JeffOstroff - 10:16 pm on Feb 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

Our site is very typical of many of the other web sites who enjoyed top 10 ranking for years in Google, then lost without reason. Most of our pages are toolbar ranked PR=4 or PR=5. I don’t give much credence to PR, it has nothing to do with your rank. Here's our incoming links:

Total links from unique domains: 306
Total incoming links: 3,610
Total incoming links to homepage: 2,549

We created our domain name in 1998, so we definitely have longevity. We enjoyed top 10 rankings for nearly all our prized search phrases. Then like many of you, we lost our rank in late 2005 to 300-400. I did notice hundreds of scraper sites who duplicated our content and appeared higher than us with our own content. Could not figure out how Google could be so boneheaded to rank a site 6 weeks old over our site, 8 years old. We sent out 150 DMCA notices to Google and web hosts to get hundreds of sites shut down and out of Google’s index. Then our rank came back on June 27, 2006 on a major Google update, then we lost our rank again last March 2007, and never got it back, sort of, until now. Keep in mind we NEVER did any black hat seo techniques ever. Our pages are content rich, and reader friendly first, search engine friendly second.

Now with 950 penalty, when we did a search on Google, our home page would come up, often ranked 200 or below, but our intended keyword related page, call it xyz.htm, would be a no show, or it would show up in the 900 range on Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Sound familiar?

Here’s 3 major steps we did 2 weeks ago that seemed to help.

1) I went onto one of my pages, let’s call it 123.htm, which was loaded with < widget > photos, as it is a < widget > gallery. This used to be #1 on Google! When I checked it out, all the photos were slightly keyword stuffed in the “alt tag”. Now we were not “black hat” SEOs just stuffing them endlessly, each photo alt tag had only 5 or more keywords, a reasonable amount. But I can’t help but wonder if Google frowns down on seeing similar search phrases repeated often in a bunch of photo alt tags. It does not look very natural, especially since most normal alt tags on web sites might say something like “photo of new house” or “graduation picture”.
Alt tags are really intended to be truly descriptive placeholders for users who have images turned off on their browser. So imagine someone seeing “widget, widgets, blue widgets, red widgets, green widgets, photos of widgets” as an alt tag. You want to simply read “photo of blue widget”, and little more. So we removed alt tags from many of the photos, and on several other photos we simply reduced to 2 or 3 keywords.

2) I saw some people commenting how footer tags at the bottom of their page may have hurt them. I noticed we had a footer tag at the bottom of all our pages that links back to the home page, it looked something like this:

“Example.com Home page for Widget Keyword Advice”

Could be construed by Google more as an “optimization” rather than a link back home. So I revised the entire link to read simply “Home”. End of story, nothing else fancy needed there.

3) We also have affiliate program links on our site, and each page might link to the same affiliate store several times, one lengthy page had maybe 10 links to the online retailer affiliate program that we belonged to. I reduced links these in half.

After all that, we had to be patient, waiting until Google updated our pages in the cache, which took about 7-10 days depending on the page.

Last week I re-ran our ranking of one of my pages, and here’s what we got for a tremendous improvement:
Rank Rank
Before After
68 46
457 34
59 44
134 230
142 69

Another page I tried this on fared much better coming emerging out of the 950 slump:

Rank Rank
Before After

957 368
27 24
871 871
140 116
450 194
450 275
828 302

You can see significant improvement after just 2 weeks. The ranking appears to be floating upward by the day also. Lastly, a week ago I went into our Google Webmaster tools account and submitted a reinclusion request, telling Google everything I had done, and asked them to take a look at our page.

I still don’t know if the fixes I implemented above were the solution to my 950 woes, but they seem to be helping.

[edited by: tedster at 12:11 am (utc) on Feb. 17, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]