Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We have a Yahoo store that has been open for 4 years now this month. After a few months in the sandbox, we ended up with excellent natural rankings in Google and had a #1 or #2 rank for our most important search phrases almost this entire time.
About a year ago, we dropped down from #1 to #2 for our top search phrase. It troubled me a bit but to be honest we were so busy with sales and also with moving to a new state that I didn't stress over it too much and it didn't appear to make a dent in our business.
Back in June, this same search phrase dropped to #3 in Google. With the economy beginning to slow at that point, I took notice and decided to make some changes to the site after doing some reading and research.
Here's what I did:
-I saw that we had some canonical issues and I corrected that in late June.
-I also started looking at Google Webmaster Tools and saw that we had issues with duplicate and/or short meta descriptions and some title tag issues. That was also completely resolved in July.
-We started a blog at blog.ourwidgets.com. The blog was picked up by Google immediately and we add new content on an almost daily basis. We've also started adding the latest blog entries to our homepage to keep the content on the homepage fresh. The blog has been live for about 6 weeks now.
-I also made sure that our site has a good amount of internal links using anchor text for our top search phrases. This was also done back in July.
-We add new products/content frequently as well.
We have products that are frequently featured on major blogs and many other "important" industry related websites with links back to us with articles and features on a regular basis. So, we do have a strong network of links to us from other sites and we do not have any outgoing inks to other sites at all.
I thought that we may be overly optimized so I deleted some verbiage for the homepage that was kind of keyword heavy. That had zero effect on our ranking for this top search term. Then I had the idea of adding the latest blog entries to the homepage and that has also had zero effect.
Should also probably mention that the PR is 4 for our homepage.
We're doing pretty well for all of our other top search phrases, in the #1 or #2 spot for most of what we monitor. It is just this one key search phrase that we can't seem to get any upward motion on.
I am not sure what else I should be checking or changing at this point. Up until now, whenever I made a minor tweak I could see a direct and pretty immediate positive result. we've been getting crawled and I see the changed version of the site showing up in the Google cache. I am wondering if I am just not giving this enough time. This one has me stumped and I am not sure what more I should do. Any thoughts or comments would be greatly appreciated.
...................................
We have products that are frequently featured on major blogs and many other "important" industry related websites with links back to us with articles and features on a regular basis. So, we do have a strong network of links to us from other sites...
Note that as blog posts rotate off the front page of a blog that's linking to you, they are likely to become less helpful to you.
...and we do not have any outgoing links to other sites at all.
This is not necessarily a good thing. It might be better if you were in fact seen as part of the web, with some natural links to high quality sites.
IMO, the idea of not linking out to hoard PageRank is a misguided one. If you think through the question of PageRank distribution on your site, you'll see that prudent linking out doesn't actually cost you much PageRank to your key pages at all. This depends on your site architecture and where your outbound links are. I wouldn't, eg, have 50% of my home page links as outbounds... but relevant outbounds from an article on a deeper page most likely will help you more than it will hurt.
