Why no backlinks?

di11on

Hey folks,

My site (http://www.woodentoys.ie) has been up and running for around 7 months now. I have seen the unique visitors to my site increase steadily enough, however, I still have a Google pagerank of 0. When I check for links to my site (link:www.woodentoys.ie) it reports none, however when I look for www.woodentoys.ie on the net, I see a good few - I've submitted my site to loads of directories.

So, I have two questions,
1. What more can I do?
2. What does it take for a link to my site to qualify as a back link in Google's eyes?

Many thanks for you time folks,

Jody

smemon

i wouldn't worry about links, you're already indexed in google so that's a start.

google have no set pattern for updating links/pagerank so it could be months before you see results on those..

according to iwebtool, you've a predicted pagerank of 4, so obviously you have been linkbuilding

yahoo is a more 'live' option to check your backlinks and according to them you have 194 backlinks.

p

On a more general note. You're site isn't very search-engine friendly. You're using tables to control the layout as well as things like spacer gifs etc... That can get in the way of Google indexing your page as well as they might.

di11on

@smemon: Thanks a millon for that - that's really helpful and interesting.. nice to see that my hard work has actually been achieving something!!!

@p: You're right - it's because my site is oscommerce based so unless I completely rewrite the site, there's not an awful lot I can do. It's something to consider for future projects though.

By the way - did anyone find the site very slow? I do. Is it becuase letshost.ie host have a us based network??

DJB

A good tool for checking your popularity:

http://www.popuri.us

You need to sign up to Google Webmaster to get Google's official backlink reports:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&passive=true&nui=1&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2Fsiteoverview&followup=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2Fsiteoverview

Also, to check you SEO score, try:

http://www.websitegrader.com/

Rgds, Dave

Bananna man

If you check on yahoo.com its saying 202 links.

Also, those pagerank prediction tools are pants. The only way you can predict pagerank accuratly is if you are running the same algorithm that google is using which is impossible.

Insert your link on this site:

http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

and it will also show you the pr of sites that links to you. As you can see the pr of the sites that link to you arent great and a lot of them are forum sig links so they wont hold much wait with google.

If your domain is 7 months old i would expect at least pr1 or pr2 so maybe something else is going wrong. The next google pr update was due about a month ago but still no sign of it for some reason. When its updated again check your pagerank and let us know how its doing.

I wouldnt worry too much about the way your site is designed. CSS or cleaner html is preferable but google will still index your site and a few of my sites that are designed badly with a cms still rank well.

I also checked to make sure the domain is not banned by google and it seem not to be fine:

http://www.iwebtool.com/google_banned?domain=www.woodentoys.ie%2F

I see your ranking #1 for wooden toys on google.ie so you must be doing something right. Just wait for the next update and see how things are then

di11on

Bananna man wrote:

I see your ranking #1 for wooden toys on google.ie so you must be doing something right. Just wait for the next update and see how things are then

Yeah, that is the single best thing going for me - but I think that's just because of my domain name. Hopefully, over the long term, that should result in some natural backlinks. For all other google sites it's not really up there at all.

Thanks again for all your comments.

Bananna man

Also, i see in your sig you have a link to your site but you have the domain name as your anchor text. You should change this to keywords you want to rank well for as google takes note of the anchor text in links to your site. Mix and match it up a bit as well for different links to your site so it looks more natural to google.

di11on

Thanks Banana Man - good advice!

mneylon

I think there are some plugins for OScommerce that can help with making it more seo-friendly

And yes - it is slow to load

di11on

Hi Blacknight

My OSC store is very heavily customised... I have a number of contributions installed which make it more SEO friendly as well as a host of other stuff... including a thumbnail contribution (absolutely essential).

I'm almost positive that my site is slow to load because of where it's hosted. I manage another OSC based site (www.vintagevibrations.com) which is hosted with a different company and it's way faster. I will almost definitely be switching to a different host next renewal.. will be looking closely at yourselves ;-) I've a couple of other projects coming up too.

mneylon

I can see you've got some kind of seo-friendly URL mod installed, but you still have the php session ids...

Not sure what you can do about them, but there's probably a plugin or hack

Creative Storm

I tried Letshost and i found them awful. Id make a move out of there to Hosting365. They have a great business package and would most likely improve the overall speed of your site.