Forum Moderators: open
Naturally, we have developed quite sophisticated, information-rich pages targeting "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword4" using the usual techniques. These worked beautifully until the most recent G change.
Now I find that when I put quotes around the words, these pages are at the top of the SERPs. However when I leave the quotes out, many of the pages are way down.
Does anyone have any insight into what's happening here?
To rank high in google you need links, and lots of them, using your relevant keywords as anchor text.
Neuron - yes. The pages were reliably at #1 for something like a year, but yes, we're working on the inbounds as well as tweaking page structure.
Brett - do you see anything systematic in the way this works, or do you think it's just a matter of reaching a resonable keyword density across all of the keywords?
They changed the relevance of phrases and proximity vs raw kw matches.
Brett please can you elaborate on this comment a little as I am facing similar problems- Thanks
>>To rank high in google you need links, and lots of them,
True, you do need links but also pay attention to the source where the links are coming from.
>>using your relevant keywords as anchor text.
And varying the anchor text so that the use identical phrases doesn't exceed a reasonable percentage.
There can also be some on-page factors to check out.
Look through around the top 10-15 sites for the search (without quotes) in the cache because it's easy to see, and take note of the number of occurences on the pages of the exact search phrase. And then visually glance through, noticing the amount and placement of the keywords used in the phrases individually, not in phrases.
There seems to be a threshhold cap on the number of times the exact term is used - at least it seems that way by visual inspection, and some others have been noticing the same thing.
Not necessarily, there can be any number of reasons why a site slips.
Indeed. It is good to know your neighbors. It may be that your competitors are working harder, and there is nothing at all changed with your site.
They changed the relevance of phrases and proximity vs raw kw matches.
There also seems to be an issue with 3-4 word phrases where one or two of the words are competive. I'm guessing its the synonmym thing being applied to the onpage factors and incoming links.
We are No.1 for a single word 'funnywidget', but nowhere for 'funnywidget secondword', where 'secondword' has plenty of synonyms and 'funnywidget' has none.
Its making for some odd looking results for some sectors.
Just remember that thdig is no where near as complex as Google, and it doesn't have to take spamming into account, because you are only using it on your own files.
