Hi

My site is almost 9 months old now, does well with msn, ok with google but still in sandbox and terrible with yahoo.
The funny thing is for my main search term 'free online games' two of my 2nd level pages are in the top 100 with yahoo, my main page is nowhere. Does anybody have any ideas what I can do about this?
This is my site http://www.free-online-games-player.co.uk and the 2nd level pages are: /arcade-games and /adventure-games.

Thanks

G'day loversinc, and welcom.

1)  The sandbox is a Google thing.

2)  Make your title "Free Online Games Player"

3)  Make your description "Play a Game or Buy One - Free Online Games Player for the Best Games on the Internet"

Note: I don't care about "probably" or "we try," I want facts and I need to be convinced of them. Besides, you're wasting space with meaningless words.

4) You've done an important thing in giving yourself a backlink.

Regards,
Laurie.

thanks, i've made the changes u've suggested. In another forum I was told that the problem is that yahoo believes index2.html is my main page and that i should do a 301 redirect.
I'm having difficulties doing so, this is what my .htaccess looks like now: Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^free-online-games-player.co.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.free-online-games-player.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

redirect 301 index2.html http://www.free-online-games-player.co.uk/

any ideas what i'm doing wrong?
the first one works fine, it's the second that does'nt, i've tried:  redirect 301 free-online-games-player.co.uk/index2.html/ http://www.free-online-games-player.co.uk/ and that did'nt work either.

G'day again, loversinc.

The codeing experts are a bit slow chiming in to help you. Could be because it's Saturday, or maybe because it looks like you have a site full of copied stuff and are way beyond your personal ability. I'd put my money on the latter being their reason.

Here are some thoughts and facts that might help:

1)  I know nothing about 301 redirects; I don't need to know.

2)  If you've made the recomended changes, the difference should be seen in a couple of weeks when the site is spidered and cached  by the various SEs. Of course, this applies to the appropriate keyphrases.

3)  I would think you are in a very high competition field.
*  Have you done your reserch homework?
*  How's your link profile going? Say, 1000 PR3 one way backlinks or 100 PR4/PR5. Gained over a period of time. Relevent.

4)  You haven't told us much about this index2 page, and the link you gave no longer works.
*  Put it back how it was and we can have a look.
*  Is index2.html the home page or do you have a correct home page and index2 as well?
*  Either way, I doubt that the spider is clever enough to associate index2.html with index.html. If it's different to what he'll recognise as the home page, then it's different. Might as well call it wheelbarrow.html if it's not exactly right. On this basis, I doubt that index2 is your problem, unless, of course, you have no index.html page. If the latter was the case, I doubt that you'd be on the radar.

Keep comunicating, Fella! Give us info!

Regards,
Laurie.

loversinc wrote:

thanks, i've made the changes u've suggested. In another forum I was told that the problem is that yahoo believes index2.html is my main page and that i should do a 301 redirect.
I'm having difficulties doing so, this is what my .htaccess looks like now: Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^free-online-games-player.co.uk$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.free-online-games-player.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

redirect 301 index2.html http://www.free-online-games-player.co.uk/

any ideas what i'm doing wrong?
the first one works fine, it's the second that does'nt, i've tried:  redirect 301 free-online-games-player.co.uk/index2.html/ http://www.free-online-games-player.co.uk/ and that did'nt work either.

sorry... figured North or one of the 'code heads' would have jumped in....

try this

RewriteEngine On

# redirect all non-www traffic

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^free-online-games-player.co.uk$

RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.free-online-games-player.co.uk%{REQUEST_URI} [R=permanent,L]



# Redirect aliases of home page to the root website

rewriteRule ^index2.html http://www.free-online-games-player.co.uk/ [R=permanent,L]

hi again laurie.
no copied stuff on my site, has taken me ages to build it to the size it is now, it is my first site though, have loads to learn.
not sure what you mean by way beyond my personal ability... you mean with the redirect... well yea it's beyond my ability that's why i'm asking for help.

yup i'm i high competition field and am starting to do ok, why not check out my links for yourself.

index2 was a test page i did, i did'nt feel a need to delete it.. oops.

in another forum, a very experience guy said that yahoo believes that index2 is my main page and that i need to do the redirect to my main page, all my links are to my domain not my index so i'm wanting to redirect my index2 to my domain.

some evidence i've seen that might back up this other guys opinion is that if you check out my site with yahoo site explorer my main page is nowhere to be seen but index2 is at the top.

Don't you think it is funny that my arcade games page does so much better for my main page with yahoo, if you have another explanation for why this may be i'd love to hear it.

thanks very much the gypsy, i'll give it a go and let you know. seems like there is some other problem perhaps related... tech support are on it now.

