What did I do wrong...

Last month, I changed the titles of all the pages in my site to make the title fit the page content better. Before, the title for all pages was "Salt Lake Sites." Today, every page has a different title.

After the last google dance, I fell from position 81 for my targetted keywords to 292. Anyway, I would appreciate comments on why I have such lousy page ranking with Google. I admit, this is the first month that I actually paid any attention to Google rankings. Before, I concentrated solely on user navigation.

The site is SLSites.com. The keywords I am targetting are "Salt Lake" and "Salt Lake City".

I found this odd. If I do a Google Search on "link:http://slsites.com" Google shows 116 backward links. If I do the search on "link: slsites.com" google shows 504 backward links.

I added affiliate programs awhile ago to offset costs. Whoopie, I make $50 a month!!!! Did these program kill the sites position? I developed the program as a template, and made directories for other towns: Links Alive. Is the fact that I developed a database template and have several sites running off the the same template with the same IP address killing the ranking?

If you are wondering, I am a unemployed database programmer. I wrote this program from scratch with PHP as a sample application. If you were an employer and I showed you this thing....would you think well of it, or toss me out on the street as clueless?

Is the fact that I developed a database template and have several sites running off the the same template with the same IP address killing the ranking?

yes, this *could* be considered spam by search engines.

im not sure about affiliate programs, but I would be cautious of them.

it's not your ip that will give you problems with Google, as many sites/individual member pages run on the same IP's, it's your content. There is nothing wrong with using a template a lot of very high page rank sites do, but you do need to have page specific content outweigh the template content...

When using PHP, try and create search engine friendly pages and on top of that don't go too deep. You lose about a PR point for every '/' in the URL, work on stripping out unneeded '/' and '?' whenever possible.

Don't worry about the SPAM, if every page you create has some sort of focus and unique content, chances are it will do better than you think. So work on those backward links and keep cranking out content.

I'll also echo what DSJ says that some highly ranked sites also use database controlled scripts.

I don't believe however that the number of slashes has an impact on a page's PR within a site.

Do a search on pagerank in this forum and you should find a link to a site with a detailed explaination about how PR flows through a site. It is basicly distributed by the graph formed by the pages and the connecting links. Not the underlying O/S directory structure.

I didn't get a good look at the code under the hood on your site as the primary tool I use couldn't read the url. It was complaining about the ? and stuff.

Cheers,

theBear,

Every '/' drops a PR point at least, but, I do need to clarify, the page and the directory/ need to be completely internally supported. It is very possible to have an internal page with 4 '/' have a higher page rank than your index, but, you will need to have more than just your site linking to it.

Example:
PR5
http://www.seochat.com
PR4
http://www.seochat.com/test
PR3
http://www.seochat.com/test/test
PR2
http://www.seochat.com/test/test/test

Even though this is an assumed page rank because obviously these sites are not indexed or exist for that matter, they are given a value based on the PR of the directory the file is in, if PR has been handed down then it's a gradual dilliution of 1 point from the index page. In my experience this really won't vary much, and if these directories or pages are never linked by any outside source you'll have a hard time getting the PR up.

True statement that you can't increase the PR of a page above that of the index page without having external links to that page or to another page linking to it that is in turned linked from an external site.

However I have a page set none of which is past one directory level off of the root and in fact have pages in the same directory that have different actual PR and none of them are externally linked.

PR is distributed via the link structure of the site and is not based upon the number of slashes in the url estimated PR isn't real PR just like PR and SERP are not tied directly together.

Google's method of determining actual PR is an excellent example of a number of mathematical constructs independent of underlying directory structures.

The math is extremely interesting in and of itself.

Cheers,

Thanks for the input.

I can now see the source of my big mistake. Last month, I made two big changes: The first was to make the titles of each page match the content. The second was to shorten the query string.

In the original design, the URL was slsites.com/dir.html?btn=cat&category_id=xxx. I fixed the page so I didn't need the "btn=cat" in the query string.

My big blunder was that I didn't realize that most of my inbound links still have the btn=cat in the name. All the inbound links still work...I just don't get credit for them because many of the links have a needless parameter.

My change was for the better, but will take several months to work thruogh the system.

Last month I fell from position 81 to 292. Hopefully, I will be able to work my way back up to the 10th page in search listings in the next few month.

My approach to web design had been to concentrate solely on the usability for the end user and ignore SEO. Unfortunately, I have successfully disproved that approach.

I wouldn't totally discount your initial theory... it is quite sound.

The best example is two competitors (which are now working together)

1. ranked enormously well -- average 5 - 7K daily (hotspot 22K)

2. ranked fair to poor -- average 50 - 200 daily (hotspot close to 500)

1. designed to rank.

2. designed to market

1. average sale conversion - 0.1%

2. average sale conversion - near 30% (that's almost one in three)

1. mean visitors 6K x 0.1% = 6 sales per day.

2. mean visitors 125 x 30% = 37 sales per day.

Who was the clear winner?

Seldom is it a straight line from the current point to the desired one.

I blew it big time last month with a change to make things a bit easier and when I regened my stub files the data feeds were in cartoon land so I had a disconnect in title .... content for about half of my site, that and a couple of small user helpful things really threw bricks through my windows .

Cheers,

The BIG mistakes are hard felt for sure... but they are also the ones that make us 10 times better than before, each and everytime we trip.

Site number 2 by a mile.

This is exactly what a friend and I are doing, purely marketing related, for a highly niched website, it is highly ranked for it's topic area so the sales areas don't have to stand on thier own.