However, the security codes maintained by majority of the sites would be a barrier. I notice only 15 visitors have gone into your site since 2011. In contrast, I don't have any security codes, and in that same time frame, I have about 2560 visitors. Of course I have more names, which I have designed as more of a relational database, with no personal data, of hundreds of family trees.
http://tinyurl.com/j8xb2ky
By the way, I contribute to a site
http://tanjaycity.org/index.html
which among others, has a section on Family Trees, a series of PDFs of selected kin. When one Googles say "Neri Family", that particular family tree is one of the choices shown. I guess all these PDFs are "indexed" by the search engines. And I do get lots of comments/updates via this venue.
Site Features
Other Search (Google, Yahoo, MSN)
Homepage
Deceased Relatives
All three Site Features options have been ticked ON for more than a year.
Just a thought. Tribalpages should tell you if this is the case. Means their search engine is virtually non existent for free sites. Even perhaps much less than what most free site members expect. It would be in their interests to answer you because if this is the situation it may encourage more members to upgrade.
So theoretically, if I were to Google for an obscure name on my TP site, Google should return such a name as being associated to the TP site, among the hundreds of resulting pages.
Logically, the name would be buried somewhere at the tail end of the list, unless hundreds of inquiries were made on that same name. If true, that sounds fair enough. If not true, then Fil still has a point.
When I Google myself, with a very common name, I get hundreds of results. But hahaha, I know it ain't me.
See the message I wrote about low priority for free sites. Don't know about yours but I don't have a problem with my premium site. I can Google a name of a deceased person and my site usually can be found without too much trouble.
I also have several free sites and cannot recall ever having seen one of these come up in Google when I have Googled a name of a deceased person. It is always my premium subscribed site that comes up. As I said in the other message, the search engine appears to give free sites VERY LOW priority. Maybe nothing. That, I guess, is to be expected. The more one pays, the more one can expect.
Good for you, having no problem getting Google to link a name in your site to your paid TP site. Mine is a paid site, too, but doesn't seem to work that well.
I Googled an "unusual name" and got back 10 hits: 3 were blogs of the guy's clan wherein he was mentioned, 3 were directories with addresses of people with the same family name, 2 were FB pages, 1 was a My Heritage site, and only 1 was of my creation, the PDF file of a family tree wherein he is listed. But no TP link.
I then did what Fil mentioned, Googling "unusal name + TP", and got 7 hits. The first 5 were all about TP, and the last 2 were PDFs on family trees I posted that had nothing to do with TP.
In conclusion to wrap it all up, allow me to wax poetic with this ditty.
Levity with brevity. To test is best. Fil needs TP to fulfill. The desire is to let search engines not to backfire.
Cheers. 'Nuff said.
Incidentally out of curiosity I tried "googling" Pincus Yeskel of Chechanovitzer, Poland. and your site did show up. Therefore you are one up on me compared to what I have seen for any of my free sites.
Anyway not much point in persuing this any further. Tribalpages will take little or no notice of what is said.
Thanks for explanation and your experiment. Now I'm even more curious. When I Google the name 'Pincus Yeskel' or even the phrase 'Pincas Yeskel of Chechanovitzer, Poland' I don't get ANY hits from my TP site. I do get hits from Familypedia, another genealogy site I was using for awhile. You see hits from my TP site?