I have redirected this domain to a different location than my main site in an attempt to
troubleshoot various issues with Googles indexing. Once upon a time (late 2005) averyjparker.com
was doing very well with google indexing, posts were in the main index within about a week on
average. Site search was fantastic, I could find articles for my own reference by simply quoting
the text I knew I used and I'd find the relevant article.
My motivation for the averyjparker.com site has been a couple of areas. First, I have wanted a
"knowledge base" of sorts of many of the problems I run across in day to day computer service. I
wanted it available from anywhere with web access. The blog style seemed ideal for that coupled
with googles site search, it made finding a problem that I'd already solved (or found an answer
for) 5 months ago AMAZINGLY easy without having to go back to the main web search and retrace my
footsteps. February of 2006 saw things change dramatically though. I think that was the time Big
Daddy went live. While, the main page and some of the category pages have been cached fairly
regularly since then, none of the articles (as far as I've found) have been indexed since early
February. In fact, many of the pre-February articles vanished. I've revisited the issue several
times. At one point averyjparker.net pointed to my home network and coincidentally around early
February I had some major issues with my internet connectivity. At first, I thought the website
indexing might have been related, but it just seems to be coincidental.
Anyway, to avoid being too easy a target on my home connection, averyjparker.net was redirected
back to the main website, which in retrospect may have been a bad idea. (I didn't set up a 301
redirect at the time.) Now, what's remarkable is that NO OTHER of the main search engines seems
to have the same trouble that google does with multiple domains pointing to a single site (or
dealing with www versus non-www access to a site.) MSN, Yahoo and Ask all seem to be fine with
RECENT articles in the search index in spite of having averyjparker.net averyparker.com and
averyjparker.com pointing to the same place (same as www.averyjparker.com) The last time I spent
a week trying to solve this, I worked on the 301 redirects and so now, I'm trying a different
approach, and that is simply moving the domain to point to another page. It seems silly, but this
is the only page for averyjparker.net right now.
If you're interested in visiting my main computer site, you should visit www.averyjparker.com, I do have a smaller site that focuses
on telling about my computer service in the Asheville area (as opposed to the more technically
oriented www.averyjparker.com site.) THAT site is www.computerrepairasheville.com If you're
looking for my genealogy sites, I have two genealogy sites up, one is www.northcarolingenealogy.net which is
essentially the oldest of all of my sites (and not included in google since December of 2005 for
some reason which I've spent an equal amount of time trying to figure out...) Also, I have a www.southcarolinagenealogy.org site which focuses
on South Carolina Genealogy. I have another genealogy related domain which has it's own folder
and I don't have much in the way of content there at this point.
Those aren't the only websites I have now though.... www.onlineradiotv.com deals with all sorts of
audio/video/tv/radio/shortwave kinds of items. As you might can see I have websites for just
about all of my hobbies/vocations at this point. To round out the list.... www.ashevillemusiclessons.com which is related to
yet ANOTHER thing I do, which is teach private piano lessons here in Asheville, NC. I also use
that as a location to post most of my music related "stuff" as well. The only real concern I have
about THIS page is that google may penalize me because I'm linking to so many "unrelated" sites, I
mean music, computers, genealogy, radio have very little to do with each other, EXCEPT that I AM
interested in all of them.
Yes, this page is sounding like a bit of a frustrated rail against google, but I AM frustrated.
The beginning of December I was seeing good traffic on the North Carolina Genealogy site and
frankly, I was seeing some adsense revenue which was tremendously helpful in encouraging me to
spend time working with the site. I was getting around 80-90 visits per day before it was
de-indexed. Then it dropped quite suddenly to 10-30 a day and now we're running in essentially
the same range (for that site.) My averyjparker.com site was getting in the order of 1000 visits
A DAY in January and again, I was getting some VERY helpful adsense revenue before February hit
and it appeared as though there was some penalty against the site. Then I was lucky to break over
100 visits a day and now, 40-50 is about par. What also frustrates me is NOW I wind up having to
re-think WHICH site I post something on, because I actually want someone to SEE AN Article. So,
in effect the RELEVANT content on the sites is getting jumbled because I'm moving irrelevant posts
to a site that's indexed well. In other words from my standpoint, googles indexing of those sites
is broken. No, not because I'M not found by lots of people, but because I couldn't even find my
own posts with the advanced search options that always worked so well before.
What's most mystifying is this.... onlineradiotv.com, averyjparker.com northcarolinagenealogy.net
and southcarolinagenealogy.org are all using wordpress (the same version) all have the SAME
template and only 2 are well indexed... (all run out of the same virtual server.) Of course, the
two that are well indexed are the smaller of the two sites (averyjparker.com has almost 1500
articles, 252 at northcarolinagenealogy.net, southcarolinagenealogy.org is well indexed and has
only 94 posts, and onlineradiotv.com (also well indexed) has only 47 articles...) So maybe the
solution is to just NOT post anything for a few months in the hopes that google will finally
"catch up"?
I'll tell you another reason this frustrates me, I have a lot of people that have approached me
about trying to find out why their website does not do well in google. I'm able to help many
times, the last one in particular, originally had about 5 words on it in addition to the title.
Everything else was "image text" which search engines don't see. We dramatically increased the
amount of machine readable text and from what I can see that will have a dramatic affect on the
"findability" of that site. This is something I've been able to do for several sites, because it
isn't (shouldn't be) rocket science, you just make a good relevant page with plenty of good
relevant to the topic at hand text. You also have to put yourself in the shoes of a searcher and
use some of the terminology that someone searching for information on your topic might use, but
like I say it isn't rocket science. Any text on the page can be used to help reinforce just
exactly WHAT is relevant to your page. In other words, the names of images, the alt text of
images (which is also good to have for those that use machine-speech or plain text browsers.
Nothing there is "black hat seo" or manipulating the page to benefit a search engine, all of those
things benefit the coherence of the page more than anything. What frustrates me is that I feel as
though I've tried to be consistent not TRY to optimize specifically for a search engine, not
employ any shady techniques and I'm still getting penalized.
Well, maybe, one of these days, my site will be fully indexed again and this page will just be
another artifact on the web of the time that it wasn't. If you've read through all of this, well,
congratulations I think....
I can't think of anything else useful to tell here.