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However, after arriving back from holidays today & checking my rankings after the latest update I got a bit of a shock.
I'm not obsessed with rankings but there are about 25 phrases that I check each month after the update. Most are in the form:
"blue widgets timbuktu mali"
or
"keyword keyword geographic-word geographic-word"
A couple of my phrases were unchanged but many had dropped significantly (7 -> 140, 15 -> 256, 2 -> 50). Oh! The pain, the pain!
So now I am pondering what went wrong. There have been no really major changes to the site or its structure. Bit of new content here, bit there, slight change in some meta tags and a change in the <title>. I am aware of what gets sites kicked and stear well clear of spammy techniques.
I also know that our host was down for a while last month (god bless them - %#&@^&%^). So that was my first idea - Googlebot got sick of our unresponsive site. But this doesn't make sense because I have checked our logs and GoogleBot had a field day, running through the entire site twice and hitting the homepage almost everyday.
But I'm now thinking that it could be something else. As I mentioned before I made a change to the title tags, nothing major just shifted some words around - and moved the geographic words to the end of the title. The title is 32 words long, so I'm thinking Google may only read X number of words from a title?
Could the title be a factor? Am I missing something? Has anyone noticed anything that the last update did significantly differently?
Eagerly awaiting your sage-like advice,
- gilli
Much too long, and impossible to create a focused page for. 32 words is a paragraph.
>>shifted some words around
Two of the most overlooked aspects of SEO are keyword proximity and keyword order. Change the order of words in the title then change it everywhere else, including inbound anchor text. Better yet, if you are ranking well for the phrase, leave it alone. Want to rank for a different phrase or keyword set? Create a new page targeting that set.
I'd have to check the exact number, but Google ignores everything in the title after 60 or 70 characters or so.
The only way to keep above Link Rot is to have an ongoing link campaign.
I have a smallish site (8 main pages + 30-40 sub pages) which is designed primarily for users, but SEO'd as much as is easy & practical. I don't make a living from my keywords, I think of it as being kind of like gardening (water it a bit, give it some sun & enjoy the simple pleasure of watching it grow).
Having said that I can see one thing that I have been too lazy/silly to fix up - I have one title for all pages on the site. So the lengthy title is trying to sum up the whole lot - not just the one page. Will take your advice and cut the title down + write custom titles for each page.
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martinibuster: Could you be little more specific, as what you say does not make sense in terms of what I understand as link rot.
All outgoing links from our site are valid and pages do not get removed from our domain some incoming links should also return valid results. Do you mean to say that the value of an incoming link depreciates over time and there fore you need to keep looking from more and more new links?
If this is what you mean then its not the cause of our problem as our backlinks (according to Google - link:www.yaddayadda.com) are increasing at a rate of about 20% per month - including the last update. So I guess that would qualify as an ongoing link campaign?
That is correct. Backlinks increasing 20% is excellent.
One other thing:
My site is a .com, my email is a .com and this is the only address I have ever really given out, yet somehow Google has stumbled across my .com.au domain (mirror of .com) and begun indexing it in Decemeber. I guess someone has decided to link to .com.au in error.
Is this a problem & what is the best course of action?
<edit>link:www.mydomain.com.au returns nothing</edit>
thanks
DoU
The title of our index page was also a bit long, and like gilli, I played with it too much, and one important word was then not indexed.
Word order is really important with Google.
For one very important search keyword1 keyword2, we rank at No.2. If you reverse the words, we get only No.38. Just noticed that one today. I have tried to have titles on different pages to catch different keywords and keyword orders, but the work never ends.
As for "link rot", couldn't agree more. I got a bit lazy in November, only to see our rankings slip a little. Back in the hunt for more links the last couple of months. You can't afford to rest on your laurels in this game!
Happy (Chinese) New Year to everyone
<dashes off to fettle his own titles on a new site>
cheers
DoU
Make sure you are not duplicating pages, otherwise google will drop this site in favour of your more established .com version...... new content.... new visitors :)
The entire site is duplcated. Both domains contain our main corporate homepage. Its not really feasible to modify these pages to present different content on the under the two domains.
I don't want google or anyone else returning results from the companyname.com.au site. All our email addresses & corporate identity are based on the companyname.com domain. The companyname.com.au is just there to catch visitors who guess the url (we are based in Australia).
I guess its more a matter or corporate identity than traffic.
Anyway I found out how google caught the .com.au site, one of our partners was linking to it :( I've asked them to change it.
Google seems to have understood the situation with the results of link:www.companyname.com.au being identical to link:www.companyname.com and link:www.companyname.biz.
However site:www.companyname.com.au, site:www.companyname.com and site:www.companyname.biz all vary greatly for some reason.
Thanks again
