Ever feel like google won't rank you no matter what sort of site you build? Rant.

Hey guys this is basically a rant but I could do with some advice too

I started building an authority site on a topic I enjoy. I chose a brand name; the brand name actually gets 500 searches per month (not the reason I chose it).

After registering the domain I started to build the site. This took about 1 week. At the end of the week I had 12 pages including my home page, several category pages, and one or two articles linked from the category pages. Then made 2-3 social bookmarks over a few days. I also did a few yahoo answers. This was just for indexing really. I began adding an article a day and everything looked good. I was 12th for the brand name which got 500 searches. I was slowly adding good quality backlinks (high PR relevant blog comments, 2.0s which have 3 posts, all hand written, with links to authority sites too, did a guest blog too, I also did some press releases). Basically I was trying to make everything look natural. So I only backlinked after I had got some traffic from a press release for example. This site was so white hat it made me want to puke!

But then my main brand name keyword dropped out of the top 1000, and so did others. Some of the keywords I was targeting for my articles were VERY uncompetitive. I was the only one with the keyphrase in the URL. I thought that this was odd but gave it some time. That was a month ago. I've added lots of content which has received a few retweets naturally and continued to add high PR / high quality backlinks. But now when I search for exact text from my site in google not only is it not at the top, it can't be found at all. Even with "" around the sentence. However when I put site:[mysite.com] "sentence from my site" into google it can find the text no problem. Looking at webmaster tools i'm getting less than 100 impressions per day. Sometimes less. Not saying I should be ranking no 1 for anything yet, but I should at least be in the top 1000 for very uncompetitive key phrases.

Anyone know why my exact site text isn't appearing in google? Robots.txt is fine, no duplicate content. Im still indexed - 1st result for mysite.com in google. I'm also not aggressively targeting keywords; I get the keyword in the title if I can but it's very much designed for human readers. There are even one or two articles i've done which don't target a keyword at all. I did change about 10 of my title tags including my homepage before this happened. But shouldn't that have sorted itself out by now?

Really pissed me off because of how good the site is. It's genuine on a topic I love - it doesn't even have ads on it yet. It got on the front page of a subreddit for a bit too. Maybe it just needs time...

Ok rant over, I feel better now, thanks for reading

Happens to my sites too. For sites less than a few months old, rankings are usually very unstable and take time to stabilize.

Are you diversifying your anchor texts? What happens when you do a search for <target keyword> <URL that is targetting that KW>, if you're not #1 for that search - you've got a penalty of some type.

I already encountered with this situation. Yesterday my site Google ranking was 68 with an article page then I submit 40 high PR directories and 10 1to4 page rank social bookmarking today when I check ranking it is not showing in 1000. It already happened with this website when I doing directory submission my site is not showing in SERP.

Is directory submission harmful for a website?

Sometimes the projects closest to the heart have trouble getting visitors ??.. I have had similiar luck with some of my older sites...two in particular that are related to my real world business.....that I am knowledgeble about....that are full of great information and are content wise, twenty times the size of my crappy niche sites..Like you I got indexed but rarely got ranked. This is because I was too fussy with sites that I cared about...that I felt had a long term focus, so was very fussy to be very white hat and not put any ads on until I got the sort of traffic that made it look justified. And yet I can throw up a niche site over a weekend...optimise it on site...spin,scrape and blast the nuts off it and get it ranking well within a month.. I think the attitude with sites I just build for monetization is blast it and if it doesnt work bin it ! and go again on another project.
If its any consolation those two older sites are now starting to grow all by themselves and all the time spent manually writing log articles/posts and article submissions etc is starting to work {taken 2 years though !} I would suggest take your time if you have and keep it as a side project that you come back to. Yahoo answers doesnt get the sort of juice it used to..still worth doing for the tiny bit of work involved. Have you though about going after more competitive keywords ? Like you I thought low competition meant they were there for me to take.....I found out they were there because nobody else was interested including advertisers...If you have a good site with good content go for the competitive keywords and see how you fare out.

tencentpiece said:

Are you diversifying your anchor texts? What happens when you do a search for <target keyword> <URL that is targetting that KW>, if you're not #1 for that search - you've got a penalty of some type.

Click to expand...

Yeah im making everything look at natural as possible. Using my brand the most, followed by various raw url variations, followed by "click here" type stuff. I've tried to copy the anchor diversity of an authority site in my niche. Inner pages are backlinked too.

Doing that for my main keyword brings back my privacy policy... Just don't see where a penalty could come from.

Patience and promotion are two things I recommend for this type of situation with a new website. It does take at least a few weeks at minimum for the search engines to crawl a site enough to start indexing it. Even when that does start to happen, the indexing can shift and fluctuate for a while. I think this is part of what many people have stated calling the "Google Dance." In the meantime, I would carve out some time to research the latest recommended promotion and link-building methods that Google will eventually reward. It can never hurt to have more information about this ever-changing topic.