Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
As our intrepid heros left Oct. and entered Nov. they had just weathered a seige of Chinese domains into the rankings, Google's PageRank Massacre and the first signs of the annual Pre-holiday Sales Algorithm Change (a festive Google tradition)...
Chapter 11 - Holiday Hell or Heaven Sent?
Hee hee. Obviously I am having some fun starting the November thread. But seriously, this SEO is seeing some long-ranking web pages erode in the rankings. They're acting like icebergs. After a long time in good positions they have broken off of the glacier and are slowly drifting south. These are not stagnant websites sitting on their laurels either. The big concern is that doing the 'correct' relevant things do not seem to help.
Many of the replacements are soaking in a bath of external paid link-equity. One website I am watching appeared on the first page for a major two-word phrase and rose to #2 last month. The website has a reciprical footer link with a directory that has site-wide footer links to the ranking website using only the two-word keyword as anchor text. The directory has site-wide footers with 3 other directories. All three directories have site-wide footers to the ranking website. Oh, and the cream of the crop...one well known directory has a hidden link to this website. The link is in the markup with no anchor text. Other websites seem to enjoy link equity from lots of TV and radio websites (I wonder why? ;) ). For all of Google's bluster, Mountain View continues to have only sporadic combat success.
Boring business websites, the ones that have a hard time crafting compelling creative linkbait, seem to be the vulnerable to ranking shifts. I still see many verticles where reciprocal links still seem to be the deciding factor for which pages rank where.
Size does matter. The slow encroachment of big box retailers and Amazonian wannabees (you know who you are) continues to creep into the SERPs. Many domains that have spent the last year or two in the 20-40 positions have cracked the first page and are quietly moving up. These sites have lots of original content. Perhaps Brett needs to update the 26 steps to say, "Add 100 pages a day."
Does camouflage work? This makes no sense at all, but I have noticed in some keyword markets that domain names that contain popular domain names as a part of them are ranking. For example the popular well-known domain might be called THISDOMAIN.COM. The lookalike domain name might be THISDOMAINPRODUCTCATEGORY.COM.
Those are my observations. What are you seeing?
[edited by: tedster at 5:14 pm (utc) on Nov. 1, 2007]
The one site is hard wave form... going from 200 visitors/day for a week or two then to 1,400 visitors/day for about 5 days then back down. Waves were close initially, but the last one was big and last 4 weeks. Over the summer I was sitting pretty the whole time. This weekend back up, then started slipping again as of yesterday.
The second site was less wave centric and more of a big wave this past weekend. I slipped about 2 months ago and continued to slip for target terms all the way to last spot page 2. Then this past weekend I made the rise back position 1-3 on page one where I originally sat for the longest time. At this very moment, I seem to be slipping back down again.
Both are holiday critical.
They made an announcement to make the supplemental index searchable during the course of summer, but nothing has happened so far.
After calculating the supplemental ratio of my one site, I could see how the supplemental result could have been searchable during the summer.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:09 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2007]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
3) At any case the Serps showing only 1000 results IMHO no reason (who is going to search after the second page (20) results, or third page (30) results.
I'm reminded that J.P. Morgan was asked by a reporter once what he predicted for the stock market. He replied that it will fluctuate. The same applies to Google serps.
Yikes, WHAT is going on there - and WHY am I still getting the impressions, but no clicks?
Klaus
[edited by: tedster at 5:46 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
That big a drop sounds a lot like a penalty to me. Get brutally honest with yourself about the site and any marketing/link-building you've done. Check out the discussions in our Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.
If you can't come up with anything at all that might trigger a penalty, even a keyword-specific penalty, then you may have a Google bug that works it's way out in a little bit of time. But I suggest you do some intense due diligence before going for the Google bug answer.
When I look in Webmaster tools "top search queries" I see that 2 weeks ago I had #9 for our important single word and #5 for two phrases. Now I have #213 for the sigle word, but #4 and #1 for the two phrases. (Was adding a historical view to the "top search queries" part of the Google strategy?)
Don't know what to do...
Klaus
[edited by: tedster at 5:21 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2007]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
Most of the sites that I saw buying links, did not link out anywhere.
But the the sites selling links do (obviously - lol). The "buyers" in your scenario are simply at the end of the chain.
Once you get past 30, Google isn't even trying anymore anyways. Most of the results past page 3 are irrelevant to the original query. You'd think there is more than 30 relevant results for a given search, wouldn't you?
Yep... what really ticks me off is sites that are clearly trusted infiltrating results just cause they have a mixture of the queried terms on the page, mentioned only in passing, and the page is 8 months old. To me the trusted sites are way over-valued. As a result, my niche highly targeted site is getting trumped by trusted sites even though their relevancy to the query searched is poor.
As search term popularity decreases, trusted sites should change. In other words, TRUST should be determined in relation to the specific query not in general. From what I have been seeing, TRUST is completely general.
Yep... what really ticks me off is sites that are clearly trusted infiltrating results just cause they have a mixture of the queried terms on the page, mentioned only in passing, and the page is 8 months old. To me the trusted sites are way over-valued. As a result, my niche highly targeted site is getting trumped by trusted sites even though their relevancy to the query searched is poor.
What really bugs me is the # of obvious scraper/spam sites getting PR these days.
Have you checked things with Google Webmaster Tools?
Klaus
I found my pages on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th page by searching all of my main keywords.
What the HELL is going on at Google?
I never sell and never buy any links. No reciprocal links either, just quality links from quality sites.
I am really dissapointed ...
past - 26th Oct my site was no 1 in SERPs
27th Oct - 05th Nov my site was no 18-21
05t Nov - 08th Nov my site was no 1
09th Nov - ........ my site is, no 15
I just don't like this latest change in SERPs, lot of useless sites gaining rank while sites very much related to the search term are losing rank.
Interesting to see if they "cancel" this update for the "second time".
The page I used to rank on for those searches dropped from PR 6 to PR4, but the sites now occupying page 1,2,3 mostly have the same PR or lower with fewer IBLs. Page 1,2,3 are now occupied by a whole new crop of junky low ranking pages. I find it interesting that an authority site which has ranked near mine for the last year or so has also dropped to 4th page just above mine. Is it common for a sudden drop of PR / loss of links to make a page plummet?
