August 22nd, 2006 by metapilot
I’ll tell you–it’s when your page is in transition from a page that is not listed in the regular index to one that is listed in the regular index.It was just two days ago that I was sorta thinking that I might start seeing some action for the “site:www.metapilot.com” search within a week or so, and voila!, here it is–5 days early.
August 20th, 2006 by metapilot
As of today, there is evidence that there is not an all out ban on the new domain name with Google. I like to set up alerts in Google (I like the real-time option) so that I know when there has been a change in the in output from the Google algos for site’s I’m working on and today, I received my email that there was a change in the output for metapilot.com. Since the alert is for “metapilot” which covers both domains, I have to check the source code of the alert emails that I receive to see which domain the included link is alert is referring to (probably should just change it to “metapilot.com”).
August 20th, 2006 by metapilot
At least I can now say that the site is not banned in Yahoo. Yahoo site explorer shows 12 pages still in the .net index and it has been stuck on showing only two of the new .com pages for several days, now. It is also showing one of the previous owner’s .pdf files in the index (although not in the cache).At least there are two new pages now showing in Yahoo, though. For a couple of days, only the home page was showing as indexed and current wisdom states that when just your home page shows in the Yahoo index, it is a sure sign that the site has been banned. Of course, being very aware of the possibility that my site will suffer from the legacy of the previous domain owner’s “poor neighborhood” practices and the resulting penalties placed on the domain, I was holding my breath while wating for more pages to show up. When another page did show up along with the home page in the Yahoo Site Explorer, I could finally let out a little sigh of relief. Now, only in Google is there an indication that an all-out ban is still possible.
Google is not cooperating at all. Though the site was submitted two weeks ago, there is no aknowledgemnt from Google that a site exists at that domian. Granted, two weeks is no time at all but I was hoping for a best case scenario–an older siter (even though it was purchased as an expired domain), with a lot of back links (even though they are from irrelevant, bad neighborhood sites), with fully indexed pages from another site being 301?ed to same page name pages on this site–it’s a good scenario–it’s a very good scenario, except for the litte issue of the domain having been BANNED.
Over the past six months to a year, or so, however, Google has greatly increased it’s grip on expired domains. For “domainer”- types, who have tended to rely on continuity of domain name aging (regardless of whether the registration had expired and ownership had changed hands) to help their site’s ranking ability, this turn of events hasn’t been particularly advantageous. For me, however, it means I can have a greater expection of being able to seperate my site and my owership of this domain from those that came before me. It is a double-edged sword, though. For it also means that I’ll most likely be subject to the euphamistically named “aging delay”, aka, the “sand box penalty”. Bleecchk, I hate that thing but it is better than being banned and not going through it.
MSN, on the other hand, currently lists 27 pages for the .net site, including the metapilot.net/index.html page. Eleven of the cached pages point to the “Permanently Moved” cached pages. The rest still point to standard caches of the originals. On the site:domain search for the .com site, it shows 29 pages in in the index, including the metapilot.com/index.html page(4 of them are from the previous owner’s site) .
Interestingly, when you click on the “Cached page” link in any of those 4 results from the previous owner, you get an empty page–not an actual true version of that previous page.
August 19th, 2006 by metapilot
Real estate of all types is very competitive in Florida and with the market going through the changes it has recently, it’s getting more so every day. This increase in competitiveness is very evident online, where real estate oriented website owners are putting substantial resources towards optimization for their sites in order to reach more online traffic.
All of this means several things for new real estate oriented sites: 1) It is taking quite a bit more effort for new sites to reach traffic-producing search engine rankings on primary keywords. 2) Niche keyword spaces are getting more difficult to find. 3) It is taking increased vigilance to defend your rankings from other sites who want to claw their way up into higher rankings.
Firms who are not competing directly against mainstream realtors do have it somewhat easier, though. A strong optimization campaign can find keywords that will bring in traffic, yet doesn’t pit them against all the “heavy hitters” engaged in real estate search marketing. Such a campaign would enable Signature Residences to bring in targeted traffic while their website matures and gains strength over the next 12 months. In addition to optimization of the existing site, it is recommended that these companies focus on adding to the site’s content and that it strive to develop strong back links to its site as a foundation for continued strong rankings in the future.
