Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Everything otherwise seemed normal for other keywords with the usual ups and downs.
My main competitor and the moronic version on wikipedia for the main keywords appears to be back in order today.
It was just strange from about last Friday on.
Thanks, I appreciate the replies- back to work.
You would be surprised what lies in the longtail.
When it comes to organic traffic the clicks and the conversions lie in the long tail. Sitting high for big key words more often feeds the ego than the wallet.
Time to start buying adwords
When it comes to Adwords, and learning how to pay per click; you want to start that yesterday. You don’t want to be looking to buy insurance the day after the fire. You can always pause the campaigns if you’re riding really high with the free traffic, but the day after Google flushes you down the tube is not the day to try and learn. PPC’ing effectively and profitably is every bit as challenging as optimizing sites for organic traffic. It takes time, patience and practice.
Does G always get it right? No, and that is the case for you.
This is happening more and more every day. It’s not exactly fair but Google has a difficult job and in carrying that out, their tolerance for innocent casualties has risen dramatically over the past 18 months.
Broaden your scope and you will be well served during difficult times and changes.
I was asking if anyone else has had this happen?
All the time for me.
I don't like the "cast your fate to the winds" philosophy. SEO is very complicated, but it's understandable. There are rules. They're hard to figure out, but they're there.
Since your home page has dropped off the radar with Google, it appears that Google has penalized your home page for something, but hasn't penalized your other "obscure page." "Hit the books," so to speak, and update yourself on all the rules and figure out what it is that all three of you have done that has downgraded your rankings. If you haven't copied text from other sites, then it's something else.
One new area that Google is looking at is link exchanges with irrelevant sites. Do you have out-bound links to sites that don't relate to your topic? I just mention this as something new going on with Google. Without knowing the specifics of your site and your keywords, it's hard to give you specific advice.
I have had this happen to sites of mine--not as dramatic as yours, but where we have dropped significantly. One thing I noticed, is that sometimes these setbacks were very temporary and we climbed back up when Google re-indexed everyone. Anyway, there are several possible responses: You can blame Google for being stupid; you can give up on these keywords; you can re-train and go into another profession; or you can take a look at who is the new #1, roll up your sleeves, and stay at it, slugging it out with your new competition. That's what I did and in time regained and even surpassed my earlier rankings, applying SEO fundamentals, usually.
Thanks. The drop has resulted in maybe a 5-10% drop in referrals the last few days. Which in the last two months has grown about 20% in visitation. So I'm still a bit ahead of the game overall. I've been very aggressive in adding content the last two months. The next two months I'll be internally cross linking the pages I've added as well as adding more.
#1 competitor has hired a new designer, probably in the last month. #2 competitor is wikipedia, which has added content to their articles in the last month also. Probably hacked from content I've added.
I dismantled a "link farm" of my domains/web sites last spring as it was hit with a 950 penalty- this fixed the problem (BTW, the 'farm' was developed long before G determined they were evil). I reinstalled to pages to my main website and redirected the domains to those pages and set up an internal link structure (ie: city1, city2, city3...) last month.
My main site, exists in separate parts on three domains. This is due to management concerns over the 12 years I've been building the beast. The plan over the next year is to reduce it to two domains, moving the original site to the busiest domain. The third, while having content added to certain sections, will otherwise remain static until I see how the move affects the result.
The new competition, if the results remain, show a very narrow slice of the information available on the subject matter. Over the years I've established, I guess it would be called a -trade name- and have noticed an increase in searches for that trade name.
I've just noticed that the obscure page has changed to the parent page (parent:obscure1:obscure2..) in the search for the keyword pair. Competitors 1 & 2 have dropped down a notch or two. We're all on the second page still.
My gut feeling is that this will resolve itself. Regardless, my instinct tells me to compete and take advantage of my competition's drop. :)
My question is the result of concern, not desparation. I've been taking advantage of -buzz- longtail for quite a long time. SEO is fascinating, but building a site that makes me and my visitors happy is now, and has been paramount since the beginning. Although I have a great deal of respect for what Google has built with adsense and adwords, since this is not a ecommerce site I feel the problem should and can be solved with intellect rather than throwing money at it. That's what I like about the web.
...It happens to millions of pages each moment. The web is very dynamic and new pages and links are being created every single moment. Accordingly, Google changes its SERPs...
But that is not what is happening here. We have had the same thing happen with some pages, and the new #1-10 pages are, for the most part, just awful in terms of relevancy and/or "importance". The one good thing is that most of those pages don't seem to stay up long.
In one case we had an info page that has ranked in the top 3 for 6+ years. Then in the top spot is some page that is nothing but a one page ad for a shop that is barely related. Yet I can check back a day later, and we are back.
From what we have seen, it has nothing to do with the web being dynamic, it is more like Google is experimenting.
This is all very confusing...
[edited by: tedster at 4:39 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2007]
[edit reason] edited specifics [/edit]
