Home Pages Rises Then Falls After SEO

Can someone tell me why Google is being harsh?

[JAB Creations]

There is no "general" google forum so I'm posting here.

I never really played around with SEO but Ig ave it a crack and one of my pages vastly improved. So I tried it with my frontpage of my personal site. I went from my typical page 7 or 8 and sometimes as low as page 14 to as high as page 3.

Well I keep checking to see how it plays with my rank as other sites get revisted. Well no surprise my much better SEO frontpage literally sinks to page 12!

Now I see a lot of emphasis on many things including good crosslinking on our own sites ... but honestly I have a rank of 2 on MSN and ASK (and yahoo page 1 or 2) but Google has just been utterly harsh on my site.

Can anyone give me any insight on to why Google hates my page?

[diamondgrl]

You wrote: "Now I see a lot of emphasis on many things including good crosslinking on our own sites"

It's not clear what you mean by this. Do you have crosslinking between different sites you control? How extensive is this crosslinking? This might be the answer to some of your problems.

[BigDave]

but honestly I have a rank of 2 on MSN and ASK (and yahoo page 1 or 2) but Google has just been utterly harsh on my site.

Google is not yahoo or ask. Why should it matter to google what other SEs rank you?

I like pepperoni and sausage on my pizza, other people like pineapple and artichoke hearts. Differnet search engines like different factors when ranking a site just like different people like different flavors of food.

Often times, just playing around with some SEO trick your read on some website can do more harm than good if you are not careful to do your research.

If the suggestion seems like it is aimed at improving your site for you users, then it is probably safe to implement anyway. If it seems like it is intended to just give you better search engine results, then learn what you are doing before implementing it. And be willing to accept the consequences when the SE decides to take aim at sites using that particular trick.

[AndyA]

I don't think right now is a good time to test any new things on Google. There seems to be a problem at Google.

My index page isn't overdone in any way, and I've never deployed any trickery to try and rank better. I just try to build good pages that are helpful to people, and provide internal navigation that is user friendly.

Yet my site is almost impossible to find on Google, even when searching for its unique name. It's buried under other sites that mention my site, or link to my site. Now how is that relevant?

Personally, I'd sit tight for a little while and hope that Google gets its mess straightened out before trying anything new.