Hello! Hope someone can help me here. I've had a website registered for a few weeks. Google found me, and I was ranking in the first 2 or 3 on keyword searches.....and then it lost me! Now it tells me that certain keywords that are very specific for my site simply cannot be found.

I suspect I've done something wrong, but I don't know what.

Would somebody mind having a look at the site? It's NOT a complicated site, so it shouldn't take very long. I'd appreciate that very much.

url is www.biofarmag.com.au

Many thanks!

Jeff

It happens, sites bounce in and out all the time.

Have you had a look at the site? Have I done anything wrong?

try building your back links since when tested your site it looks like you have not worked hard on building links

Not sure what "back links" are? I've submitted the site to plenty of industry-related sites, but not many have actually put me on their sites. And you can't force 'em. You can only ask nicely.

So, what are "back links"? And what's the best way to do it?

And having the command in the metatags asking robots to "follow".....is that correct?

And a robots.txt file being empty (as per Google's recommendations) is a logical/correct thing to do?

Don't need to look really, It's quite normal.

It's a new site, the current state of play with google is that it takes several months for a new site to start ranking, and during that time it will be appearing and disappearing.

Ahhh. Gotcha. Thank you for that. I saw it appear, and then disappear. Thought I must've stuffed something up.

So, what's the story with "back links"?

Well having just looked at the site, I would say that you are looking for trouble. With the pointless small text (almost hidden) at the bottom of every page, using images as text then stuffing the alt attributes with the same text.
This is NOT 1995 where this kind of thing was the norm. SE algos are much smarter and can soon pick up and penalise stuff like this. It has all the hallmarks of a site built for SEs not for real users.

Make each of those images into a page with the text as content, The SEs will prefer it that way and so will the visitors.

reduce the size of the header, it takes up 50% of the visible screen at 800x600.
Avoid underlines on text that isn't a link, it confuses visitors.

There are also quite a few other usability issues as well

Backlinks are important, though not the be-all and end-all of SEO.

Submit the site to some of the established directories, see ISEDB for a list.

Right. Gotcha. Thanks very much for that. I'll get that changed later today, and hopefully that will do something good.

The robots.txt and robots metatag bit is OK?

Originally Posted by biofarmag

Hello! Hope someone can help me here. I've had a website registered for a few weeks. Google found me, and I was ranking in the first 2 or 3 on keyword searches.....and then it lost me! Now it tells me that certain keywords that are very specific for my site simply cannot be found.

I suspect I've done something wrong, but I don't know what.

Would somebody mind having a look at the site? It's NOT a complicated site, so it shouldn't take very long. I'd appreciate that very much.

url is www.biofarmag.com.au

Many thanks!

Jeff

Don't worry, Google does this with new sites. The older the site is, the more respect it gets (as long as it is updated).

the robots meta tag means little as "index,follow" are the defaults. The only time it's needed is to exlude a page from being crawled. Same with robots.txt, having a blank file simply stops the 404 errors from appearing in your log files.

OK. I've taken advice. I've:

(a) got rid of the almost-hidden text

(b) got rid of the possibly-SPAM alt-text behind the images, and replaced with shorter and more relevant text refering to what's in the photos

(c) expanded the amount of text on the first page to include more keyword-including information

(d) used http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...estion/?mkt=au to find out what keywords are actually being used by users, which was a REAL eye-opener!

(e) submitted the site to as many industry-specific directories as I could find

(f) reduced the header-size

If anyone wiser than me (which is practically everybody) would mind having a look at the site and telling me if I've missed anything that will either help or hinder me getting into google's good-books, I'd appreciate it.