My love affair with Google is starting to end.

If you Google for: kayaking massachusetts
wtpaddlers.org doesn't come up within the first 700 entries.

This site has been online for about a year and a half. I've heard that Google penalizes you for having bad code in your pages, but this website is scrubbed clean within an inch of its life.

I know that Google <i>does</i> have it listed, because if you limit your searches to our domain, it shows up.

If you do the same search on Yahoo, we come up at #11 or #13, depending on the order of the words - not too bad, considering how many kayaking sites there probably are in Massachusetts.

But if our site is being beat out by motels in New Hampshire that happen to casually mention kayaking as something to do when staying there, I also have to wonder about all the other queries that I'm making. I used to think that Google gave the most relevant results. Now I have to wonder...

Pat,

Keep the faith. I had a friend from long ago Google my name in an attempt to locate me and guess what was the second entry, a trip report with the WTPADDLERS.

I won't tell you what the first entry was, but I'll just say that in that one I was known as 13589-54002.

I've done a little research, and a lot of others are having the same experience. Some who know a little about what's going on behind the scenes are blaming it on a change in their indexing methods that was done several months ago. They mention the new "Big Daddy" and "Jagger" algorithms adopted by Google.

BTW - we come up 6th in MSN.

If you search Kayaking Boston Harbor we're on the 3rd page.

Maybe you could try repeating some words in your meta tags and include kayaking Massachusetts in the home page text.

Might help.

Google doesn't look at meta tags anymore. Back when they did, they'd often penalize you for repeating keywords. "kayak" and "massachusetts" are already on the home page text. I don't want to overly bastardize the text to make it look like a set of meta-tag keywords.

If you pick specific locations, we do better in google, such as:
kayaking hingham harbor
kayaking plymouth harbor
kayaking duxbury bay
...etc.

A service I've used gave specific guidelines for adding decription and keyword meta tags. They suggested repeating specific words no more than 3 times with a limit on the total number of characters used. It wasn't easy to conform to but did help some.

I did a little more research, and although Google no longer uses keywords in determining your relevance in the index, it DOES still penalize you if it believes that you're lying with your keywords. So I've removed all but the few most relevant words like canoe, kayak, paddle massachusetts. I'd remove the keyword tag completely, but other search engines might still use it.

It's something of a black art to get a good listing in Google.

My webmaster is out of the office today, but I'll ask him about it when he gets back.

One starter suggestion: you need to think in terms of actual text on the home page -- not images. Much of the home page for WTPaddlers is graphical...the logo, the descriptive wording in the "wells" etc. tends to be in GIFs or JPEGs. Google cannot index any of that content because it doesn't register when the site gets spidered.

I do know that we struggle with this all the time, and as a nonprofit we can't sink much money into search engine optimization. So...if you think the Turkeys have problems...check out http://www.massinc.org.

Ok, now here is something interesting.

I just checked today to see if things have changed. I searched in Google for:
kayaking massachusetts
and one of the wtpaddlers.org pages finally came up around #240.

What page came up?

This thread.

The words kayaking and Massachusetts are use quite a few times in the content. Maybe we should all add Kayaking Massachusetts (or various other terms) to our Signatures.

Back in the beginning, if you were selling widgets, you could put:
widgets widgets widgets widgets widgets
in your text and come up high in the search results. But you wouldn't come up as high as the guy who included:
widgets widgets widgets widgets widgets widgets widgets widgets

Ultimately, search engines got wise to this and started penalizing you if it saw any word used too much. Since I'm not coming up in the top 700, I probably have nothing to lose, so I might as well start packing the home page text with keywords. The whole "not cheating" experiment seems to have failed.

Pat:

If this thread came up at #249 when you googled kayaking in MA, maybe you should add the word "google" to your meta tags as in "Google Kayaking Massachusetts".

Having extensive text on the home page is also supposed to help the Google bots & spiders. If you haven't already done so, you might include an "alternate text" description for each image on the home page. Also you could put a lot of discriptive text on the home page but hide it using teeny tiny fonts with the same color as the background.

Mike (Finn) was saying the same thing to me on Sunday. I probably should do this.

Ok - here's a poll - what does everyone think are search terms that we should try to strive for? I think that the following are obvious:

kayaking, canoeing, paddling, massachusetts, mass, ma, south shore, cape cod, ocean, sea

I'm sure there are lots of other vague ones, like the names of each individual towns, etc. But are there other common ones that I've missed?

naked, free beer, free gas,...

I just tried kayak +massachusetts +paddling, and we came up 16th.

Would kayak and kayaking be different or is having kayak in the word kayaking cover kayak.

What about wild and turkey. I know I have told people to google wild turkey paddlers.

If you include anything paddling related with wild and turkey, we'll come up within the top couple of results. Just "wild turkey" gets us to 25, which isn't too bad.

Remember..."Wild Turkey" is one Hell of a bourbon. They also make one of the few genuine Rye whiskeys out there. Most of the others are bland blended swill trying to pass as real Rye.

But I digress...

I think one of the problems is the word - "paddler." I'd be more inclined to sneak in kayak, kayaking, canoe, and canoeing in various combinations with the turkey phrase. I don't think people are inclined to use "paddler" as much.

Then again, what do I know?....

Ok - I've added some text to the home page.

Too much? Not enough?

south shore ma kayaking got me to the top of page 2.

How about "Kayak Trip Reports"

You mean how about adding that within that text on the home page?

Anywhere it will be picked up. You could even make it the same color as the background if there was no place it would fit, couldn't you??

During the winter when there's not much going on kayakwise I'll do a search for that phrase to see if what's out there. If I can't kayak myself, I like to read about others doing it.

This is another thing that I heard was a penalizable offense with search engines. Sometimes they can't tell, especially if you use an image for the background color: style="background-image: url(red.gif); color=red".

Well now!!!

Search for kayaking massachusetts and our results have improved. We're now #50 with a bullet!

And it appears that it's got nothing to do with the recent changes I've made, since they don't show up on Google's cached page.


Edit: I put "70". I meant "50".

Could it be all of our searches and clicking on the WTP site made it look important?

An interesting theory...

For what it's worth....

we come up at #60 if you search for "killing wild turkey's with a paddle"

I got us to 19 with "drinking wild turkey while paddling"

Not bad.

"Paddling a wild turkey while drinking" is only 28. I should work on the keywords a little more.

Try using Dogpile.com I have used it for a couple of years now and I think it's great.

I've been using jux2.com. It appears to be a similar project.

So much for our 15 minutes of fame. We're back down to #250. Interesting that it changes day to day...

Google has picked up the additional text at the bottom and pushed us up to #32!

Just thought I would let you know, someone here at work was looking for tide information for southeastern Mass. and this site came up on top.