post, and figured I may need to clarify.

In Googles Webmaster tools, I have 3 sites all linking to the same site one for each domain, so my sitemap.xml files to google looks like this

higuidesitemap.xml
http://www.higuide.co.za/ and http://www.higuide.co.za/our_sitemap.php

homeimprovementguidesitemap.xml
http://www.homeimprovementguide.co.za/ and http://www.homeimprovementguide.co.za/our_sitemap.php

thehomeimprovementguidesitemap.xml
http://www.thehomeimprovementguide.co.za/ and http://www.thehomeimprovementguide.co.za/our_sitemap.php

is this correct or should I be giving a link to every page in my site and every time I add a page must I then resubmit my site-map files.

**chrishirst** · 02-06-2009, 04:46 AM

Simple! one site + 5 mirrors = trouble.

Decide which site address you want to keep in the index and 301 redirect the rest.

BTW. it's image alt attributes not "tags"

**scorpioserve** · 02-06-2009, 06:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Simple! one site + 5 mirrors = trouble.

Decide which site address you want to keep in the index and 301 redirect the rest.

BTW. it's image alt attributes not "tags"

Ok that make sense, I will do some searching to see how to do that with php or Mac Os X Servers Apache webserver maybe I could use the .htaccess thing, who knows I will look around.

Now once that is done then do I direct Google to a Sitemap file that only has 2 links on like this
thehomeimprovementguidesitemap.xml
http://www.thehomeimprovementguide.co.za/ and http://www.thehomeimprovementguide.co.za/our_sitemap.php

or should I list all my urls like this
http://www.thehomeimprovementguide.co.za/page1.php?x=y&a=b and http://www.thehomeimprovementguide.co.za/page2.php?x=v&a=c and
http://www.thehomeimprovementguide.co.za/page3.php?x=t&a=d and
http://www.thehomeimprovementguide.co.za/page4.php?x=g&a=e and
http://www.thehomeimprovementguide.co.za/page5.php?x=h&a=f and
etc

Thanks everyone for helping me out I know all the questions are silly, but I am asking cause everything I assumed last time did not work

Thanks

**chrishirst** · 02-06-2009, 11:23 AM

For 100+ pages why bother with a XML sitemap?

Just reference the XML sitemap in robots.txt http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=64748

**full house** · 02-08-2009, 09:13 PM

Quote:

For 100+ pages why bother with a XML sitemap?

Just reference the XML sitemap in robots.txt http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=64748

GOod point Chris. . .sitemap can help you index lots of pages.

**scorpioserve** · 02-09-2009, 05:16 AM

Thank you all so much hopefully within the next few days my site will be back in running with the search engines, I really appreciate all the help and time you have all put into helping me on this one.

**full house** · 02-09-2009, 08:50 PM

cool! next time you want to do things and you are not sure, just ask some help in this forum.

Quote:

Simple! one site + 5 mirrors = trouble.

Decide which site address you want to keep in the index and 301 redirect the rest.

BTW. it's image alt attributes not "tags"

remember this!