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I'm sorry to hear that. I work in search quality at Google, and we really do try to do our best, but it's a very hard problem.

"Just provide good content" indeed isn't enough. What we should also be saying is that you shouldn't count on Google's search results to do your marketing for you. It's difficult for Google's search results to "lead" the internet. If something isn't already somewhat popular, it's hard for us to discover it, though we try very hard. What I'd suggest is to try to market your site through more conventional ways without worrying about search engines. If real people demonstrate that they like your site when exposed to it, the ball is in our court, and it's really our fault for not ranking you well enough.

However, if not enough people have been exposed to it, there's still more you need to do on your end.

Send the site along, and I'll see if there are any issues I can tell you about.

1 comments

Thanks! It only has a couple of hundred hits per day, and it is an astrology site, so I am not sure if it is worth your personal attention :-) Although of course it would be great. Also of course I'd be glad to be of assistance to Google in case I can help to improve the algorithm :-)

I know it is an uphill struggle for Google against all the spammers and I am sure Google is trying to rank the best sites as the highest ones. It just gets frustrating at times.

The site is http://mondhandy.de - page 6 for the keyword "mondkalender" (it is also German). Some of the sites before it are fair, but I think it is obvious that there are many that are worse than my site. For example, some are just sites where you can order a book about the moon calendar.

I think I did most of the "on site" improvements, but I don't have many inbound links, and the domain name is weird.

I plan to move to http://mondkalender.us soon, hoping that I won't be punished too much for running a German site on a .us domain. Also finally want to launch an English language version (although I think the topic is not popular outside of Germany).

Also plan to improve the widget - just wondering, do iframes also count as inbound links? That was my secret master plan to generate links, to make lots of blogs include my widget. The widget really needs improving, though.

Once I entered the site in some catalogs. A while later I noticed the ranking had really tanked. I guess that was a big mistake. I tried to remove it, but it wasn't possible for all of them. On the other hand it seems it shouldn't be too bad, otherwise it could be used to damage the competition (enter them into catalogs, too).

Anyway, I plan to give the site one last push, so that I can say I have tried what I could. Also planning on an Android and an iPhone app, so that I have everything covered. Suggestions are of course very welcome.