Gotta say Google is tough on a girl sometimes.

I have a couple of sites that I would have to say were optimised for search engines.

Halloween Australia in particular, was hand-built with SEO in mind. Obviously creating a useful, interesting site was the most important thing, and I built a Halloween Events search-by-suburb function, so you can find local events and trick or treating streets. But the URL, page names, title, description, keywords, headings and content and image text were sprinkled with the targetted keywords. I even made it source-ordered, so that content appears before navigation, a true sign of an SEO-addict.

And MSN loves it. Number one for “halloween australia”. Yahoo is also pretty good - a strong page 1 result. But Google is sluggish. It has gradually crept up to page 2 on Google, but given that the whole site is dedicated to halloween in Australia, you’d think it would rate better than some of the others on the page, where halloween is a small part of a site.

The Christmas site is a little different. It’s a Drupal site, so it has a bit more overhead code than I would have chosen - so there’s a bit more stuff for spiders to wade through (lots of file includes), before getting to the content. But the URL, meta info and content are definitely oriented towards Christmas Australia. And yes, MSN loves it again (#1), Yahoo is page 1, and Google is languishing.

Yes, there is more competition for Christmas websites.

But the twist is that Christmas Australia is a replacement for an old site of mine that used to rank number 1 or 2 at Google, for the chosen keywords. Until I lost the domain when the renewal went astray. So if content really was king, the replacement site should have been ranking up near page one.

Back when I created the original site, I wrote a poem about Christmas in Australia, to add some original content to the front page. It really did give a significant boost to my rankings back then. And it’s been fun seeing my poem get quoted on a few other sites.

Most of the problems at Google would be off-page related. The domain is not very old and it doesn’t have enough incoming links. I corresponded with a few sites who used to link to my old site, and they said they would move the links across, but Google doesn’t appear to acknowledge these links.

The risk is that there is some old duplicate content hanging around from the old site, causing Google to ignore the new site.

I still have a few more functions and content I’d like to add, before I submit a reconsideration request to Google. It’s getting close to the time of year where you concentrate on Christmas sites - a few months before you need it.

So on the surface, I’m good at building sites for MSN and Yahoo. Google just needs to be slowly reminded that there is some good content there.