Hello all, first post here. If this has been disscussed elswhere just point me in the right direction.

I was on page 1 #10 yesterday, usually page 2 # 12 - 14. Today the site is missing altogether.

I did the URL: search and it is listed, just no where to be found.

Link is in my profile. Try your best not to make too much fun of me.

Why make fun of you? Jennifer Aniston's HOT! (Course, naked pictures are always helpful, but that's a future update I'm sure. )

As far as the site goes, you've actually done a lot of things correctly. You built it for your users, you're not spamming, you're not manipulating, you're not link exchanging (that I could see) or doing anything like that.

The only things I can come up with are:

1) Your forum. If you're going to have one, you'll want to get some more people involved and actively posting. You'll pick up more keywords and phrases organically that way.

2) Your Home link. Point it to anistoncenter.com, not anistoncenter.com/index.php .

3) The coding of your site. This is a layout that could have the amount of code significantly reduced if it were a tableless layout (which it easily can be.) There are lots of great resources on CSS and tableless layouts on this site, as well as a few geeks like LadyNRed, vangogh, chrishirst, ForrestCroce, Learning Not-So-Newbie and myself who can help you out.

For what search term?

You have a lot of pages in Google's (normal) index. So you probably dropped from #12 to #1,200. From what I gather this is actually a common thing, and if you didn't mess up somehow, there's a better than 50/50 chance you'll be back where you used to be in a few days. Google likes playing with math, and testing new ideas on how they might be able to improve their algorithm a little.

Your site seems well enough coded, and while I have absolutely no interest in your topic, it looks like you've actually put together a lot of content that's related to your topic, that readers interested in it will like. Kudos. That puts you ahead of 99 % of the people who post here. Sadly I'm not kidding.

It's also not-for-profit ( good on you! ), and doesn't have advertising. Makes for a better user experience. Your color scheme could use some work ( a little hard to read ), but you didn't ask about that. Question, though: on the bottom left, where you have a bunch of "listed at" links, are these sites that link to yours? If so, the links ( from those sites ) will be worth more if you remove or nofollow these links. Google has devalued recripricals.

By the way, for anyone else wanting to give advice, the link is to a site called Jennifer Aniston Center. I'm assuming you didn't put it in your posting to be polite, but as Adam says (sarcastically), links are the universal solvent in SEO, the one and only thing that matters. So there's a free one.

A couple of other thoughts. You have that navigation thing in the top left, or almost at the top - it's actually really creative the way you made that look. I like. But here's some feedback on how you could improve it:

• Use roll-overs. When somebody points to one of these links, it should change somehow, probably in color. This makes it easy for a new viewer to look at your galleries, without wondering which link they're about to click on, because the mouse is bigger than the links.
• Don't open these links in a new window. That's annoying. People will forgive you doing that for links to other sites, but there's no reason to have a bunch of tabs or browser windows open, all with different pages on the same site.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Why make fun of you? Jennifer Aniston's HOT! (Course, naked pictures are always helpful, but that's a future update I'm sure. )

As far as the site goes, you've actually done a lot of things correctly. You built it for your users, you're not spamming, you're not manipulating, you're not link exchanging (that I could see) or doing anything like that.

The only things I can come up with are:

1) Your forum. If you're going to have one, you'll want to get some more people involved and actively posting. You'll pick up more keywords and phrases organically that way.

2) Your Home link. Point it to anistoncenter.com, not anistoncenter.com/index.php .

3) The coding of your site. This is a layout that could have the amount of code significantly reduced if it were a tableless layout (which it easily can be.) There are lots of great resources on CSS and tableless layouts on this site, as well as a few geeks like LadyNRed, vangogh, chrishirst, ForrestCroce, Learning Not-So-Newbie and myself who can help you out.

Thanks Adam!

1. We have almost 5000 registerd members. I just recently turned the forum pages loose. I had them blocked in the robots.txt file. Still not sure I will leave this.

2. I thought I had cought all of those, but I have a couple of people that also edit this that ahhhh... need help occasionaly.
Where did you find that and I will fix it.

3. I have actually been doing this, I just rcently recoded all of the layout for a 4 colum floating layout but some of the table stuff still remains. I will get to it eventually.

I originally got into this to help them with some other totally unrelated stuff, spamming the forum with porn and drug sites for instance. Anyway since about mid December I have been doing the SEO stuff. So in mid dec. I actually had to look SEO up. Didn't know what it was.

Still not sure I do...

I rank fine on Google and Yahoo, but have always been low on MSN, then today it was just Gone. I put this here becouse I thought I may have made an SEO blunder.

Bill

Sorry, the search term is Jennifer Aniston.

This happens at Google all the time, but I have a 5 or 6 serp position there most of the time. Yahoo is very stable at 3.

Actually I have been thinking of getting rid of that navagation. Not becouse I dont like it but becouse the text is imbeded in the images and can't be resized. I will look into making the links change on hover and your right about opening in a new window. I will change that too, thanks.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

For what search term?

You have a lot of pages in Google's (normal) index. So you probably dropped from #12 to #1,200. From what I gather this is actually a common thing, and if you didn't mess up somehow, there's a better than 50/50 chance you'll be back where you used to be in a few days. Google likes playing with math, and testing new ideas on how they might be able to improve their algorithm a little.

Your site seems well enough coded, and while I have absolutely no interest in your topic, it looks like you've actually put together a lot of content that's related to your topic, that readers interested in it will like. Kudos. That puts you ahead of 99 % of the people who post here. Sadly I'm not kidding.

