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Googled By Google!


samporras

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First off, I would like to thank TCH for all of the wonderful tutorials on promoting your website. I'm pretty new to web development and I have learned so much from them. Of course, when you learn something, more questions come to mind.....

 

I recently made a website for an event planning company named Venue Chicago that specializes in event planning. I have tried to follow all of the guidelines (to the best of my ability) in promoting my site.

 

Here's the funny part....

 

When I was in school, We had an assigment to creat a website for some business. I decided that it would be a great time to make a prototype of the website I wanted to build. After getting permission from the owner of venue chicago, I created a site and put it up on our school servers. Now, whenever I search on Google for venue chicago or anything related to that, I find that I get all of these links to the "old" website (school).....I mean i'm talking like top 10 results (one was even #2!!)

 

I used the same meta tags on the new website as my original website (the one for school) and included some more that would help out. The real website hardly comes up in any searches!

 

I have two theories on this....

 

One of them is that the the website I created at school is linked to that class' webpage(the one that I had the assignment on). Students from that class visit it every day for assignments and stuff. Since my original website is linked to this page, does that help the page rank?

 

The other theory is that I recently (after reading the tutorials) made a lot of changes to the meta tags and description in my index page of www.venuechicago.com. So the google spiders might have not picked up the changes in the monthly search. My problem is that I really don't want to put a lot of links to other websites on my site because they might lead business away from the company.....

Any thoughts? suggestions? :dance:

 

p.s.- sorry about the leangth, but i've been doing a lot of thinking....

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As far as the link is concerned, that may have some value, but I would imagine it isn't a highly rated link as far as Google is concerned. There are many factors that Google takes into account when ranking a page, and sometimes it is hard to tell exactly which ones worked and why.

 

If you just copied the meta tags, that probably isn't going to bring your new site right to the top. Instead, you would need to have keywords in the body and title and such. There may be some weight given to the age of the old webpage as well, especially if it is still updated regularly by someone.

 

It's also possible that there are other sites that link to the old page, perhaps with your search terms as the link text, which helps a lot. Could you give an example of a search term that ranks the old site very highly, and perhaps give the url (but not a link!) of the old site?

 

Ted

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samporras:

 

www.venuechicago.com has only just been indexed. Only the home page has been included thus far in Google's index, your site has no PageRank. You have to wait and get the entire site indexed (i.e. deep crawled) which may take some time.

 

As far as links go, you are right that links from a site may 'lead business away' but the reciprocal links (links on those other pages back to you), may 'lead business your way'. Therefore in essence, it is a wash (from that perspective). You can also go after links that complement the business not compete.

 

Word of caution: having duplicate content can get you in trouble. The original will always carry more weight (makes sense, it was the 'original'). Ideally, you would put permanent redirects on the school project pages to the 'real' page. This would give your 'new' site instant indexing, PageRank, and rankings (and eliminate any potential penalization for duplicate content).

 

Final suggestion: If the site is hosted here at TotalChoice, add it to our family members page.

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Ted,

I not only copied the meta tags...I also added more, changed the description, and also repreated more target words like venue chicago and event management and stuff. Here is the url that comes up when i search "venue chicago":

h**p://staff.lib.muohio.edu/~rachel/ims201/student_work/spring2003/projects/venue_chicago/vcHistory.htm

That is my old website. As you can see, it is not as professional or good looking as my new one! www.venuechicago.com :dance:

 

TCH-Scott:

What do you mean that having duplicate content can get me in "trouble". Do you mean legal trouble? How do I go about putting a permanent re-direct on my old site?

Also, I will join the family. It is a great way to showcase my site. Thanks for the information!

 

Thanks for your input guys!

Rock Sign

 

Edited: Removed the link. Google scans our fourms quite often and you don't want it to see yet another link to the old site. :lol: - TCH-Jim

Edited by TCH-Jim
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Not legal, I am speaking in terms of search engines only. Search engines can and will penalize sites for duplicate content. One of the early spams was to have multiple URLs with all the same (or very similar) content... a no-no today.

 

Regarding redirects:

 

More on permanent redirects here.

 

To have a redirect you need access to your .htaccess file... not sure you have access. Do you have an .htaccess file in ~rachel (this would be, by loose definition, your root)?

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Scott

Sorry I didn't answer right away. Thank you very much for your advice. Although I don't have an access to that file, I wrote my teacher an e-mail and asked her if she could redirect the page. Thanks again!

 

:lol:

 

Sam

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