Why Isn't My Site Ranking In Google?

A question many people are asking themselves this month.

I tried to write an article explaining why many sites, including this one, no longer rank for their official site name.

Generally recurring themes which have been seen are a combination of the following:

  • Many sitewide inbound links.

  • Lack of anchor text variation.
  • Low deep link ratio.

Some of the sites that were hit may have deserved to be filtered out, but some of them that were hit just don't make sense.

Should a site be penalized because most people link to it using it's official site name? The current algorithm says yes.

Some people are wondering whether Google has lost its focus.

Published: February 25, 2005 by Aaron Wall in google articles

Comments

Philipp Lenssen
February 25, 2005 - 3:17pm

Yet your site is still ranked as PR7...

February 25, 2005 - 3:45pm

>Yet your site is still ranked as PR7...

right. some filters do not outright ban sites, just prevent certain pages for ranking for certain terms.

February 25, 2005 - 9:12pm

The Pope Blog is also not ranking for its site name.

I think this filter is bullshit, because the Pope Blog actually did get its link pop naturally... no, REALLY!

February 25, 2005 - 9:22pm

Brad Talmir runs a # of legit niche directories and was also screwed by the latest Google update.

A friend of mine surfs the web not by typing in URLs, but by searching via Google. He said that close to a month ago PayPal wasn't even on the first page of Google for their official site name.

February 27, 2005 - 9:45am

Aaron,

You may want to change the copy now in your ad for your seo book:

"This is the #1 ranking SEO book on all major search engines."

Nonetheless - it still is the best SEO book out there - good luck with the recovery.

Alex

February 27, 2005 - 8:36pm

Aaron,

the press release about your new affiliate program on PR Leap was the #4 result for SEO Book on Google as of Feb 27, 2005.

SEO Book Launches New Affiliate Program - me
http://www.prleap.com/pr/4715/

Merrick

July 7, 2005 - 9:34pm

I wonder what the effect the links of spam directories who just copy real directories have on your site with this sort of algorithm set!? It is frustrating for me to search my backlinks and find my site listed in clothing directories and many other totally unrelated directories. I know many people are happy to get any link they can but I hate going through my backlinks and seeing dozens of copied spam directory links. I would hate to imagine that my ranking could now be effected by these sites.

Helen
December 2, 2006 - 8:08am

Hey i just come to know that instead of submitting your site to google, link it with some site, it will automatically get indexed. This is True

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