August 19th, 2006 by metapilot
Yahoo starts to show .com results and as it does, it starts removing pages from its “site:metapilot.net” results. Currently, just the index page from the .com domain is showing up. Notice I was (unintentionally) doing the search without using “www”.
Note: This was the last date that I was able to use the site:domain command and get standard Yahoo results. For the past week, Yahoo has fluctuated between serving me standard site:domain results and forcing me to be logged in and serving me results via the new Site Explorer (Beta) interface. Hence, all site:domain querries are redirected to the Yahoo Site Explorer interface. This is something that has been talked about in the forums over the past week or two and seems to be the case for a growing number of searchers who use the site:domain query.
August 19th, 2006 by metapilot
August 19th, 2006
Real estate of all types is very competitive in Florida and with the market going through the changes it has recently, it’s getting more so every day. This increase in competitiveness is very evident online, where real estate oriented website owners are putting substantial resources towards optimization for their sites in order to reach more online traffic.
All of this means several things for new real estate oriented sites: 1) It is taking quite a bit more effort for new sites to reach traffic-producing search engine rankings on primary keywords. 2) Niche keyword spaces are getting more difficult to find. 3) It is taking increased vigilance to defend your rankings from other sites who want to claw their way up into higher rankings.
Firms who are not competing directly against mainstream realtors do have it somewhat easier, though. A strong optimization campaign can find keywords that will bring in traffic, yet doesn’t pit them against all the “heavy hitters” engaged in real estate search marketing. Such a campaign would enable Signature Residences to bring in targeted traffic while their website matures and gains strength over the next 12 months. In addition to optimization of the existing site, it is recommended that these companies focus on adding to the site’s content and that it strive to develop strong back links to its site as a foundation for continued strong rankings in the future.
August 18th, 2006 by metapilot
MSN is starting to show .com results with two pages indexed. I was reading a comment on another blog recently about the blazing speed with which MSN is indexing new sites. That’s what I’ve been seeing for some time, now, with client sites and I think it has even picked up some in recent months. MSN has the other beat two hands down when it come to the speed of indexation.
August 17th, 2006 by metapilot
As Yahoo starts to eliminate the metapilot.net pages from display in the search results, the first thing it does, at least in this case, is remove the link to the cached version of the page from the results. As of this date, the number of cached metapilot.net pages is down to three (two of them from the most current version of the which went up two weeks ago, one from the previous version of the site). The site:domain search still shows 15 total pages indexed, however.For those who aren’t familiar with the difference between “indexed” and “cached”, it is really only a matter of the amount of information the search engine makes available to us in the search query result. A page that has been “indexed” is one that has been crawled by that search engine, has it’s information stored in that search engine’s database(s) and can be made to show up in a search results page by performing a search for information specifically relevant to that page.
An indexed page that is in good standing with a search engine shows up in its search results with the title of the page, a snippet of the query-relevant content from that page, and, at least in the case of Yahoo, Google, and MSN, a link to cached version of the page. The “cached” version is an exact copy of the web page as it would have appeared in a browser at the time it was crawled by the search engine.
Often, the lack of a link to the cached version indicates that the engine has some sort of problem with your site or that some sort of change is taking place within the search engine regarding the site’s result listing.
Click on the image below and you can see that some
of the results have a link to the cached page and some do not.
August 8th, 2006 by metapilot
MSN is the first of the search engines to show any change. The site:domain query on MSN reflects that it now recognizes changes made to the .htaccess at the .net site. The results are starting to show .net pages that have moved permanently–all the below results used to show title and snippet. Now the ones without title and snippet point to cached pages that say simply “Moved Permanently” Read the rest of this entry »
August 1st, 2006 by metapilot
Moving to a domain that’s been banned and/or penalized in Google, Yahoo and MSN and not having detailed knowledge of the history of how the search engines have treated the site is like leaping over a wall without knowing what is on the other side. It leaves open a whole realm of possibilites including never being able to get the ban or penalty removed and never getting the site listed again.
So anyway, here we go:
* 08-05-2006—>
* The .net site map had been deleted so it hadn’t been verifying in Google site maps for some time prior to this. Left it deleted for the time being.
* Each .net page 301?d over to the same page name on the .com domain via .htaccess file.
* Added .com site map in Google Webmaster Tools.
* Requested verification of .com site map and it was verified using the Meta tag verification.
* Now that all 301’s are in place, submitted .net to Google search, Yahoo, MSN
