No Index / No Ranking / Great Site! Please Help

[HumorBug]

* this thread shows up first when you search for humorbug. SEOGuy forum updates fast on google.

http://www.humorbug.com

Question:
HumorBug has a lot of hyphen's/dashes in a lot of it's URL minimum of 6 upwards of 11. Anyone heard of being penalized for having too many dashes/hyphens? Especially when there are a lot of keywords in the URL.

Thank You

[wlh]

you have VERY competitive keywords... 'funny' has over 24 million results and the others are between 5-8 million (google). If you want to rank high, you have a lot of link exchanges to do and atleast 3 more months before you will see any results...if your lucky

[wlh]

try targeting more specific keywords such as: funny cat pictures, funny day job jokes etc...

Your site is great though, i love that you have no pop ups :)

[eitemiller]

You gave incredibaly good details as to what your page is, what your kw's are, what you've been doing, etc. Much better than the usualy "My SERP's are bad, please help..." Thanks. But as soon as I read

[QUOTE=HumorBug]
this is the 3rd month of operation now, with not much changes
[/QUOTE]

I stopped. Patience. You do have incredibly hard keywords, good point. But I'd say it going to take six months before you see any serious results.

Surprised Google hasn't stopped by. Try downloading/install the Google Toolbar, and run all over your site. Sometimes that "inspires" the Gbot to stop by. Do you ahve a blog? Write some links from your Blog to your site - maybe Gbot has been to your blog - that worked for me.

Good luck with the SEO - keep working on your backlinks.

[HumorBug]

I learned an important lesson while i drove myself crazy with trying to find out why my site won't get indexed, ranked, or even listed in google.

Here it is:

BE PATIENT!

[CMA]

Good day from Austria! First of all, yur site is really funny!
One thing that I always do with my sites is to add the meta "robots" index,follow thing at a robots.txt.
Another thing, since seo-guy has high-pr and you are posting here, you might get hit be the bot even more often.
Wish you good luck, your site deserves to get in and climb up.
Greetings
David

[HumorBug]

Question:
HumorBug has a lot of hyphen's/dashes in a lot of it's URL minimum of 6 upwards of 11. Anyone heard of being penalized for having too many dashes/hyphens? Especially when there are a lot of keywords in the URL.

Thank You

[eitemiller]

wierd. How can you have a PR of 2, yet not find one page of your site indexed by G? I am at a loss....

[HumorBug]

[QUOTE=eitemiller]wierd. How can you have a PR of 2, yet not find one page of your site indexed by G? I am at a loss....[/QUOTE]

Yeah it's been a big trouble spot for me. I am even in the google directory and dmoz directory and have tons of backlink pages.

I use to think it was PHPSESSIONID that caused the problem, but I disabled it.

Now I think it's the dashes/hyphens which I hear in some forums can cause negative rank.

If someone would like to double check my html. I already did it with w3 html validator.

I don't know what the problem is either.

Any thoughts?

[eitemiller]

where are you at in the directory? I am really curious about this. My suspicion is it's gotta be a fluke.

[mobilebadboy]

I don't really think alot of dashes would be the problem. Have you ever seen bizrate.com URLs that are indexed? Some contain more underscores and dashes (and commas) than I have in several URLs combined. Here's a typical one:

www.bizrate.com/buy/products__att359071--6074-,cat_id--13050816.html

If that can be indexed, you should have no worries.

Google shows 0 backlinks, if you've been running for three months Google should have at least run across some of your backlinks and included them in the last couple of BL updates.

Makes me wonder if that domain was previously owned and penalized for any reason.

[eitemiller]

[QUOTE=mobilebadboy]Makes me wonder if that domain was previously owned and penalized for any reason.[/QUOTE]

Ewwwww - I didn't think about that horrible possibility :eek:

[Scoreboard]

[QUOTE=mobilebadboy]Makes me wonder if that domain was previously owned and penalized for any reason.[/QUOTE]

I'm starting to fall into this camp's thinking, as well. I wish Google had a "bad url" query to test these things before you build sites on them...or for that matter so anyone can see if they are banned. They can get their point across and remove all the guessing games at the same time for minimal work on their end.

