1) Make sure you have a Google Webmaster Tools account and see if your site has any warnings and/or other problems identified by Google.
2) Think about reducing the number of links on the homepage, and increasing the amount of content. Maybe a greeting for new users letting them know what your about. Overall your homepage is covered in links and as a user at first glance nothing stands out and I'm likely to hit the backspace button.
3) Create a better site structure (clear tiers of content), its very hard to navigate your site.
7) A new design with larger font, different colour scheme and better plugins (commenting, ratings, etc) is in order.
8) Get rid of the Hot Auctions tab, link to eBay from the product page and not a secondary link farm looking tab.
9) Despite all these minor problems (and there's more) the quality of content on site is pretty poor, I guess if I was coming for the history of some cards maybe your site would be helpful but the content is written in a detached, impersonal tone that doesn't garner links or Google rankings.
Focus on writing high quality articles based on your/author's personal experience and expertise.
Check out www.copyblogger.com for more information on how to write well for the net.
Thanks for all the suggestions. In terms of content, that is exactly what I'm going for with the majority of my site - to be an objective resource for people looking for information on cards. The industry has been plagued with a lot of backroom dealing and unethical partnerships, so being an unbiased source has been one of my strongest selling points.
I've used a few market research services to randomly survey visitors to my site. The content itself was always gotten exceedingly positive marks from collectors, but non-collectors have given it mixed marks. That seems to substantiate the feedback I've also gotten on some Webmaster forums. The vast majority of collectors and people in the sports collectibles industry (and to a lesser extent people in the mainstream sports industry) regard my content as high quality and those outside of it give more of a mixed response.
Second that, Bluehost is great and support are very helpful. For content based sites like mine it works just fine, haven't had experience running anything major or any major traffic spikes but from my experiences they would be able to handle it.
I have received many compliments about my writing now but I can tell you that two years ago my writing sucked.
Since then I have written hundreds of articles, a 270 page book and hundreds of thousands of words.
There truly is no substitute for practice, but its the right kind of practice that works.
I would highly recommend reading www.copyblogger.com, which covers all the major tips and techniques around writing online (Make sure to dig deep into the archives).
What you will find is that every few articles you read you will pick up a tip and if you make a concise effort to implement the tip into your next article then it becomes almost second nature and your writing improves immeasurably.
For now make sure your double if not triple checking all your posts looking for ways to make them more readable and fluid and get reading about writing techniques and skills.
The best way to get the best publicity is to have an incredible product that people need to hear about.
But failing that or having a less revolutionary product, I would highly recommend blogging, whatever your start-up you must have interesting insights and tips about your industry that you could share.
If your not committed to regular, high quality blogging and for many founders that doesn't fit into their skill-sets then think about creating one time big research reports that would shake the industry or provide some highly valuable new information.
Blogging and reports are perfect for a start-up because there is virtually no cash cost, so if your bootstrapping or just playing it smart then these are my top two.
Instead of looking for a typical outsourcing company, why not look for a blogger or forum member (stack overflow or HN) that answers questions/writes tutorials on the topic you are struggling with.
Contact a few with the offer of a small bit of work and I'm sure if you email enough people you will get a response.
By already viewing their work and being able to hand pick only the best you will ensure that their work is top-notch.
Why not do some of your own projects and build something cool.
Just think about what you would want (maybe for a hobby or interest) or what other users would want, build and either sell it or in the more hacker style give it away for free.
Would it be likely that if the site was to use another monetization plan that it would be less likely to be penalized e.g. advertising instead of affiliate links?
I recently talked for about a minute about the topic of "too much advertising" that sometimes drowns out the content of a page. It was in this question and answer session that we streamed live on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Yv6DzHBvE#t=19m25s . The short answer is that we have been looking more at this. We care when a page creates a low-quality or frustrating user experience, regardless of whether it's because of affiliate links, advertising, or something else.
Thanks Matt, took a look at the video, that answers my original question.
Also is there a preferred monetization model, e.g. do Google think advertisements are more or less harmful to the user experience than affiliate links, sponsored posts, etc?
Obviously across different models you can't just track space taken up, so is there some kind of metric that tracks the rate of content diluting via monetization?
I know you were looking for an answer from Matt but I thought I would offer up my opinion here (as you might have noticed, I love talking about this stuff).
Our models currently suggest that the presence of contextual advertising is a significant predictive factor of webspam.
We use 10-fold bagging and classification trees, so it's not all that easy to generalize. But I pulled one model out at random for fun.
The top predictive factor in this particular model is the probability outcome of the bigrams (word pairs) extracted the visible text on the page. Here are a few significant bigrams:
Next, this model looks for tokens extracted from the URL and particular meta tags from the page. Similar to above, but I believe unigrams only. A few examples follow. Please keep in mind that none of these phrases are used individually... they are each weighted and combined with all other known factors on the page:
offer
review
book
more
Management
into
Web
Library
blog
Joomla
forums
The model then looks at the outdegree of the page (number of unique domains pointed to).
From there, it breaks down into TLD (.biz, .ru, .gov, etc)
The file gets pretty hard to decipher at this point (it's a huge XML file) but contextual advertising is used as a predictive variable throughout.
