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.