After months of speculation, I reported last week that yes, the reason my Project Mai Tai domain is banned from Google is that it used to be owned by someone else. That left me with two choices: wait - perhaps more than a year - and hope it gets indexed, or port the pages to a new domain and start over.

And then I had another idea, and so did READ MORE

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I was right. Project Mai Tai’s problems are caused by the fact that the domain was owned before I had it. Someone owned it until 2004, I think. Then it just lapsed, and I bought it in 2006. From archive.org, it didn’t look like the old owner did anything that would trigger Google penalties. And the old site was still indexed when I started my site.

Does Google … READ MORE

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I’ve been going through the blog feeds I read, and today seems to be all about the no-follow tag, WikiPedia using it, and whether that’s going to help them prevent spam.

Let me answer the third question first: no.  I originally gave my reasoning why, but who cares?  No-follow has never stopped spammers.  Therefore, the answer is self-evident.

I like SEOrefugee’s take: that it’s a slap in the face of the webmasters who helped build … READ MORE

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Google still refuses to index Project Mai Tai. Oh, somehow, I got one search via GoogleUK or something, but the site is not in the “google.com” index at all.

But it’s got a PR 4. So, yeah, that makes sense.

There’s been another slight change. All along, Google Webmaster Tools has been reporting huge numbers of pages that it couldn’t find. When I checked their URL’s I had no idea where they … READ MORE

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As I mentioned a few days ago, I decided to eliminate as much code as possible from above my content - from a bot’s point of view.  All of my sites now have the sidebars on the right, and I’ve removed all the plugin and CSS code I can from the top and put it into other files.

That frees me up to focus on my new goal: post, post, post!  Actually, I’m looking forward to … READ MORE

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I’ve been operating lately on the principle that the less code there is between the start of your webpage to the actual content, the better. That way, the bots get to your content more quickly.

Since all of my sites are WordPress now, there’s not a ton of code at the top in a clean install. But when you start adding plugins, it gets hairy. One plugin I have is particularly awful - … READ MORE

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All of a sudden, Project Mai Tai has a pagerank of 4… and it’s still not indexed in Google.  I didn’t even know that was possible.  :D  But whatever: I’ll take it.  I’m still hoping someday Google will index the damn site and BOOM traffic will multiply overnight and it will all have been worthwhile.

I do think the reason they’re not indexing has to be that the domain used to exist, was allowed to … READ MORE

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I noticed this month that Project Mai Tai got more referral link spam - mostly porn - than any site I’ve ever started.  By referral link spam, I mean those sites that show up in your AwStats as having referred one visitor to you - and when you click to see who they are, it’s something obviously spammy like porn or a pharmacy site.  I don’t know for sure that these hurt you, but … READ MORE

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My research into whether or not a missing robots.txt file could really be the cause of Google shunning Project Mai Tai led me to a discovery: my robots.txt files suck.  Wayback machine was no longer archiving any of them because of something in the file - I’m not sure what, but I copied the robots.txt file from another site that was indexed, and then I ran it through this lovely robots.txt file … READ MORE

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Okay, I’m wondering if any of you might have some ideas on this.  My newest site, Project Mai Tai, was indexed by Yahoo and MSN within days of its launch three months ago.  Google has yet to index one page, even though the bots come by every day.  I did forget to include my robots.txt file until yesterday, but the verdict from other webbies is that this is not what caused Google to shun … READ MORE

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