AnonyMouse - 3:15 pm on May 26, 2004 (gmt 0)

<quote>Show me the money. Take a ranking page. Over-optimise it so it disappears. Now de-optimise it so it reappears. Now over-optimise it again. Now line up for an evening of drinks on me at Pubcon... </quote>

You're on! As I said earlier on this thread, I have a PR7 site, which sat at positions between 4 and 6 in the SERPS for many 2-word phrases - but within the site, I had optimised for 3-word phrases. An example: optimising for "[location] usa hotels" resulted in great SERPS for "[location] hotels"...

...but I wanted to be in top3, and the guys above me had done *some* optimisation for "[location] hotels", so I changed the optimisation on my pages to "[location] hotels" not "[location] usa hotels" in the title/H1 etc etc. NOTHING ELSE WAS CHANGED. According to the accepted SEO rules, by targetting "[location] hotels" more closely, my SERPS should have improved - but no, they dropped between 5 and 20 positions depending on the term.

Please note (again) that when I refer to optimising my pages, I don't mean stuffing, I mean the usual title/H1/alt tags etc plus a smattering in the content.

I'm about to roll back my changes to that of e.g. "[location] usa hotels" - if my SERPS go back up, will you buy me that drink?!?

(BTW, great post MHes!)

[edited by: ciml at 3:35 pm (utc) on May 26, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified. [/edit]