Just from eyeballing it, it appears to be more or less as significant as the precision and recall rate of high value commercial terms, average word length (western languages only), and visible text length.
Based on what I'm looking at right now, my answer would be that sponsored posts are going to be far more harmful to the user experience than advertising.
Can't answer the rest of your question which I assume relates to the number of ad blocks or amount of space taken up by ads... we don't measure it.
Edit: Just realized that Google will probably delist this page within 24 hours. Should've used a gif for those bigrams. Oh well ;-)
"True" - because my current understanding (which Matt_Cutts can elucidate on if he chooses to) is that Google has looked into - but does not currently incorporate - the presence of advertising as a spam signal.
"Sadly" - because my independent research has shown that advertising - most notably the presence of Google AdSense - is a reliable predictive variable of a page being spam.
All things being equal, a page with AdSense blocks on it is far more likely to be spam. Yet as of a few months ago, that does not appear to weigh very heavily into the equation.
I agree but don't you think that from an algorithmic point of view Google would be better looking at what the user wants and what monetization models they prefer to see versus the averages in terms of monetization models on spam sites.
That way their focussing less on removing spammers and more on user quality and thus removing spam.
This really made me think. But I took exception to your comment:
I agree but don't you think that from an algorithmic point of view Google would be better looking at what the user wants and what monetization models they prefer[...]
No. In fact, I am a rather loudmouthed opponent to Google's somewhat clumsy attempts to measure this ala "Quality Score".
In addition to webspam detection and machine learning, I have spent way too much time in marketing (I have a master's degree in marketing, in fact.)
A neat thing I learned along the way was the value of market research.
There are so many nuances in every line of business. Segments, preferences, pricing, even down to minutia (now well studied) such as fonts, gutter widths, copy styles, and so on.
You can learn a lot by combining large amounts of data and well chosen machine learning algos. But even with a few thousand businesses in most categories in a particular country (far less outside of the US), that doesn't give an outsider enough data to truly distinguish what can be a winning formula from a spammy one. This knowledge is hard won through carefully executed experiments and research.
A few years ago I was researching the topic of landing page formulas by category. One example that stuck out most in my mind was mortgages. There were a few tried and true "formulas" that significantly outperformed the rest. Two stuck out:
1) Man, woman, and sometimes child standing on a green lawn in front of home. Arrow pointing down from top left of landing page to mid/lower right positioned form. Form limited to three fields.
2) Picture of home/s docked to bottom of lead gen page. No people. Light/white background. Arrow pointing down from top left of landing page to centrally located form.
These sites were incredibly successful. More than a few of them had to contend with quality score issues over the years. Can an algorithm capture nuances such as the ones I mentioned? In theory... they could. But today, they don't. All of Google's QS algorithms to date have been failed attempts and have caused an incredible amount of harm and distrust.
You finished that sentence with:
to see versus the averages in terms of monetization models on spam sites.
I'm not at all sure what this means. Could you explain? Is it even possible to directly model the monetization model of a site without having direct access to their metrics?
Well we know Google can classify what spam sites are.
And assuming they could (despite your arguments against) determine the method of monetization on a site, then simply compare the models they see on spam sites versus another metric which would track the user's reaction to certain types of monetization models.
And assuming they could (despite your arguments against) determine the method of monetization on a site
I can assure you that that they cannot do this accurately. You would be amazed at the scummy business models that openly advertise on Google and are not caught. It would be incredibly difficult to do so as some of them are downright ingenious (one example: free software that updates your drivers.)
It sounds to me that you are positing some type of magical technology that doesn't exist predicated on Google's seeming omniscience. Of course, I am eager to stand corrected...?
I'm not declaring it is a technology they are capable of developing, just wondering, still a bit surprised that with all their top engineers they couldn't (if they wanted to) come up with a solution to this?
2) Think about reducing the number of links on the homepage, and increasing the amount of content. Maybe a greeting for new users letting them know what your about. Overall your homepage is covered in links and as a user at first glance nothing stands out and I'm likely to hit the backspace button.
3) Create a better site structure (clear tiers of content), its very hard to navigate your site.
4) Get rid of empty pages like this: http://www.cardboardconnection.com/2011-topps-tier-one-baseb....
5) Make sure you aren't copying other's content and they aren't scrapping yours see: http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cardboardconnec...
6) Save posts like these for Twitter and Facebook: http://www.cardboardconnection.com/hockey/amazing-patches-fr...
7) A new design with larger font, different colour scheme and better plugins (commenting, ratings, etc) is in order.
8) Get rid of the Hot Auctions tab, link to eBay from the product page and not a secondary link farm looking tab.
9) Despite all these minor problems (and there's more) the quality of content on site is pretty poor, I guess if I was coming for the history of some cards maybe your site would be helpful but the content is written in a detached, impersonal tone that doesn't garner links or Google rankings.
Focus on writing high quality articles based on your/author's personal experience and expertise.
Check out www.copyblogger.com for more information on how to write well for the net.
10) Try and get in touch with Matt Cutts (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Matt_Cutts), he regularly helps out sites that feel like they have been harshly treated (proof: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-ban-cutts-support-14164.h...)
11) After you have fixed all these problems submit a reconsideration request to Google.