Question for all those smarter than me (a wide net).

Google is becoming frustrating and it could be my lack of experience, but I have put the effort into the problem. The PG Living site is doing just fine with Yahoo, MSN etc… and Google puts it at about number 305 for “Punta Gorda Real Estate”. I know they have gone through a lot of transitions, but I have been working on this for the past 8 months now.

1. I have worked until all pages had code verified at http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...gliving.com%2F

2. I built and submitted a correct sitemap.

3. I have established relative links with over 100 real estate sites.

4. I get crawled successfully now on a regular basis.

Google still thinks I have FIVE links. It has been that way since the beginning of time.

Any ideas??

Tom Arnold
www.pgliving.com
Punta Gorda Real Estate

Well it is widely known that google never shows all of your backlinks, just a percentage. Is it also possible that google hasnt had a chance to index all of them yet? How often is your site visited by the googlebot? if it seems to only visit once in a while and really slowly could be part of the problem. Do you know how many pages of your site are indexed in google? If your whole site is already indexed its not likely that it is because of the googlebot not indexing. Plus, Google fluctuates lots, it is not the best indicator of backlinks. I have heard Yahoo shows more backlinks than google, but still wont show them all.

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Real Estate Webmasters

You can find my blog at ferociousfeline.com, I'm so cool I'm not even back linking myself!

It crawls me about once a month. More often when I resubmit my sitemap. I have 40 pages that are all described in the site map - and all my reciprocal links are relavant (real estate).

If I type Punta Gorda Real Estate in Yahoo - www.pgliving.com is #27. Not great, but I can work up from there.

I type the same thing (Punta Gorda Real Estate) in MSN (LIVE) and I am the top of the 2nd page. Still not ideal, but again workable.

I do it in Google and now I can't even find myself.

I also don't know all the tools to help me diagnose the problem I suppose.

Thanks for input & comments. I'm learning fast.

Tom Arnold
www.pgliving.com

Sounds to me you need to optimize the site better. I can't check it because I can't get to your site at this moment.

Getting to the top has a lot to do with the age of the website and the google sandbox/trustbox. But you should be able to get higher than 305 with a lot of backlinks and good optimization.

I'm struggeling myself with getting our website (http://www.casabaan.com)out of the sandbox. Can't seem to get any higher in the search engines with no listings in yahoo or dmoz. Very frustrating.

Hey Tom.

Google has tweaked its advanced operators a lot over the years. As a result, it's hard to get a legitimate link count. I would use Yahoo Site Explorer for a more accurate picture of your inbound links. Yahoo also tends to list them in order of importance (as they perceive it), so you can quickly find out where your [hint: or someone else's] best links are coming from.

I keep a spreadsheet of all my sites and the number of links, just to measure progress over time. I always use Yahoo Site Explorer for this. I don't remember the last time I used Google to check for backlinks.

Hope that helps. Good luck.

-Brandon

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Brandon Cornett
Real Estate SEO Support Center

I'm not sure if Yahoo would give similiar results, but I did use http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/ and it came back with 110 links to my site and the majority were linked under Punta Gorda Real Esate.

Now I'm wondering if the sites I'm linked to are not being crawled properly by Google??

This can't be so complex can it? I really thought that when I didn't have all my code 'approved' and didn't have a sitemap etc, that I was home free. I have had all those for months now and am getting nowhere.

TA

I just tried Yahoo Site Builder. It shows me having 18 internal links to my own home page (www.pgliving.com) and 110 external links to that home page.

So, if Yahoo see's 110, I still wonder why Google doesn't seem to give me any 'credit' for those links?

Tom

There is also a section in yahoo option that says only to this url. Change that option to the entire site to see all the links to your site.

As has been mentioned, Google will never show all of your links. They know about them, but they just don't show them all. You can't really go by the number they're currently showing. When you know there's a G update in the future you can check to see if the amount at least goes up.

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