| 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Book Reviewer | 6/11/11 2:39 PM | I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YES My site's URL (web address) is: http://dannyreviews.com/ Description (including timeline of any changes made): none in last few years (other than 4 to 8 reviews added every month) Evidence th |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Wow_Just_Wow | 6/11/11 3:02 PM | Hi Danny. First, let me say that I am a fan of your reviews and have found them informative and helpful in the past. So, I am very interested in seeing your site rank highly in Google. The information is the type of information I want to see when I s |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | seo101 | 6/11/11 3:23 PM | The recent changes in Googles algorithm is designed to lower the rankings of lower quality sites, generally based on this criteria: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html They asked a large grou |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Danny Yee | 6/11/11 3:26 PM | Thanks! It's encouraging to get such a rapid response, especially from someone who knows the site already. There's certainly something to be said for updating from Web 0.5 (as I call it) to Web 2.0. It would be quite nice to build a reader communi |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Lysis | 6/11/11 3:39 PM | Danny, you can also get a DMCA letter from a lawyer sent to the host. I've known companies that do it and it is effective. I can't imagine a letter would cost much, but I'm just a computer nerd. :D I do think, though, that if it is one site with tha |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | wejonk | 6/11/11 3:43 PM | Remember that that isn't Google. DMCA is a legal procedure outside Google. That is (normally) you first contact the webmaster, when they do not reply the web hosting company and then you fill in an official DMCA request. |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Danny Yee | 6/11/11 3:44 PM | Well, I'm biased, obviously, but feedback over the years suggests many people find the site useful. And looking through the quality criteria at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html, it's hard |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Danny Yee | 6/11/11 3:47 PM | Lysis and wejonk - yes, DMCAing the hosting service makes more sense. I'll do that first thing tomorrow morning. |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Lysis | 6/11/11 3:52 PM | Well, I think you should take Wow's and seo101's advice and implement a bit of an upgrade in visual aesthetics. I wander the halls of this place practically every day, and there's been quite a few old sites (I'm talking 10-15 years old) that have pos |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Wow_Just_Wow | 6/11/11 3:53 PM | Unfortunately, Google does care about the design. The problem is that a lot of sites were thrown up in the old days of the web and got a lot of links. They just stayed in the search results forever and ever without adding anything valuable today beca |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | LarGibbon | 6/11/11 3:54 PM | Hi Danny, do you have any relation to http://donbooks.net ? If so you are shooting yourself in the foot - it's a complete duplicate of your site. |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Danny Yee | 6/11/11 4:07 PM | The site structure hasn't changed, but I've done a fair bit of tweaking of the look and feel over the years, and I've put quite a lot of thought into the review layout -- attempting to get the optimal line width and line spacing for on-screen reading |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Danny Yee | 6/11/11 4:15 PM | Ok, a DMCA notice regarding http://donbooks.net has been send to GoDaddy (by email, if that's not accepted I'll send a fax on Monday). |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Durant Imboden | 6/11/11 6:16 PM | You're absolutely right. Every review SHOULD be on its own page. That works best for the reader, and it should also work best for Google. As for the site looking "old-fashioned," I'd take suggestions to modernize its look and feel for SEO reasons wi |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Danny Yee | 6/12/11 4:23 AM | Thanks, Durant and lockedout-noreason. Looking at threads at WebmasterWorld such as http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4323314.htm, a lot of the advice is to sit tight and wait - there's clearly a fair number of people suffering similar problems, |
| Re: 10 (or 15) year old personal site, 1200+ book reviews, hammered in rankings | Danny Yee | 6/12/11 7:32 AM | I've made one easy "link structure" change. The pages http://dannyreviews.com/titles.html and http://dannyreviews.com/authors.html used to have full lists of all my reviews, but now they just have links to the individual letter index pages. This wi |