Low Google ranking - why? - it is the sandbox?

Hello all,

I'm struggling to get a halfway decent ranking on Google for the site
I've designed for Wolverhampton City Learning Centre at
www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk, even for the terms "Wolverhampton City
Learning Centre". I'm wondering if anyone could take a look and
suggest why.

A search for "wolverhampton clc" places us first, but a search for
"wolverhampton city learning centre" has us on about page 6. On other
search engines - e.g altavista, yahoo UK, "wolverhampton city learning
centre" places us first.Are we in the Google sandbox that I've read
bits about?

The site was submitted to google at the start of September. The
current PageRank is 3. I have not used any form of extraordinary
linking from other sites. The pages validate and contain no hidden
text to act as Search Engine spamming.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Richard Anderson

Richard Anderson wrote:

www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk

Have a peek at http://zeldman.com/, especially at his "h1".

--
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Happy Customers: http://castleamber.com/testimonials.html

"Richard Anderson" <anderson_public (AT) dsl (DOT) pipex.com> wrote

Hello all,

I'm struggling to get a halfway decent ranking on Google for the site
I've designed for Wolverhampton City Learning Centre at
www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk, even for the terms "Wolverhampton City
Learning Centre". I'm wondering if anyone could take a look and
suggest why.

A search for "wolverhampton clc" places us first, but a search for
"wolverhampton city learning centre" has us on about page 6. On other
search engines - e.g altavista, yahoo UK, "wolverhampton city learning
centre" places us first.Are we in the Google sandbox that I've read
bits about?

The site was submitted to google at the start of September. The
current PageRank is 3. I have not used any form of extraordinary
linking from other sites. The pages validate and contain no hidden
text to act as Search Engine spamming.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Richard Anderson

Richard

I've given it 30 seconds of analysis and a factor is that you use "back to
home page" as alt text on the logo and "Home" in the top left corner. You
are not selling homes, backs or pages. Try amending the alt text on all
pages on links to the home page to read "Wolverhampton City Learning Centre
home page" and variations like "Wolverhampton CLC home page" etc. Do this
kind of thing for every link within your site so that the alt text or actual
link text really does match up exactly with the visible body content of the
destination page.

Anyway, I really appreciate your reference to the giant robotic telescope in
the Canary Isles. Visitors to your page
http://www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk/sc...enrichment.php might benefit from
a link out to telescope manufacturer at http://www.ngat.com/ You can
download a rather nice screen saver showing the telescope moving. The most
recently completed 2.4m diameter telescope has just been dispatched to
Yunnan, China, by boat out of Birkenhead, Liverpool. We wish it a safe
journey by sea and thence to the rarified atmosphere of Michael Palin's
Himalaya. Y
unnan 2.4m Telescope
Best regards, Eric.
#1 for the most sound advice on SEO

"John Bokma" <postmaster (AT) castleamber (DOT) com> wrote

Richard Anderson wrote:

www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk

Have a peek at http://zeldman.com/, especially at his "h1".
Customers: http://castleamber.com/testimonials.html

whats with all the title= tags - i thought they didnt impact SEO and they
deffinateley aint contributing to accessibility ?

mark

"mark | r" <markrush (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

"John Bokma" <postmaster (AT) castleamber (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:Xns95A59853A1BDDcastleamber (AT) 130 (DOT) 133.1.4...
Richard Anderson wrote:

www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk

Have a peek at http://zeldman.com/, especially at his "h1".
Customers: http://castleamber.com/testimonials.html

whats with all the title= tags - i thought they didnt impact SEO and they
deffinateley aint contributing to accessibility ?

mark

Richard

I've given it 30 seconds of analysis and a factor is that you use "back to
home page" as alt text on the logo and anchor "Home" in the top left corner.
You
are not selling homes, backs or pages. Try amending the alt text on all
pages on links to the home page to read "Wolverhampton City Learning Centre
home page" and variations like "Wolverhampton CLC home page" etc. Do this
kind of thing for every link within your site so that the alt text or link
anchor text really
does match up exactly with the visible body content of the destination page.

Anyway, I really appreciate your reference to the robotic telescope in
the Canary Isles. Visitors to your page
http://www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk/sc...enrichment.php might benefit from
a link out to telescope manufacturer at http://www.ngat.com/ You can
download a rather nice screen saver showing the telescope moving. The most
recently completed 2.4m diameter telescope has just been dispatched to
Yunnan, China, by boat out of Birkenhead, Liverpool. We wish it a safe
journey by sea and thence to the rarified atmosphere of Michael Palin's
Himalaya.

Best regards, Eric.
#1 for the most sound advice on SEO

(apologies if the above message appears twice, the first attempt appears to
have failed since I sent it 24 hours ago)

Thanks to everyone for their comments. Can anyone clarify whether h1
tags around images (with title attribute set) have any effect on SEO,
as there seems to be disagreement in the discussion? I will pay
attention to issues re. linking back to home page etc. Thanks for
pointing out these problems / issues.

I still can't believe how low the ranking in google is, though! For
example, for the search term "wolverhampton city learning centre"
(without the quotes when typed into Google) the following sites appear
above www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk:

"WLV Directions" http://asp.wlv.ac.uk/Level2.asp?User...Subsection=351
(PageRank=1)

"Wolverhampton Baby Toys"
http://www.city-visitor.com/wolverhampton/babytoys.html (PageRank 2)

and numerous other sites, that, in passing, mention "wolverhampton",
"city", "learning" and, "centre" at some point in their body text -
but often not together, and not in the page title.

I thought that Google placed a pretty high emphasis on page titles? I
could understand it if I needed to tweak things to take me from
position 10 to a higher position, but surely my site should be above
these? To repeat part of my original question; "Is this the sanbox
effect?"

