The Underscore Archives

2009/12/9 Ray Brooks <ray.userinterface at googlemail.com>:
> None of this is hard and fast. Just guessing.

Any guesses gratefully received.  There are a million things stopping
me from launching and this is one.

> Firstly, consider the amount of content available for "travel" and
> "bed" as separate words, as opposed to just one: Google is likely to
> think that a user has simply made a typo as these are both very common
> words.

Yup, that is definitely true, a search for "travelbed" with quotes
overcomes that, but travelbed.co.uk is still not on the first page but
a freeindex site pointing to me is.  Assuming no other variables, I
really would expect a keyword in a domain to rank higher than a
keyword in a page - unless freeindex has a Page Rank of 14 or
sommit...

> Secondly, Google has loads of Lorem Ipsum in its index for your sites
> (check this using site:travelbed.co.uk). You mention that you are
> wildcarding Apache (I am assuming you mean you are using virtual
> hosts), but all the subdomains in the Google Index route to the main
> site (your vhosts are not set up correctly!). I am sure Google is
> smarter than having flagged you as a domain squatter as they are
> subdomains, but I am sure this amount of redundant content cannot be
> good for your ranking.

There's a whole bunch of content from booking.com I was experimenting
with and I'm waiting to expire :(

I do use wildcard DNS so that subdomains
www.new-b-and-b-site.travelbed.co.uk is active instantly.  This is a
big concern for me but as you say, I am hoping Google is sensible
here.

> Thirdly, you use Analytics and Google will therefore know how much
> traffic you get and what keywords people use to get to it. Maybe there
> are other keywords where you would do much better. Analytics should be
> able to help you make some sense of what is going on, in order to
> amend your content accordingly. You could probably do better using
> Adwords, as opposed to trying to get natural ranking for "travelbed".

Fair comment, I'm tentatively using AdWords right now, more to
experiment and get some early traffic to the site.

P/S thanks to the anonymous gutless fool (with a very familiar IP
address...) giving their "feedback" on uservoice.  At least I know
that bit works now :)

-- 
Andrew McGregor
+44 7940 22 33 11
www.txm.net