Family Business website facing Google indexing problems
Recently I have developed a website for a family member and after finishing the design, the next stage was to get it indexed into Google. Well we had problems at the first hurdle as the site was taking ages to get indexed even after posting here about it, which usually helps for our other niche sites.
I noticed that the site was indexed when typing in site:domain_name.com but it was only showing the website domain name and no meta description.
After analyzing the site, I came up with the following problems which could explain why it was not showing properly, but this is still unclear as to what the exact cause was.
- Robots.txt file was set to Disallow /
- We set this up while designing the site as didn’t want the pages to be indexed with incorrect content or pages and then have to ask Google to remove certain urls etc.
- We had modified this to Allow / quite early on, but maybe it was taken some time for the google robots to pick up these changes. The robots test showed the correct information - We had some javascript on the main home page, this script was a basic expand and collapse text script so had hidden text but when clicked would display the text. This could have been seen by Google as spamming as we could be hiding keywords. But I’m sure loads of other sites use this and don’t have any indexing problems. Anyway this has been changed now to click through to another page, so no more javascript
- No 301 .htaccess redirect file set-up so that our non canonical domain http://domain was not being redirected to the http://www.domain… etc. This could have been seen as duplicate content across the domain. This has now been set-up.
Well a few days later and more of the pages are being indexed with the description. Still though the home page or root of the site isn’t showing the description and I’ve triple checked the code, its no different than some of the other pages codes.
For those interested the family site is Expand Internationally or http://www.expandinternationally.com
Any comments/suggestions welcomed
Affiliate Project dabbles in Dreamweaver to help family business
Recently Affiliate Project was approached by a family member asking for help with starting up a business adventure. They had seen and heard about our success with a few of our niche sites and how we have managed to get the sites listed in the top ranks on google in little time and sought our help to design, develop and SEO the site.
As we have only really had experience with using Wordpress to get our sites out there, it wasn’t straight forward to design the site as the requirements although basic weren’t really suited for Wordpress. Rather than hack a Wordpress theme to suit our needs, we decided to build the layout and style this from scratch using css and code with html with the help of Dreamweaver.
The site for any one interested to see our work is www.expandinternationally.com. Its basically a business website that is aimed towards companies that are looking to export services internationally. In this current market businesses are looking to cut costs and doing business overseas is one way business can save money. However its not that straight forward for companies and that is where Expand Internationally can help with over 100 years experience in doing business internationally.
Our challenge is going to be a little harder as we’re not trying to SEO a niche site. This is a business site and we need to try and understand the market and the target audience, but we love a challenge and this is what we’re in the Affiliate Marketing business for.
Hopefully the site will get up in the rankings so we can prove to the family that we are keen in doing Affiliate Marketing full time.
2nd Niche Site progress update, 1 month since launch
After nearly 1 month since we launched the site maternity swimwear, we are very pleased with the results. This is only our 2nd niche site out there although we do have the odd few that still needs working on. We wanted to update our blog with some juicy stats as we are proud Affiliate newbies 
Our main goal was to get the site to within the top 5 position on google.co.uk for the website domain keywords, as then this would hopefully make us some money. The site has been sitting at the top of page 2 or bottom of page 1, which we were happy about as the site has not long been out there and we hadn’t done hardly any linking. This was purely down to all-in-one-seo plugin on the site, the domain name, trying to use strong keywords, good descriptions and good heading titles.
Today the site ranks at number 1 position on google.co.uk when searching for “maternity swimwear” (exact) and number 2 spot for maternity swimwear (not exact) so we are well chuffed. We are also number 3 “maternity tankinis”.
I took a screenshot as proof (see below) as I’m not sure how long it will stay there for!!
I think the ranking position has got higher due to the fact that I spent the last few days doing some link exchanges for this site. Paul has also being getting in touch with his ‘feminine side’ and writing some really good content in the form of articles from his alter-ego yummy-mummy, well done Paul, or should I say yummy mummy
We are also getting an increase in the number of visitors to our site and in addition to this we have also had a pretty good month with our earnings. We have generated in excess of £1500 in sales, an average of over 5000 impressions, and nearly 30 sales, which is almost 1 every day.
We’ll see if this improves now that we are higher up on the rankings although because of this we may not get the ‘last click’ but we should see more traffic.
It is still a big learning curve for us, but one that we really do enjoy. Especially when you see results for the effort we are putting in.
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