Regards,

Richard

Richard Anderson wrote:

Thanks to everyone for their comments. Can anyone clarify whether h1
tags around images (with title attribute set) have any effect on SEO,
as there seems to be disagreement in the discussion? I will pay
attention to issues re. linking back to home page etc. Thanks for
pointing out these problems / issues.

I still can't believe how low the ranking in google is, though! For
example, for the search term "wolverhampton city learning centre"
(without the quotes when typed into Google) the following sites appear
above www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk:

"WLV Directions"
http://asp.wlv.ac.uk/Level2.asp?User...Subsection=351 (PageRank=1)

"Wolverhampton Baby Toys"
http://www.city-visitor.com/wolverhampton/babytoys.html (PageRank 2)

and numerous other sites, that, in passing, mention "wolverhampton",
"city", "learning" and, "centre" at some point in their body text -
but often not together, and not in the page title.

I thought that Google placed a pretty high emphasis on page titles? I
could understand it if I needed to tweak things to take me from
position 10 to a higher position, but surely my site should be above
these? To repeat part of my original question; "Is this the sanbox
effect?"

Regards,

Richard
My guess (and I stress it is just a guess) regarding the so called 'sandbox'

effect is that for the first 5 to 10 weeks or so the positioning of the page
in the results depends much on its content and as time passes the
positioning gradually depends increasingly on the effectiveness of the page
in satisfying searchers. This way new pages get a chance of exposure to
visitors and if the results are favourable then they are kept up; if
otherwise they move down.

Regarding headers, if you want to be safe, stick to a bold visible text
<h1>heading on the page. Add alt text to images only where the image is
significantly interesting or if it is a link button. You can be penalised
for stuffing alt words into images that are trivial, like single pixel gifs.

Read these very carefully:
http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/site....htm&FORM=WGDD

http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/guidelines.html

Best regards, Eric

On 19 Nov 2004 12:48:45 -0800, anderson_public (AT) dsl (DOT) pipex.com (Richard
Anderson) wrote:

Thanks to everyone for their comments. Can anyone clarify whether h1
tags around images (with title attribute set) have any effect on SEO,
as there seems to be disagreement in the discussion? I will pay
attention to issues re. linking back to home page etc. Thanks for
pointing out these problems / issues.

I still can't believe how low the ranking in google is, though! For
example, for the search term "wolverhampton city learning centre"
(without the quotes when typed into Google) the following sites appear
above www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk:

"WLV Directions" http://asp.wlv.ac.uk/Level2.asp?User...Subsection=351
(PageRank=1)

"Wolverhampton Baby Toys"
http://www.city-visitor.com/wolverhampton/babytoys.html (PageRank 2)

and numerous other sites, that, in passing, mention "wolverhampton",
"city", "learning" and, "centre" at some point in their body text -
but often not together, and not in the page title.

I thought that Google placed a pretty high emphasis on page titles? I
could understand it if I needed to tweak things to take me from
position 10 to a higher position, but surely my site should be above
these? To repeat part of my original question; "Is this the sanbox
effect?"

I've missed big chunks of this discussion apparently (mahcine wobbled
a bit) but Google wants to see inbound links more than anything. these
other sites will be arguably less to do with your subject but, for
reasons unkonwn and I ain't gonna look, will have more inbound links
using relevant words in the anchor text.
So Google will interpret them as being more deserving of a higher
ranking for those terms than your site.
If you input "miserable failure" into Google, you get teh bio of Dubya
Bush (still works, I just tried it). This is because loads of folk got
together and made links to it from their sites using miserable failure
as the anchor text. It illustrates neatly one aspect of how Google's
algorithm is flawed.
So there's nothing really wrong with your site.
What's really wrong is with Google.

BB
--
www.kruse.co.uk SEO (AT) kruse (DOT) demon.co.uk
home of SEO that's shiny!
--

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 22:38:49 GMT, "Eric Johnston"
<nospam (AT) redyonder (DOT) co.uk> wrote:

Richard Anderson wrote:
Thanks to everyone for their comments. Can anyone clarify whether h1
tags around images (with title attribute set) have any effect on SEO,
as there seems to be disagreement in the discussion? I will pay
attention to issues re. linking back to home page etc. Thanks for
pointing out these problems / issues.

I still can't believe how low the ranking in google is, though! For
example, for the search term "wolverhampton city learning centre"
(without the quotes when typed into Google) the following sites appear
above www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk:

"WLV Directions"
http://asp.wlv.ac.uk/Level2.asp?User...Subsection=351 (PageRank=1)

"Wolverhampton Baby Toys"
http://www.city-visitor.com/wolverhampton/babytoys.html (PageRank 2)

and numerous other sites, that, in passing, mention "wolverhampton",
"city", "learning" and, "centre" at some point in their body text -
but often not together, and not in the page title.

I thought that Google placed a pretty high emphasis on page titles? I
could understand it if I needed to tweak things to take me from
position 10 to a higher position, but surely my site should be above
these? To repeat part of my original question; "Is this the sanbox
effect?"

Regards,

Richard
My guess (and I stress it is just a guess) regarding the so called 'sandbox'
effect is that for the first 5 to 10 weeks or so the positioning of the page
in the results depends much on its content and as time passes the
positioning gradually depends increasingly on the effectiveness of the page
in satisfying searchers. This way new pages get a chance of exposure to
visitors and if the results are favourable then they are kept up; if
otherwise they move down.

Very similar to what I've been saying.

BB
--
www.kruse.co.uk SEO (AT) kruse (DOT) demon.co.uk
home of SEO that's shiny!
--

Eric Johnston wrote:

Add alt text to images only where the image is
significantly interesting or if it is a link button.

Add it to all images if you want your page to validate.