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]
My major site has so far between 1st, 20something, 1st, 15something (looked good at this point as the difference between data-sets was shrinking), 1st, 18something (latest: the gap growing again)...
And the timing just could not be more tragic: I'm missing many major income days in my sector.
And before any #)"/(/#"(¤/# says "SERPs are always changing, you know" ... Yes, SERPs are changing NOT jumping, at least never before during my lifetime.
Way too nerve-wrecking, couldn't they do this with more subtle way or something.
< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >
[edited by: tedster at 6:22 pm (utc) on Dec. 3, 2007]
