[l008com]

So I started a new web site a few months ago, www.menulizard.com. And google originally picked me up right away. At first it was good, a search for pretty much any restaurant that was on my site, would have me in the top 5, usually #1. This is good since my site is usually the most relevant page for someone searching for a restaurant. But something has happened. Google hates me. Do a yahoo search for a restaurant, and I'll be 3 of the top 10 results. Do a google search, and you'll usually have to go several pages deep before you find me. I knew something was up when I noticed in my stats that I was getting as many yahoo search hits as I was google search hits. On most of my sites, I generally get 20x more google search hits than any other engine. Something has gone awfully awry and its killing my growth. But I can think of nothing that would make google not like me? Its a very clean, simple site with no advertising at all except for one googlead per page. I got that pagerank widget, and my pagerank is 0. I don't know what it was before google started to hate me. But the site fits into all of the things we know google likes. So I'm hoping someone here will be able to shed some light on this? I even have a bunch of chefmoz.org pages linking to me, but it seems to have no effect on my ranking. Let me know if you have any ideas.

[- - e r i k - -]

Google outrighted banned my site after a while giving me no reason (it's a norwegian blog) whatsoever. It was the top result for my name and my first name in Norwegian google.

[l008com]

This sucks because, without google, its all but impossible to grow a web site. At this point i'd have to do tv advertising to get any significant traffic.

[Doofy]

Is it not time to group together with owners of similar sites and do a class-action on Google?

[JoshuaZ]

Because you touch yourself at night.

[l008com]

I'll try switching to daytime but I don't see how that is going to help.

[Scifience]

The same thing happened with one of my sites. Went from making $2,000 a month on it to making $50 a month. I e-mailed Google, but nobody ever responded.

[m a d r a]

google is the new micro$oft

[m a d r a]

searching for "madra", my website ranks:

3 - on alta vista
3 - on A9 [in the images panel - for the cartoon of myself on the frontpage]
*nowhere* on AOL
1 - on clusty [who, they?]
3 - on gigablast
5 - on lycos
5 - on MSN
5 - on teoma
2 - on wisenut [who, they?]
1 - on yahoo

but unfortunately nowhere on google, which is a shame, as they seem to have monopolised the search engine market these days.

[ThisGuy]

ahhhhh, but you are #1 when searching for "stíobhart matulevicz". so at least you got that going for you.

[m a d r a]

Originally Posted by ThisGuy

ahhhhh, but you are #1 when searching for "stíobhart matulevicz". so at least you got that going for you.

yeah! - i sure whopped all those other stíobhart matulevicz's arses!

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

I thought you can lose your google ranking if you hide all sorts of meta data in your website repeating keywords.

[olePigeon]

Bush's bio is #1 for "failure." (Google bombing is so much fun. )

[rickey939]

I blame Google.®

[l008com]

So you think that because I repeat menu items over and over on every page on my menu web site, you think that made google dump my page rank? I also contact google on the matter and I also don't expect a response

[Mastrap]

Originally Posted by Disgruntled Head of C-3PO

I thought you can lose your google ranking if you hide all sorts of meta data in your website repeating keywords.

Indeed.

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

Originally Posted by l008com

So you think that because I repeat menu items over and over on every page on my menu web site, you think that made google dump my page rank? I also contact google on the matter and I also don't expect a response

No meta data. If Google sees that you are putting "Best graphic designer" or whatver over and over in hidden in your site they lower your rank. I think sites that are also updates frequently get higher rankings.

[RAzaRazor]

Google 101:

You need other outside sites to link to you. The page rank is based on how many other sites link to you, the words they use in the link text**, and the prominence (size, color, location, etc.) of those links on the outside pages.

Google doesn't really pay too much attention to what you have on your site, but they will deduct from your score for excessive META tags, and other search engine trickery. Also, if the content gets old the score will be reduced.

When you launched the site, did you have a bunch of people linking to you? And now are most of those links gone?

** This is how Google Bombing works. People will put a link to a site and use the specific word in the link. Example: FAILURE

[m a d r a]

i knew google was influenced by other sites linking to yours, but i never knew that the actual wording of the link was important too. with that knowledge and, bearing in mind a lot of visits to my sites com via my sig here, i've changed the text on the links in my sig to include the word "madra". now let's see if that has any effect...

[l008com]

Regarding updating. When I add menus, that slightly changes every page on the site, while more significantly changing many other pages. As far as updates go, my site is updated the perfect amount to make google love it. And googlebot does visit me each and every day. Still hates me though.

AND as far as linking go. You are wrong in that, when the site started, I had no links, my google ranking was all based on the pages themselves. And I still ranked awesome because when you search for a restaurant without a web site, there really aren't many good results. But since google started to hate me, i've been submitting my menu pages as menu urls to these restaurants in chefmoz.org, where you end up with a page for a restaurant, and a text link for the word 'menu' to my web site.

