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Now the site is disappearing, page-by-page, each time it's crawled. Every page that's been crawled in last two weeks has been moved and buried somewhere in the back.
Two months ago, I redesigned the site using a lot more CSS, which raised the bulk of the content to the top of the page for easier indexing by the search engines. I pared down the keyword meta tags to a few relevant keywords, and rewrote each title and description placing product names first and the company name last. Page text remained mostly the same with some gramatical changes and some new information. The navigation was changed, but all internal links remain text links.
When the site was first crawled, almost every page moved up to within the first five spots on Google for just about every product, so it seemed the redesign went as planned. Now, in the last two weeks, each time Google reindexes a page, it just about disappears so far back in the pack I can't find it. Only a search on the name of the company and the broad category we'd be listed under gives a first page ranking. Rankings for other related companies seem to have changed also.
I don't use any tricks, etc. and just follow the major guidelines. Has Google changes something?
Thanks, Pat
What I found - and I do not wish to optimize for it, it is too ridiculous:
Google seems to have a filter, if keywords are used too often on a page, but if you use the keywords once and nothing or not much else, google seems to think, that you are 100 percent on topic. I found that by accident (having forgotten the noindex on a popup).
So all kinds of databank generated pages saying "sorry we do not have widget1 widget2" or directories listing just a few links mentioning widget1 widget2 rise to the top.
Google, you should evaluate the amount of content on a page, too!
If this feature is going to stay, I will start optimizing for it as well as the rest of webmasterworld....I wonder what this will do to the quality found in the web...:-))
Gosh, there is little I can can do to combat this, since each page deals with a specific product the search term will appear multiple times (product details, chart headings, images, links, etc.). Those listings ahead of us aren't using the search terms in their descriptions and sometimes not even in their headings. I would need to jump through hoops to figure out how to rewrite many descriptions and what could I possibly have as a heading if not the name of the product?!?!
Thanks so much. Let's hope it's just temporary.
Google seems to have a filter, if keywords are used too often on a page
There have been rumors of this going on for the past several months. However, I'm not seeing it on sites I watch. One page that just rose to #1 from #3-4 has the keyphrase repeated ten times on the page.
but if you use the keywords once and nothing or not much else, google seems to think, that you are 100 percent on topic.
This has been going on for quite a long time - at least 6 months, I think. Maybe it's worse now, I can't tell.
But, I think you're right in not trying to optimize for it - not just because you think it's ridiculous - but because if there's not much content on the page, it seems that the visitor is likely to just go elsewhere. Or maybe I'm wrong?
Beth
So, instead of dropping keywords out of the page, fill it with them :)
that would depend on how you handle it...but I decided not to get creative about it .... not yet anyway.
Ummm... you're right about that. I have some pages that fall into that category just by happenstance. I find that only a small percentage of visitors go further into the site than that one page. But, yeah, it could be otherwise.
Beth
Have you been adding inbound links with keywords as anchor text in a greater amount than others in your keyword group?
Remember backlinks are slow to update...
I have a good number of backlinks for a b2b site, but I'm not sure what you mean by "anchor text". On the inbound links, they use the main category term, but not individual terms for the products that most people use when they search.
