I have two relatively new recipe websites that Google is not playing nice with – I’m really not sure what the issue is but am considering fileing a reconsideration request from Google webmaster tools.
The first site is http://easyrecipecooking.com, A domain name I mentioned a couple of posts back – a week or so on and it still is not appearing in Google’s index.
I have verified in webmaster tools and also added a site map which has been submitted to Google – the site has been online for a month or so. The issue with this domain is that it was an expired domain name and I don;t know what the previous owner used it for… hopefully nothing evil.
The second domain name is free vegetarian recipes, This one is at least popping in and out of the search engine results pages, but is not at all stable – the domain was ranking 3rd for “Free Vegetarian Recipes” when it was purchased but has slid backwards since.
I’ll be keeping an eye on these and will post a progress report. Any thoughts you care to leave in the comments are appreciated.
My good friend Violeta has overhauled her website Tips and Tricks. She’s used the Thematic theme by Ian Stewart from ThemeShaper, a Wordpress theme I am very impressed with. At present Violeta has been working on the layout and placing modules to display “Recent Tips”, etc.
Already the site has a clean and minimalist feel that reminds me of the design used over at the NY Times. Thematic theme has really nice typography out of the box and makes for a very ‘readable’ blog.
As I understand it, Violeta’s intention is to customise the header in due course, and add a little colour and style. Thematic also makes this very easy if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty and diving into a little HTML and CSS.
Thematic is also a very well search engine optimised theme, with H1 tags for your blog description on the home page, but H1 applied to post titles on post pages – sexy! There are some other quite advanced SEO things happening under the hood, and it will be interesting to get a report from Violeta on the search engine performance of Tips and Tricks a month or so from now.
In summary I really like what Violeta has done and I think the Thematic Wordpress theme framework is a great starting point for developing a new look for your Wordpress powered site!
The site is built on Wordpress and provides a nice selection of tasty, yet easy to prepare recipes.
The problem is that the site has been up now for about 3 weeks and is still not appearing in Google’s index. It’s very strange because usually I find Google picks up new sites in a matter of days.
I’ve added a Sitemap and submitted this via Google’s webmaster tools but still no luck.
The domain does have history in the Wayback machine – and the history displayed is good – however I am now wondering if the site has been used by a more recent owner for some negative purpose and possibly is now being penalised by Google. The Wayback machine does not show the most recent year of history so this period is unknown.
I’m hoping with a link from my own personal blog that Google may come to its senses – if not I will have to file for a reconsideration request.
If anyone else has tips on rapid indexing, or overcoming penalties in Google – I would love to hear about them in the comments below.
About a year ago I put up a site to test out a number of search engine algorithm theories I had. The site is http://stars-without-makeup.info/ and focuses on celebrities or stars without makeup.
The site has never had a huge amount of traffic, and has not ranked highly in any of the engines until recently it moved to #3 and then #2 in Yahoo. Surprisingly this netted between 900 and 1000 visitors per day for a brief period, but just as suddenly as these rankings were bestowed they were gone! Yahoo now ranks the site at 49th and this change occurred overnight.
Why is this?
I’ll be pondering this question and will let you know what happens. I’m looking at content, backlinks and a number of other factors.
A very good friend of mine has a beautiful cat, the breed is Russian Blue. We were talking about her cat recently and it emerged she is part of a larger network of people who love and collect Russian Blues in Europe.
This friend is also a web designer and has built a really cute website for the cattery and Russian blue community. Take a look: http://www.cendre-de-roses.ro/
If you were interested in buying a Russian Blue they are apparently very smart and good natured pets, and come highly recommended. The Cattery currently has Russian Blue kittens for sale, but get in quick as stock is limited!
I must say the kittens are unbelievably small and cute! Who could resist one of these!
Norman Sheppard has a good tip today that shows you what to do if Dreamweaver suddenly stops working. It’s a Dreamweaver bug.
This has happened to me on a number of occasions – and has always puzzled me. Working away in Dreamweaver and suddenly it dies – It won’t open again except for a few seconds when my workspace flashes before me and then vanishes.
My resolution was this – I deduced that it was the site directory that I was currently working in that had caused issues (Yes didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out).
So I renamed the directory
then created a new directory
Dreamweaver then opened
and I downloaded all my files again off the live server….
Now I know what really happened – as Norman explains what causes Dreamweaver to stop working is when a file in your site is exactly 8,192 bytes, or a multiple of this number. The fix is to find the file and just add a few characters to it, using notepad for example – then Dreamweaver will open again.
Read the full story at the link above. Interesting
I’ve found that using dofollow for all links in Wordpress comments is generally not good because it attracts unmanageable amounts of spam – basically spammers use bots (scripts, automated programs) to surf the web looking for dofollow blogs. When they find them they come and personally leave spammy comments hoping that the author will approve them. Yes spammers automate spam commenting too – but these are easier to pick up because they are generally less relevant to the content.
What has bugged me about this is that if I reply in my own blog comments then any URL is also nofollowed. Thsi bothers me because I quite often link out to other sites in response to users questions and I don’t want these links to be nofollowed – I’m writing teh comment, I’m placing teh link, so why shouldn’t be considered by Google to be a dofollow editorial link?
I just wanted to thank Vladimir Prelovac for his Wordpress Ping List.
I have just added it to this blog and a couple of others – It’s a much more comprehensive list than the one I was using previously.The list should be entered into Writing Settings > Update Services in your Wordpress admin.
When you post a new blog entry these services will be notified of your blog post increasing online exposure.
A very good friend of mine has a beautiful cat, the breed is Russian Blue. 
If you were interested in buying a Russian Blue they are apparently very smart and good natured pets, and come highly recommended. The Cattery currently has 
