Good and Bad Ranking at Google

[peterinwa]

Using a keyword that I have used for years, I have managed to stay #1 in ranking in search results at Google. But a few months ago I discovered that another keyword was even more popular, so I changed my HTML title, META description, and homepage text. I left in my original keyword that has worked so well but added the new one.

Before doing this I couldn't even find my website searching the new keyword. But the changes took effect right away and I came up about #500. My rank slowly moved up a little over the next few weeks until Google made some changes and it jumped to the 100s. Then it slowly moved up some more until they made more changes and it jumped back to the 600s.

Obviously I'm never going to be found searching for the new keyword. (However, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of people are finding me with the new keyword combined with other keywords that wouldn't have found me before.) But this is all just background to my two questions:

1. With all the changes to my title, description and homepage text, how is it possible that I am still #1 searching for my old keyword?

2. There are so many websites based on my old keyword that I suspect that I do so well searching for it because of all the links to my website. But if this is true, why don't these same links help me get a good ranking with my new keyword?

Thank you, Peter

[bether2]

Maybe your good ranking for the old keyword has to do with your anchor text in the links to that page. Is the old keyword used in these links?

I don't know much about anchor text, so maybe someone else can say more about this - or give their opinion on why you're still ranking well for the old keyword.

Beth

[IITian]

1. With all the changes to my title, description and homepage text, how is it possible that I am still #1 searching for my old keyword?

I have come across several sites that don't have even a single mention of the keywords on their pages but are doing extremely well on those keywords because of the anchor texts. One of them is on the first page out of over 10,000,000 results! Just shows that anchor text is very impotant in Google's algorithm - much more than the on-page factors, perhaps.

Your score might have gone down after all the changes you made but not to the level that it is lower than the #2 result.

[peterinwa]

I didn't know the value of anchor text. (I just did a search and read about what it is.)

Interestingly, I don't have any anchor text on my homepage. Because I thought it would look more professional, I am using gifs instead of actual text.

It had occurred to me that it might help to include a title="good keyword text" in the link but that would be rediculously redundant in my case as below each gif link I have a sentence or two describing the page the link takes you to.

Thanks for your replies, Peter