It's also not-for-profit ( good on you! ), and doesn't have advertising. Makes for a better user experience. Your color scheme could use some work ( a little hard to read ), but you didn't ask about that. Question, though: on the bottom left, where you have a bunch of "listed at" links, are these sites that link to yours? If so, the links ( from those sites ) will be worth more if you remove or nofollow these links. Google has devalued recripricals.

I don't want the ads, not that Im against making money, we just don't need them.

I agree with you on the color scheme too. Unfortunatly thats not somethiing I am any good at. The site was originally designed about 4 years ago and they had someone create the graphics. They are long gone. This used to be the pittaniston site. They tell me there was some sort of breakup.

These links have always concerned me, but this is the way it is done in the fansite world. In fact I just added 3 from Googles Celeberty directory. It is nearly impossable to get links without a linkback. I know the SE don't like it but I don't know what else to do. And all of the fan sites do it, it really is a surprisingly tight knit community. If I nofollow or remove the links I will be removed from theirs. I may nofollow Star, US Weekly and Ok though, just out of spite...

Ok thanks to all that commented, hope I can be as useful. I fixed the URI with index.php, dont know why I did that... And I fixed my domain links so they open in the same window.

Can't get the onmouseover to work in the nav menu using "this.style..."?? Ran out of time tonight.

Back to the original topic. Why am I missing from the serp?

You said you only recently made your forums visible to the search engines, that you're fighting drug/porn spam, and that you just recently dropped out of the search results.

How do you deal with your spam? Do you delete the posts? How long is any particular spam link up for? I'm the least educated guy around when it comes to SEO, but I've got a hunch some links out to "bad neighborhoods" got spidered, and you're being penalized for them.

That's the beauty of a lot of the changes you just made (specifically the home page one). By having one and only one homepage for example (no index.php thing), you'll avoid any duplicate content issues and create more inbound links to a single point.

As far as the fanlinks...I'd leave them. As long as they're not bad neighbourhoods, you probably won't suffer too much if at all. And like you said, that's the way it is in the fansite world.

As far as the code is concerned: the less code you have, the easier it is for a search engine (and a user, more importantly) to get to the content.

In other words, by fixing user issues, you solve a lot of the SEO issues as well, and possibly all of them.

With regard to the naked pics: I never saw any. (I was just hoping to. )

Hope that gives you a little more guidance.

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

You said you only recently made your forums visible to the search engines, that you're fighting drug/porn spam, and that you just recently dropped out of the search results.

How do you deal with your spam? Do you delete the posts? How long is any particular spam link up for? I'm the least educated guy around when it comes to SEO, but I've got a hunch some links out to "bad neighborhoods" got spidered, and you're being penalized for them.

Hi ForestCroce,

You may be on to something I dropped in Google too from 4 to 6. I'm going to put the dissallow back in the robots.txt. Wasn't sure it was a good idea when I decided to do it.

Without going into a long history, I was asked
to help with some problems they were having after they had switched to the new forum template. I fixed that stuff and noticed they also had a lot of spam and asked if this was a big problem. Turned out they were spending time everyday deleting this crap manually. I changed a lot of things.

• No Guest posts
• Captcha that cant be read by OCR software
• Hid the profile from users until they are registered and I can set this to only be available after a certain number of posts.
• Registration verification by return email
• Added several things to the Admin CP to make it easy to delete users and posts without hunting.

Other things too…

We don’t get anymore spam and that was all finished in mid December.

Still it is very possible indexing the forum was a bad idea. It really isn’t needed anyway. I will go database diving and see if I can find any gad site urls in the posts. Great catch!

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

That's the beauty of a lot of the changes you just made (specifically the home page one). By having one and only one homepage for example (no index.php thing), you'll avoid any duplicate content issues and create more inbound links to a single point.

As far as the fanlinks...I'd leave them. As long as they're not bad neighbourhoods, you probably won't suffer too much if at all. And like you said, that's the way it is in the fansite world.

As far as the code is concerned: the less code you have, the easier it is for a search engine (and a user, more importantly) to get to the content.

In other words, by fixing user issues, you solve a lot of the SEO issues as well, and possibly all of them.

With regard to the naked pics: I never saw any. (I was just hoping to. )

Hope that gives you a little more guidance.

Nope no naked pics. We have a lot of kids, thats why the spamming was so important to stop. I have been around the block a few times but I was SHOCKED. That's not an easy thing to do.

Actually I think all of the Listed At links have pretty good PR. The other fansites, many of them are people that started their own web site after spending time with us.

And everyone has their favorites, besides it's fun. And that is what a fansite should be. The highest rated jen site does the same thing and has a higher PR than us. Been around 3 years longer too.


Can't say I would mind topping Wikipedia though

I think I may see what has happend. The WWW domain is missing and just the Home Page. I have a 301 redirect to WWW but the serp always listed the non www. I resubmited the www domain about a month ago. the 301 redirect was done in January.

It's still missing this morning, I hope it's just reindexing and will start to use the www.

It's back page 2 #11 as non www ... strange

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools - one option in their control panel is whether you'd like them to index you under www.site.com or just site.com. There's a lot more that's of interest in there, but for this reason alone you should check it out. Especially for the price, free ninety-nine.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools - one option in their control panel is whether you'd like them to index you under www.site.com or just site.com. There's a lot more that's of interest in there, but for this reason alone you should check it out. Especially for the price, free ninety-nine.

Thanks Learning but I have been a member there for some time. The Prefered Domain is actually only a suggestion to Google as to which URL you want, they do not use this as a default. The only way to direct traffic from the non www domain is to do a 301 redirect. Other wise Google and others may ( at times ) consider one a duplicate of the other. Silly I know...