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Originally Posted by hmilesjr
Very nice work. Curious as to how the big three search engines are reponding to the site changes?
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The Coastal 360 site is still a test site and is not being optimized.
However, the primary site was released with the new format in the past few months. Hilton Head 360 features
Hilton Head rentals, real estate, and local information (shameless anchor text entry).
One problem we had with the old site is that Google had indexed comment and request forms for the thousands of listings. Each of those pages was essentially duplicate content with the same title tags. That meant 10,000+ pages of junk, nearly duplicate content. Between the delete URL requests I submitted and Google spidering the new site most of those pages are now gone.
Google has indexed many of our thousands of listings pages, although they have not re-indexed the majority of them since I tweaked the title tags. I expect another pickup in the rankings once the majority of those pages are indexed.
In the meantime, rankings have improved and all but one of our key terms are in the top 10 or just outside the top 10. This is mainly because of the on page optimization as there is no active link building campaign going on now. Any link building is strictly passive through the Social Bookmark tags I added and the RSS feeds I have added. In the next few weeks as a few new sections of the site open we will be adding additional feeds.
Rankings would be even better if there was an active link campaign going on. However, development of other sites (which drive our web revenues) have taken precedent at this time.
One interesting thing that happened over the past few weeks is the Yahoo Slurp (spider) has crashed our sites. When it hits our custom search form it triggers all sorts of strange queries and ends up leaving a lot of sleeping queries and that shuts down the MySQL server. Since I blocked Yahoo from accessing those pages the problems have gone away. Blocking the search form is no big deal because there are other avenues to pick up all of the listings.