[mobilebadboy]

If you look at archive.org, the domain was used for a humor site all the way back to 2002.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.humorbug.com

At the end of 2003 the layout changed, and then in June 2003 it turned into a TopList. Nothing looks to be worth being banned over, but of course it doesn't tell the whole story either.

[HumorBug]

Yeah,

I e-mail google to let me know if I was banned. They didn't respond, so I e-mailed them again, and they told me to be patient, it's been 4 weeks since the first e-mail.

The directory listings are at:
http://dmoz.org/Recreation/Humor/Archives/
http://directory.google.com/Top/Recreation/Humor/Archives/

[eitemiller]

Excellant idea using the web archives to see the site some years back. Too bad it didn't turn up much.

HuomorBug: Go back to the Google directory and look at the listing of your site. Look at the "green" bar next to your listing. I have been saying that Google actually did go a PR update, but it cannot be seen on the G Toolbar. To see it, you have to find your listing in the G Directory, and look at the bar next to your list. Go look and tell me if you see what I see, but that look likes a zero - there is no green.

Not surprised that Google isn't going to be much help. If you really wanted to, call there AdWords program, and pretend like you are interested in buying sponsered links. Maybe (a big maybe) they can give you an idea as to what is wrong.

I don't know what else to tell you...kinda at a loss here...

[HumorBug]

[QUOTE=mobilebadboy]I don't really think alot of dashes would be the problem. Have you ever seen bizrate.com URLs that are indexed? Some contain more underscores and dashes (and commas) than I have in several URLs combined. Here's a typical one:

www.bizrate.com/buy/products__att359071--6074-,cat_id--13050816.html
[/QUOTE]

http://www.humorbug.com/p-8-889/funny-kids-pics/gotta-teach-your-kids-to-aim-high.html

My url has lots of keywords in though and also those keywords are in the title tag, the meta tag, bold on the bottom of the page, title of the content, and italics on the page. Could this be considered as spamming?

[eitemiller]

I sure do not think so. It's probably true that too many dashes/underscores in a URL may give you some "negative points" in the SERP's - but that is far different from a ban.

You don't have any outgoing links to "bad neighborhoods", do you? No link farms, crap like that...you don't have 35 mirror/doorway sites out there, do you? I'm just thinking out loud here...

[HumorBug]

I use to have subdomains for example

http://jokes.humorbug.com/funny-animal-jokes/2332/

but I changed that to http://www.humorbug.com/j-c-3_1/funny-animal-jokes.html

the subdomains were about it, they dont' exist anymore, taken down about 4 weeks ago, once i started realizing the site wasn't getting indexed at all.

as far as i know i don't have any doorways/mirrors or such.

[mobilebadboy]

Ok, it's official. This site has to be banned by Google. I see HumorBug on (at the time of writing this) so I got curious enough to go look. After backlinks updates and now a PR update, that site still turns up a greyed out bar. The Google Directory still shows no PR bar either.

I would suggest bringing this up with Google again (if you haven't already).

Sorry to bring this back up, was just sitting here in one of my rare bored moments. 8-|

[HumorBug]

Hey,

Thanks for the post. I can't figure it out. My focuses have changed from marketing via search engine to other methods. So far so good, amazing what can happen when you are "forced" to think out of the box.


Thanks
HB

[leeds1]

Looks like google thinks you have a lot of duplicate content - whilst doing a "site" command:

Results 1 - 2 of about 108 from www.humorbug.com for

[HumorBug]

yeah it's wierd, maybe it's the html, there might be too much of it thats similar. Otherwise the title tags and content are all different. Is it something i should be worried about a lot?

Go figure. Oh well, im getting indexed slowly.