Am I jinxed?

Listings plummet!

[bobby_boy]

Hi,

Having been hit by Google over the last few weeks (average previous position #1 - #3 now #28) I have also seen a similar situation within Teoma. For the main keywords my sites ranked #2 + #3 and now are on page 2 and 3 at best! I'm confused (and frustrated) as my site has not changed in the last 2-3 weeks so I can't see what I've done wrong. Any thoughts?

Thanks

[caine]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld

are you jinxed - good question.

regarding why your site has slipped in Teoma, hard to say. Explain a little deeper what sort of site you have, without going into specific's of services or products, that the site is involved in or promotes. From this i may be able to help you out.

Worth reading Brett's post about Teoma/Ask Jeeves [webmasterworld.com]. An excellant post regarding how teoma works.

[bobby_boy]

Thank you for the warm welcome.

My site/s promote online services. The content is very good and unique (i.e. these are not just optimised banner farm pages). Like I said, I ranked really well up until about a week ago when I all but dropped out of Google and now Teoma (dropped out is an exaggeration, went from #1/#2 to #25/#30).

I have not changed the sites for weeks (maybe this is my problem?) but am really struggling to see why any change should be so dramatic. One theory I have is that the downgrading of the sites in Google have effected the way Teoma ranks the Subject-Specific Popularity of the site (which from what I read about Teoma is critical). What d'you think?

[edited by: caine at 2:01 pm (utc) on May 25, 2003]
[edit reason] specific industry. [/edit]

[caine]

Subject- Specific Popularity = is the authoritative hub or computer / algo - based clustering of site's around your own. Obviously your in a very competitive industry, and a shift of that proportion in teoma, must be down too your site, as your not banned.

1. Have you checked out your competition and looked into any changes on their site's?
2. Did you have any expert (Resource) links to your site (usually high SERP ranks do)?
3. If none of the above, how spammy is your site, (teoma has in some case quite vicious spam filters, though not banding your site, may have banned some pages, hence degraded your site)?

At the last Bar Conference in Boston, Teoma rep. suggested some major changes coming, so may be the future, and a re-working of your site, may be in order to become friendly to the algo!

[bobby_boy]

There is one site I am aware of (Google PR7) that linked to me which would be considered as industry leading. For some reason the site has changed it's URL and all old links are now not found (as the site is new it has a grey PR). Could this one site make all that difference?

[caine]

The fact that there has been crawls and re-indexing on both teoma and google, then i would suggest yes. Is it your base url, that has lost the ranks, or deeper into the site? If it is the base url, then i would start to look at expanding the content on the top page into sub-pages, then unhinged links will not have such a profound effect on your site ranks.