Dallas Martial Arts!

I was whining about how the Wujido Martial Arts website used to be on page one for phrases like "dallas martial arts" and "dallas kung fu", when someone pointed out that the home page only mentions Dallas once, in the title. Doh!

I had been focusing so much on fitting the articles in there, I lost track of job number one. So I went through the whole site and fixed it up so all the keywords I'm interested in figure prominently in the copy and the links.

Note that as of this writing, the only martial arts school that appears in the first 23 results is the Okinawan Karate Club. They just have a goofy Frontpage-based site, but they mention Dallas 15 times on their home page. I think this is how so many directories get on Google's first page for these kinds of keywords, because each dallas martial arts entry is natually going to mention that it's in Dallas, hence each page will have a high ranking for "dallas martial arts". Duh!

Google's OK With PHP

Googlebots came through on the night of Sept. 16/17, crawled through all the links in my Wujido Martial Arts ecommerce site up to two levels deep. That's a lot of crawling since there are about 2000 products in the catalog, and it went and got all the product pages and images and reviews.

Clearly, whatever time you're spending making your site search engine friendly is wasted on Google.

Page Rank Not Related To Links - 2

This is getting to be too much data, so let's make a table.

Site URL	Google Links	Page Rank
www.dmgreer.com	19	5
www.luxefon.com	5	4
www.3dskimaps.com	0	0
www.hillcrestcheer.com	3	4
www.wujidomartialarts.com	15	0
www.taichidallas.com	0	3
www.gomountain.net	1	2
www.dallasmartialarts.net	8	3

There's no rhyme or reason to that. Why does dmgreer have 19 links - PR5, while wujidomartialarts has 15 links - PR0? Why does taichidallas have 0 links - PR3?

Plus, not all of the links are being counted. For example, my dmgreer site has plenty of links to 3dskimaps, so why aren't these counted? Also notice if you look at www.dmgreer.com with the Google Toolbar, the links are all coming from 3dskimaps, hillcrestcheer, and dmgreer. Links from luxefon are not counted.

What's more, if you look up "wujido" in Google, you'll get 2480 results. Since all those results are coming from my own websites, I know that they all have links to www.wujidomartialarts.com. So why are only 15 counted? And why does www.wujidomartialarts.com/catalog/ have a PR2 when the home page has PR0?

Also, I have links from my PR5 site to wujidomartialarts. I think all this clearly shows that links alone do not good Page Rank make.

Page Rank Not Related To Links - 1

Take a look at my two families of web sites. Well, first let's look at my main family.

If you look at the link popularity of www.dmgreer.com using a tool on www.seochat.com, you'll find that Google, Yahoo and MSN say that page has 19, 464, and 13 pages linking to it. If you go use the "link:" tool of each of these search engines, you'll find that all of these links come from my own family of websites. So my pages only appear to be popular and important, but apparently no one but me is linking to me. Tear.

But my Page Rank is 5, so that makes up for my loneliness.

Now if you look at the link popularity of www.3dskimaps.com, you'll see it's pretty low, with GYM numbers of 0/7/2. I'm beginning to think that having a number in your domain name is not good, because I have plenty of links to that site from elsewhere, and I know a few people who are linking to it. The Page Rank of www.3dskimaps.com is Zero, so there's no surprise there.

But look at www.luxefon.com, GYM is 5/2/2, Page Rank is 4. It's hardly different than 3dskimaps, but the Page Rank is 4, and Google is counting 5 links from within the site.

This is what I don't understand, and I wish someone could explain it to me.

Next we'll be looking at my other family of sites, related to Wujido Martial Arts in Dallas.

Warning: eBay Spoof Emails

I'll take a break from SEO talk to warn people about spoof emails from eBay, or from any other place where you have financial information.

Briefly, these spoofers will send an email that looks to be from eBay.com, and they'll say your account has been suspended, or offer some other excuse for verifying your account information, and they'll give you a link to click on so you can give them you credit card number, and possibly even your Social Security number. I don't know what all they ask for, because I've never clicked on that, but just be very wary of emails that are asking for sensitive information. And by being wary, I mean delete them before you even open them, if that's possible.

Ulterior Motives

Actually, I'm also doing this to see if I can boost the ratings of some of the sites in my links list. Unfortunately, I've chosen a template that doesn't have a links list! But I'll soon fix that.

Here's the deal. My own website at www.dmgreer.com has a Page Rank of 5, and I've done no promotion, haven't even tried much SEO techniques on it. But if you check on the backlinks using a tool I found in www.seochat.com, you'll see that Google says I've got couple of dozen links coming in, and some of the other search engines say I have as many as 470 links as of this writing.

What the search engines don't know is that almost all these links are coming from my own websites: www.3dskimaps.com, www.luxefon.com, and www.hillcrestcheer.com. Now, all these sites have vastly different content, so it's almost impossible to tell they're related, but I put links to the Mother Site, or the Father Site as the case may be, so every page of those sites points to my main site, and boosts it's rank to a respectable number.

Right?

Well, take a look at the other family of sites: www.wujidomartialarts.com, www.taichidallas.com, www.gomountain.net, and www.dallasmartialarts.net.

The main site that I want to have page rank, and for which I've tried many an SEO technique, is at Page Rank 0. A check on the backlinks indicate 14 or 15 backlinks from each search engine. But www.taichidallas.com has a Page Rank of 3, with backlink numbers ranging from 0 to 1!

What's up with that? That's what I'm trying to find out. I'm hoping that starting this blog will not only give me a clue about what's going on there, but also that I can use it to boost the rankings of all my sites, and especially www.wujidomartialarts.com.

SEO Talk

I've been learning a lot about SEO lately, and finding out that some things which held to be common knowledge aren't necessarily true. As evidence, I will show and compare the particulars and the rankings of my two families of websites. I hope that by writing this down in a blog, I will be able to figure out what's going on, or maybe someone else will be able to tell me.