Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I rank #1 in Yahoo for one of my core keywords for the website and yet I am no where in it for Google!. Why?
Anybody have any ideas?
[edited by: Ricky123 at 10:24 am (utc) on Nov. 24, 2008]
[edited by: engine at 12:03 pm (utc) on Nov. 24, 2008]
[edit reason] No specific sites or keywords, thanks [/edit]
When you say "nowhere", do you mean literally not on any of the search results pages? in other words, have you checked all the way to the end?
Google has a penalty for "over-optimization" that may be affecting you. We've been calling it the -950 pnealty [webmasterworld.com] because it can sometimes throw your url to the very end of the results.
[edited by: Ricky123 at 3:53 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2008]
[edited by: Ricky123 at 5:49 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2008]
The summary way to say it is you've used enough specific SEO advice that you created too many relevance signals - you made your url too "Google perfect" for the search term. The first place I check is anchor text - especially text menus where it can be way too easy to repeat the same keyword in many links.
If that's apparently not the problem, then have you loaded the page in other ways - especially using the keyword in too many ways (see the summary thread), or using too many synonmyms or somewhat related words. The kind of thing that Information Retrieval calls "co-occurence".
I also have a suspicion that if you over-control the anchor text in backlinks from other sites, this can trigger the -950 effect.
What Google is doing here is not easy to wrap your head around, especially at first. It's a kind of semantic algo that is quite different from the very literal and linear approach that old time algos used.
Very brave to enter the arena now unless you're 99% niche. Best of luck!
