shawn - 3:42 pm on Dec 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hopefully, everyone will wake up and realize that no search engine is your friend. If you have spent any time even thinking about how you might rank higher without paying money to the search engine, you are the enemy and you will be irradicated.

I was not really sure if I agreed with this statement, however, after reading it over and over...there might be some validity to it. Google may not take away free listings all together but they can certainly make it harder for your site to rise to the top.

I have to say this last Florida update has been the worst for me. I was number one for the last 2 years for "mycity+Keyword+Keyword" and now have disappeared in to a black hole.

The results for this search use to give you about 15 other local competitors but now has only one local company listed in the number one spot. The remaining top 20 results are directories, link pages from other websites that linked to my site and other competitors, affiliate sites, and even a website for a popular singer who is now dead - (the web design firm who designed this site used CSS to hide a layer filled with spam).

I was also ranked in the top 15 for 5 other search terms, which were not highly competitive but maybe moderately (each returned 2-5 million results). These search terms are very competitive in the AdWords and Overture.

We cannot really afford any PPC campaigns for these terms; however, we may need to bite the bullet if things do not change.

We re-optimized our main index page. The only thing I can think is that maybe we were "over optimized" with anchor text etc.

I have saved the original page just in case I want to put it back up.

None of my clients were affected in this update - then again none of them are targeting fields that are highly competitive in Google AdWords.

Coincidence?