Any gurus? Confused why this site is doing better than us

[ebizbuys]

Hi all,

Summary First: (If pushed for time just jump down to main question.)
I am the webmaster of the tintprofessor (http://www.tintprofessor.om.au) and I have a few challenges with getting this site better listed in google. In yahoo no problems. Got it in top 10 for all main keywords want. Problem is google though.

My main problems are that site is run by a cold fusion based cms system and obviously have issues with static pages, parameters etc. I also do not have access to uploading html designed pages to the server as yet. I am meeting with the designer this week to discuss this and I also want to see if we can introduce a url_handler to help. Anyway I digress. I know we have a cr*p PR and I am working on some reciprocal links but not having much luck.

I have created a few keyword enriched landing pages which are doing nothing. They maybe too keyword stuffed so I will be changing asap but I think main problem is the dynamic pages. Yeah?

Is there anything else I can do to help improove ranking in google and especially ask the web design company when I meet them this week?

Main Question:
I would love to know how our competitors wwwtintacar.com.au are doing so well in google. They are number one with anything to do with the keyword tint. See the local results here (http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=tint&meta=cr%3DcountryAU).
They have only got a PR of 3, only have 3 links back to them from the same place. They use flash, use frames and I cant even see meta tags or descriptions used (unless hidden). How are they doing this?

I need to kick there butt asap.

Any suggestions. Muchhhhhhhh appreciated. Hey. Was going to add a free thankyou (flash/gif banner or similar) to whoever helped me the most but not sure if against the rules or not and a touch busy this very moment. But will see.

[Robert]

[QUOTE=ebizbuys]
Main Question:
I would love to know how our competitors wwwtintacar.com.au are doing so well in google. They are number one with anything to do with the keyword tint..[/QUOTE]

There are a couple things to look at, but first, what other keywords/combinations do they come up high with other then a combination using the words car and tint?

[ebizbuys]

pretty much anything to do with tint.

car tint, car window tint, car window tinting etc. If it hasnt got car or tint in it it doesnt sem to rank though. These however are the most popular keywords and obviousily the ones I want to target for us.

[Robert]

Here is what I remember from looking at the page yesterday. I was going to look into the fact that the google cache did not show anything, but I think that is due to a combination of frames and flash.

Anyway, the only words that google could index at all were coming up were having to do with combinations or car and tint.

As you noted the page was frames, without meta tags.

So, all google has to evaluate the site/page with is the frames page.

The title has only 3 words: "tint a car"

The URL "www.tintacar.com.au" is a combination of those three words.

Google will ignore the letter "a". Not much choice about what to say the page is about... tint & car.

Then, consider also that you are searching only au pages, and there is little competition (only about 3,500 car tint results), so pages like that stand a better chance of getting listed.

You can have a nicer page, but you are trying to do well with everything, while the competing page is only (from googles perspective) about car tint.

If you search for terms outside that range, you won't find the other page.

For example, truck tinting - not in the first 500, auto tintng - not in site, window tinting, 248.

But when you search for "car tint", google has a choice in pages to show.

It can show your competitions page which is believes is about:

"car tint"

Or it can show your page which tells google in its own keyword tag that it is about...
car tint, and also about "car window tint, car window tinting, car tinting, automotive tinting, tint professor, tinting, tint, glass tinting, window tinting, film, glass, safety film, safety glass, vehicle tinting, vehicle tint, window protection, window film, UV protection, metallised film, alarm professor, Melbourne, Australia, Franchise Opportunity, glare, UV, customising, customizing, IWFAA, International Window Film Association of Australia, Vision Systems, car security, security systems,".

(someone a bit more up on how googles looks at things these days may have comments on the number of times tint or a version of it appears. for the most part I believe google ignores tags anyway, but they may be duplicated enough to bother you on the SEs.)

Which would you expect to tell you more about medical radiology, the dictionary, or a book titled "Medical Radiology"? They both have information about the word, but because the dictionary is also about many, many other things, it can not be as comprehensive about medical radiology as a book specifically on that subject and nothing else.

While you talk about car tint on your page, you water it down too much with other competing keywords. The more your page is about other things, the less your page can be about "car tint". You have 33 search phrases in your keyword list. If you don't talk about anything else, and divide your time equally, we could assume that your page is about 3% on car tint, and perhaps much less since you listed it so far down on the list.

Really, you are doing a great job, you are just trying to make your page all things to all people.

It has been awhile since I played in SEO and I am just catching up, so someone else may correct me, but I think you will need to narrow the terms on your page, or better yet, make a page dedicated to car tint in order combat the competitors page for that term.

Also (and it sounds bad coming from someone who has not even posted a link to my own sites), you may want to look at what you ask as incoming links. For example, in your initial post, you used the text "the tintprofessor" when you could help yourself with this term by using the link car tint (http://www.tintprofessor.com.au/) or perhaps car tinting (http://www.tintprofessor.com.au) . ;)

Hope this is of some help.

Robert - (off in search of :nap: )

[ebizbuys]

Your the man robert. Thanks for the great post. I will mull over it now. Just wanted to say thanks so you can get some sleep.

Dont let the google bugs bite.

[seokid]

I would put serious money on cloaking. If you go to their index page from google.. and click back, you get redirected. Serverside redirect, google is probably seeing a different page than we are. Any thoughts on this theory being wrong? Cloaking :s&m:

[Robert]

Cloaking was my first thought, esp. after not getting a cache document from Google.

But after looking into it a bit more, I am reasonably certain that it is not used.

The redirect is partially due to googles "search" for the cached copy.

Using certain tools, you can see the actual code returned by the page in different circumstances. It is extremely easy to use agent spoofing, while much harder but still possible to spoof an IP such as one that google uses.

I can tell you that it does not provide another page to the google user agent. Spoofing an IP can cause many problems (both technical and legal) depending on how it is done, so I would never recommend doing so, or even suggest I would do it myself. :rolleyes: That being said, I for some reason believe we can "guess" it does not appear to be serving another page to IPs known to belong to google.

I think it was just lucky in a lower competition geographical search.

A couple more things to consider. If it was cloaking, we should also see good (or any) results for other keywords. It appears that this is the only page actually indexed for the entire domain.

If there was a keyword rich page fed to the google spider, then the spider should have been able to find at least a couple words to show under the domain in the search results. There is nothing, because there were no words on the page other than the html coding. This is not consistent with cloaking which provides oodles of optomized content.

Another thing I did find after my above post, was that google is aware of more than just the three links coming in. I just ran into this on another site, where google did not show any incoming links, but I could find many pages linking in, by searching "www.mydomain.com".

Google was counting these links even though it did not acknowledge them as return links when searching (link:, etc.) that way. I know this because I tested by having all the incoming links use the same keyword. Although the page had other content, and showed no incoming links (after adjusting for the sandbox effect), this page was ranked #2 for a somewhat competetive phrase.

56 pages linking from other sites to the one in question (http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22www.tintacar.com.au%22&hl=en&lr=&cr=countryAU&ie=UTF-8&start=10&sa=N). And many have good link text to help it out too.

I don't think ebizbuys will have much trouble with this site, just a matter of good links, a few treaks, and waiting for all the links to settle out.

Good thinking on the cloaking tho. As I said, that was the first thing that came to my mind as well.

[I, Brian]

Cloaking? No - I'd just put faith in them actually having a better number of backlinks with the required anchor text.

SEO forums are always getting posts from webmasters who think simply editing their on-site elements will get them well ranked for commercial terms, but it simply isn't true - certainly not these days. The currency of SEO is links, and I'd wager that's exactly where you are being beaten here.