Cache rollbacks

[markc]

I have a site of around 500 pages that Google generally loves. I get #1s for most of my key pages. I have one particular page on the site that I'm trying to improve on. I have a fair number of competitors, but none doing anything very clever. Google crawls the page less regularly than some others, thanks to the depth its linked at, but because of the site layout I can't really move it "up" the tree (and I loathe sitemaps from a UI point of view).

The page itself is not particularly text heavy, but is kosher. it happens to use the keyword/phrase six times in h1, title and description. I really try and be "above board" albeit perfectly coded (url, title, description keywords and text), but what do people know about penalties for being TOO keyword rich?

I've noticed recently (past 4 weeks) that the Cached page date on the serps keeps changing quite dramatically. I have a Cached page on Google right now as of the 9/March that puts me down to page 15 (!), somewhere there is a cached (23/March), more recent page that restores my #1 position.

Anyone else see similar? its this all just part of the puzzle of the dance? I'm pretty sure that the latest page I have on the site itself will restore me to top 5 position at least, and google has since crawled it (this morning) should I just sit back and wait?

Page 15 to #1 and back is frustrating to say the least..

[Lorel]

it happens to use the keyword/phrase six times in h1, title and description.

if you mean 6 times in one h1 or not but I'm sure that will result in a penalty from Google as you should only use one H1.

I just realized one of my main inner pages dropped out of sight in google last month and it had been steadily climbing in rank UNTIL I added about 20 H2 tags to the page (it's a long page) with main keywords, and got zapped. Ranking #2 in Yahoo however. I took those excess H2 tags back out. We'll see how long it takes to recover.

I would therefore watch the header tags and not overdo it.

[markc]

I wasn't clear, the keyphrase appears six times on the page, plus once each in h1, title and description.

[steveb]

Page 15 certainly is weird, but your greater concern is where the page will rank when the page's master cache next gets updated. I wouldn't do much besides make trivial changes to the page every day.

[markc]

back to #1, #3 and #5 depending on the ordering of my keywords. but thats a topic in itself!

[DaveAtIFG]

I've seen Google reverting to an older cached page occasionally and those instances seemed to be part of identifying and "defusing" incoming 302 redirects.

[Jakpot]

Google seems to be in turmoil