I know the system, and I'm doing what it wants me to do perfectly, but still for some reason, google hates me.

[Cubeoid]

Originally Posted by Scifience

I e-mailed Google, but nobody ever responded.

Here's a secret: Nobody actually works at Google.

[MacPoker101]

Google has this filter called Sandbox. Most new sites go for a deep freeze for about 3-6 months before getting back to the search results. The filter supposes to prevent backlinks manipulation, but what it does is really making Google an old news-links farm house.

For more information about the Sandbox, check out SEOChat.com, its the best SEO site I've found.

Cheers

[l008com]

Granted I haven't read that link yet, but, does this sandbox explain why i was #1 for the first month or so, then dropped out of sight?

[l008com]

Nevermind
I guess that explains it

[MPMoriarty]

Getting listed in Google is going beyond just Google indexing the contents of your website...

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sit.../en/about.html

Many website owners are seeing this as best way to get listed in Google right now.

[DeathMan]

go ask at webmasterworld.com

[Eug Wanker]

I'm just happy that I'm still the number 1 link if you Google Quad Power Mac.

Also number 1 if you Google Apple 970MP.

[Kenneth]

What's about the robots.txt? Will it do something bad?

[Disgruntled Head of C-3PO]

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

I'm just happy that I'm still the number 1 link if you Google Quad Power Mac.

Also number 1 if you Google Apple 970MP.

There's a life long accomplishment

Google even thinks it is spelled wrong.

[Cubeoid]

waht is with teh 7 on googl.?

[l008com]

7th birthday duh

[vinster]

Originally Posted by olePigeon

Bush's bio is #1 for "failure." (Google bombing is so much fun. )

LOL, Brilliant!

[davesimondotcom]

Also, think of Google as a blind web browser: Make your site more accessible using proper XHTML/CSS and magic will happen.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by Disgruntled Head of C-3PO

There's a life long accomplishment

I can die a content man now.

Now, if Apple would only release those damn 970MP machines.

[willed]

Originally Posted by m a d r a

i knew google was influenced by other sites linking to yours, but i never knew that the actual wording of the link was important too. with that knowledge and, bearing in mind a lot of visits to my sites com via my sig here, i've changed the text on the links in my sig to include the word "madra". now let's see if that has any effect...

Just wondering, has the 'plan' had any effect? I thought I'd do something similar, can't hurt I guess.

[Oisín]

His site still doesn’t rank anywhere close to the top in Google (his MacNN profile comes before it, for instance), so I’d say it hasn’t been too effective...

[willed]

Another question: I've noticed iWeb pages seem to render text as pictures. Does this mean that search engines can't read the text on my website? Is there any way around this?

[PurpleGiant]

To clear a few things up:

• The word which links to your website does make quite a difference to how you rank on Google for that term. Obviously one or two links won't make much difference, but in greater numbers (and from highly ranking websites), this forms a very large part of the ranking. Hence GoogleBombs (mass amounts of links using a certain term referencing a single page/site) such as "Miserable Failure"

• Search engines can 'read' text rendered as images, if they have appropriate 'alt' or 'title' tags to describe the images. They tend to value actual text more highly though, since image tags can be irrelevant to page content with most users barely noticing.

[besson3c]

It would help a great deal if you dropped GoLive as your page creator. Google gives higher ranking to sites that are coded adhering to modern standards. As it stands, your site still relies heavily on tables and doesn't make good use of CSS.

[besson3c]

Also, and perhaps more importantly in your case, Google has a hard time doing a deep crawl of sites like yours where the content only appears depending on clicking on links in a particular combination. Your main content is actually several levels deep, so you are dependent on Google deep crawls.

What I would do if I were you is making a basic site map linking to all of the restaurants available when the User Agent identifies itself as a Google Bot. This ought to REALLY pay off.

[besson3c]

Neat site idea, BTW... I wish you success with it!

[wataru]

Originally Posted by besson3c

What I would do if I were you is making a basic site map linking to all of the restaurants available when the User Agent identifies itself as a Google Bot. This ought to REALLY pay off.

Doesn't Google punish sites that present different information to the bot than to a regular user agent?

[PurpleGiant]

Originally Posted by wataru

Doesn't Google punish sites that present different information to the bot than to a regular user agent?

Sure does. If it finds out, that is. It's very deceptive to provide bots with one page to rank your site by, but show users another.

[Corpse of Chewbacca]

l008com=GoSox

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by wataru

Doesn't Google punish sites that present different information to the bot than to a regular user agent?

I believe Google's Sitemap software recommends you do this. This isn't the same as providing different content to fool Google, since you'd simply be providing the sitemap as a way to ensure that all of your content is crawlable. If you are concerned about this, you could always just make a sitemap and make it public.

[Gamoe]

Originally Posted by m a d r a

i've changed the text on the links in my sig to include the word "madra". now let's see if that has any effect...

Madra, don't be vain now!