Well after months of trying Google has finally found seaeco.com. Yesterday i put a mod_rewrite into the .htaccess file just changing seaeco.com to www.seaeco.com and i wake up this morning to see seaeco.com appearing happily on Google!

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^seaeco\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.seaeco.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That's all it took! Now to work on the rankings!

Website URL: http://www.seaeco.com Problem : Never indexed by Google Seaeco.com was originally posted in March 2005, since that time it has slowly been indexed my all the major search engines EXCEPT Google. To date (23 october 2005) WebCEO shows it as ranked by 7 major Search Engines MSN, Yahoo, All the Web, Alta Vista, Jayde and Webcrawler and Allthe Web, Alta Vista, Yahoo and MSN report 48, 41, 48 and 1 incoming links respectively all to the default or index page, they also show between 5 and 15 incoming links to all the other pages on the website. Designing and submitting Seaeco.com was created using validating CSS and XHTML and provides original content about Whale Watching in Dunsborough Western Australia and Yacht cruises in Dunsborough. It has been submitted by hand to all the major Search Engines as well as approximately 15 web directories including DMOZ and Yahoo. The titles, headings, image alt's all contain the relevant keywords, there is a reasonable keyword density in the three main pages relating to whale watching and sailing in dunborough, naturally with each page using the optimal keywords for its content. I have not employed ANY Black Hat SEO techniques and have designed this site no differently from a couple of others i created around the same time. The other websites are indexed and ranking well so far. Seeking advice While struggling with this over the past few months i have sought a great deal of advice in Search Engine forums, as i continue to do, i have recieved many helpful comments and ideas, many of which i have put into practice, all to no avail. I have contacted Google on several occasions regarding seaeco.com and after a fair wait each time, recieved two replies. The first stating that the Google engineers were 'looking into it' and the most recent stating that they could confirm that seaeco.com was NOT being penalized or banned for any reason. Although the last reply was initially comforting, it has left me in a position, where as far as i (and many other experinced eyes who have looked at it) can see, there is absolutely no reason for seaeco.com not to be indexed. I think maybe i would have preferred to find out i was banned or penalized for a specific reason, which i could at least amend and then beg to be let back in. What have i done so far? Apart from checking to ensure i had employed no Black Hat SEO techniques, i have researched keywords and optimised the pages as much as possible. I have searched for relevant websites and personally approached them in order to obtain links to seaeco.com, most of which have been successful (remember just ask nicely!). I have submitted to the major directories, with some success, not in DMOZ unfortunately (i think the backlog is a few years by now). All the incoming link text that i have been able to specify uses the relevant Keywords, some are unfortunately stuck with "visit their website" and other vague linking texts. I have submitted the Google sitemap (as i do with all my sites), i have been onto the site to update it and am currently in the process of setting up a blog (yes i know i should have done that straight away but i'm pretty new to the game), which will be updated every few days detailing whale sightings in Dunsborough. What mistakes did i make? These are mostly conjecture, i did explore the ossibility of other mistakes but have slowly discounted them through research into the do's and don'ts of Google optimisation and submission. The only one that seems to have hung around is this: When seaeco.com was being designed, i was also designing three other websites, all of my websites have so far linked to each other, each one has been tourism and Dunsborough related so i figured this was a fair call and have been given no reason to think otherwise. I did post the other websites before seaeco.com went live - this means that there is the possibility that Google spidered the other websites during the week or so when the links pointed nowhere. It has been suggested to me that this may have caused Google to think they were dead links. However, from further reading and advice, i gather that even if this was the case on Google's next indexing it would try again, so in theroy it should then come across some worthwhile content at the other end of the link and indexed it as normal. Other oddities When searching on Google for "seaeco.com", it often brings up a listing for seaeco.com.au, a dead link which doesn't exist. Some SEO guys have suggested that there may have been / be a problem with resolving the DNS addresses to the website, which i haven't discounted, but as i have another 4 websites on the same server with exactly the same IP that are not suffering, i am inclined not to follow this path any further. I did contact the host provider who checked and assured my everything was OK. I am not hugely knowledgeable on the server side of things yet, so haven't been able to 'really' check for myself. According to my server logs, Googlebot visits seaeco.com, not as often as it visits my other sites but it's been there ...so why did it ignore seaeco.com? So that's where it's at .... The intention of this article is to bring it to the attention of as many peoplas possible in the hope that someone will either spot the problem or can offer me another path to follow, or, by spreading this article as widely as possible with numerous links to the original site, hope that Google will someday spider it. Any advice that any of you may have would be fully tried and tested ...fingers crossed!

Another update on www.seaeco.com I recieved an email from the Google engineer assuring me that www.seaeco.com was NOT banned or penalized in any way by the Google Search engine. Unfortunately, that was where their help ended, there was no helpful little "have you tried..." or "maybe it's because..." I'm still promoting the website as much as possible, so hopefully when Google FINALLY gets around to indexing seaeco.com its should pop up into a decent rank (that is unless they decide it's too popular too quickly and sandbox it!). As i mentioned in my last post, please have a look if you have the time or the inclination, any suggestions will be gratefully read, tried and tested. Thanks Whale watching Dunsborough with Sea Eco Yacht Cruises