SEO Keyword research trailing hyphens and silly mistakes

Written by Mark Knowles from Mark Knowles on March 18, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about one of my pages which seemed to be lost in google’s neverland. Not to be confused with Michael Jackson’s neverland. No small children were involved in the abuse of this page.

The page is question is this one:

Trout recipes

http://hubpages.com/hub/Smoked-Trout-Creams-

I have left the url rather than a link via a keyword because one thing I had failed to notice is the trailing hyphen at the end of the title. Unlike a blog post, it is not possible to change this url, so I am stuck with it.

This page has had very few visits since it was written, and one of my SEO-expert friends kindly offered his advice to improve the page’s visibility - SEO and Keyword research. I followed his advice, and have seen a massive jump in traffic – but it is never going to be highly visible and even the links I have placed to it are not showing up in Yahoo’s site explorer. For some reason, the search engines do not see the links to this page.

So there is only going to be limited traffic to this page, and it would seem the trailing hyphen is the problem. I will probably let this one die a quiet death, although it’s and interesting phenomenon. Any one else have a similar experience?

Basically, this was a silly mistake that can only really be fixed by re-creating the page. You live and learn.

Written by Mark Knowles from Mark Knowles on March 18, 2008 | Filed Under Search Engines

11 Responses so far | Have Your Say!

Jeff Gordon | March 18th, 2008 at 12:33 pm #

that information was very useful thank you.
Amy | March 18th, 2008 at 2:08 pm #

Live and learn, right?

I don’t much care about SEO for my own blogs, but I’ve learned lessons the hard way on clients’ blogs. I just try to do better next time, unless there’s some way to fix it after the fact.
kashif | March 18th, 2008 at 2:36 pm #

This is what I call slow poisoning . Leave it Mark you needed that for your learning . I never cared about SEOing my blog but then one day I have to if I have to prevent myself from slow poisoning
Mark Knowles (Post Author) | March 18th, 2008 at 4:01 pm #

Jeff - My pleasure

Amy - living and learning as we speak

kashif - Slow poisoning is about right. Ans, as you say, a learning experience. I will let this one die a dignified death
Janis Elsts | March 18th, 2008 at 5:32 pm #

Live and learn, indeed.
Misha | March 18th, 2008 at 7:24 pm #

Mark,

Did you use trackers in all your links? This could be the reason nothing is shown in Yahoo, too…

Misha
Gas Savers
Suzanne Butineau | March 18th, 2008 at 7:27 pm #

I’m told these trailing Hyphens could “happen” when one changes or replaces words while creating a title or Url.
If there is a hard way of learning I will find it. Greetings Mark zs
Mark Knowles (Post Author) | March 19th, 2008 at 4:34 am #

Misha - Yes, I did - interesting thought

Suzanne - Greetings back. I had heard that too
Carl | March 19th, 2008 at 6:23 am #

Couldn’t you recreate the page and then 301 redirect the hyphenated version to the correct version? This way you’d keep your existing links/traffic but also have the correctly titled version of the page to get the real traffic.
Mark Knowles (Post Author) | March 19th, 2008 at 6:51 am #

Unfortunately not.It’s a hubpage page It’s a good idea though. Just going to add this one to my learned experiences.
Sparkable | March 31st, 2008 at 3:05 pm #

great info, keep up the good work.