Did you recently take the site down?  When I went to check it out, I got what looks like a standardized "test page" for the Apache HTTP Server.  Thought this message might help:

If you are the website administrator:



You may now add content to the directory /var/www/html/. 

Note that until you do so, people visiting your website 

will see this page, and not your content. To prevent 

this page from ever being used, follow the 

instructions in the file /etc/httpd/conf.d/welcome.conf.



You are free to use the images below on 

Apache and Fedora Core powered HTTP servers. 

Thanks for using Apache and Fedora Core!

You built the games yourself? You're a genious! A computer game guru!

And all along I thought you'd pirated them or it was an affilliate site.

Just goes to show!

Regards,
Laurie.

G'day again, loversinc.

1)  Did anyone welcome you to the forum? Well, welcome!

2)  Checked out you site in Google. Quite impressive! 431 pages indexed.

3)  Google showed me no backlinks to your site.

4)  I see you have, in many instances, used one of a limited number of meta descriptions. Do you think unique descriptions for every page would help with Yahoo? Given that you have a few unique descriptions, there shouldn't be moor than about 400 new ones to write. Shouldn't take you long.

5)  I noticed one of your titles in the SERPs that was mixed up with the meta tags. Hope you don't think that's picky.

I suppose the message that Major mentioned is because you don't as yet have the redirect sorted. I'd be putting it back how it was till you get it worked out. Wouldn't want the spider to come along and find that, after all your hard work and success, now would we?

Regards,
Laurie.

Thanks again gypsy but unfortunately it did not work, any ideas?

Thanks Major Melody, no idea how that happend! my index page disapeared from the server, it took me and the tech help people 24 hours to realise what the problem was!

Thanks for the welcome Laurie

yup, i need to work on page titles to get more pages indexed.

funny, every google data center i've looked shows me as having 423 links,
yahoo has it at 24,748.

the majority verdict seems to be that meta desciptions does'nt effect serps, do you disagree? do you have any evidence?

sorry, still being a bit wet behind the ears, I'm not sure what you mean in point 5.

i just had a look at your site, do you think that doing a 301 from the non www to the www version might be of benefit to your site in the serps?

I currently only host around 50 games myself, 4 of those are affiliate ones, if people like the game and want the full version they buy it and i get a cut. The majority of the rest are from sites that have a section for webmasters to download  there games and put them on there own sites. The remainding few are from game developers who approached me to put there games up.
I am currently in talks with a few game developers to start getting some games made specificly for my site.
I'm hoping that in a few years my site will be one of the top 10 online games sites, I think it will take me 3 years in total. All help and advice is greatly appreciated.

G'day

the majority verdict seems to be that meta desciptions does'nt effect serps, do you disagree? do you have any evidence?

It's my understanding that the majority verdict is that meta descriptions are quite important and that meta keywords are ignored my most SEs. I have to follow the online chat on these things, as well as follow my SEO software, because of my lack of personal knowelledge. So, no evidence.

However, for some time, I've been leaving the meta keywords blank and putting a lot of thought into meta descriptions, which I repeate as h2. If I can, I alter the order of the words in h2.

With this plan I go fairly well. My SEO is fairly basic.

I do think that unless you have no home page called index.html, you should forget the stuff about index2 and attend to the descriptions. I reckon that's where your problems are. The meta description is a great chance to have some good keywords, right at the beginning, where dear old Googlebot understands the important things go. See if you can get an opinion from Gypsey on this. I'd go with whatever he reckons.

i just had a look at your site, do you think that doing a 301 from the non www to the www version might be of benefit to your site in the serps?

Well, I dunno, Mate. Haven't heared that one before. Sounds just a little black hat, to me. How would that help the SERPs? I get spidered and cached, alright.

Hey, hope you liked my photos. Did you follow the link to my ATV Camping page. I'm heading out into the arid country again in September (early spring here), on the bike. But, hey, in winter 2008 I'm hoping to do a 350km outback trip on station tracks and cross country. Got to be near on as good as playing online games.

Regards,
Laurie.

To be honest.... I don't worry all that much about multiple home page inferences.... I have seen sites that rank just fine without any form of mod-rewrite on them...

love your photo's laurie, love your country, i've spent more time in victoria and north east queensland though, hopefully will see some more in the future.
sorting out which version of your site is the main one for the spiders is not black hat at all, if you don't do it then as far as the spiders are concerned you have two versions of your site. Some think that this is a vital bit of basic seo, but as with all seo it is contentious.

hey gypsy i finaly got it to work! the problem was with my hosts not your code, so thanks again.