Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
After spending the few days reading articles on here on how to rank higher, I believe I over-optimized a few days back. Today, I removed a lot of the keywords/phrases from my site (not just the keyword specific to this situation). However, here's the problem: I wrote the content before knowing enough to track its position in the SERPs. I really have no idea if it was on the first couple pages and then dropped into a worse Inferno than Dante had even imagined or what.
As I see it, a number of things could be at fault:
1) Over-optimization - although I can't really tell since I had no starting data. Also, the site is indexed and the page in question shows up when running a "site:" search. A couple other widget articles show up decently (pages 2's, which isn't all that great). Can a -950 penalty hit only one page but not another in the same site?
2) No backlinks to the specific article - while this is true, running a "link:" search in big daddy G doesn't return much/any backlinks to the other sites as well (only internal, which are 99% of what I have for my entire site). (Getting links to my pages/site is another headache on its own.)
3) The way the website is set up. I use WordPress, and each article is written as a post. On the left sidebar of the site, there is a collection of pages of subsections. Inside one of these subsections are links to the various posts. Could this be too hard for big daddy G to understand?
4) I got hit with "duplicate content" about a year ago in GWT since this is a WordPress site. I robot.txt'ed it up and noindex'ed a couple things, such as categories. The warning is gone from GWT, and has been for a long time, but could this be the problem?
5) Good ol' Google just thinks the article sucks and deemed it not worthy to be in the top 1000.
What do you guys think? Most of my articles are like this. I have only about 50 pages to the site, so I'm not expecting to rule the internet, but getting more traffic than what I currently am would be awesome. It's funny, I see people complaining of getting 20/day and I'm ecstatic to see 5/day.
Thanks for any and all help.
If you have acquired some credibility already then you are going to get the standard suggestion to go out hunting for backlinks, but not from me. I'd say that if you had 50 webpages in the site then somehow, logically, put links on 10 of those post to the problem page and see what happens in a couple of weeks.
As it sounds like you are not in a very competitive keyphrase race, that in itself may be enough to join the top players.
Also, while I'm offering you advice, emphasize the keyphrase a couple of times with bold and italics, you can capitalize the first letter of each important word too once or twice. Try to pick two variations (maybe one being pluralized or varied verb tense or something like that).
Try that and see what happens. G'luck.
The sites been up for 13 months exactly. I'll use your advice right away.
Thanks again.
I think you should take things a bit slower, particularly on blasting 10 links at the problem page. Most overoptimization penalties are link-related, and after you've taken all that trouble to de-optimize and remove some problems, you don't want to suddenly send such an obviously coordinated sign of re-optimization.
...you can capitalize the first letter of each important word too once or twice
Seems to me this is a possibly spurious straw picked up from another discussion here about what someone observed in Bing titles. It was later countered by the suggestion that the capitalization might have been coincidental and perhaps in itself had nothing to do with the rankings, and that the position of the word in the title might have had more to do with it.
IMO, playing with things like capitalization is a fruitless approach to SEO for Google.
No backlinks to the specific article - while this is true, running a "link:" search in big daddy G doesn't return much/any backlinks to the other sites as well (only internal, which are 99% of what I have for my entire site). (Getting links to my pages/site is another headache on its own.)
First, the Google link: operator is useless. It shows a random sample, not a useful sample. You can read more about it in Hot Topics, pinned to the top of this forum's home page.
To check backlinks, use Yahoo's SiteExplorer. It's not perfect, but its results are much more complete than Google's.
Also, get a better sense of your competitive area. Perhaps the targeted phrase in this article is more competitive than your other phrases. Look at your competition and see what kind of inbound links they have. Chances are you will need something comparable.
Read the article critically. Is it good enough to deserve a high ranking? Maybe you need to create some additional content and promote it. Get a more solid sense of site structure.
But don't chase rumors about tricking the algo to try to fix things.
"[0042] ...grammatical or format markers, for example by being in boldface, or underline, or as anchor text in a hyperlink, or in quotation marks.""[0133] ...whether the occurrence is a title, bold, a heading, in a URL, in the body, in a sidebar, in a footer, in an advertisement, capitalized, or in some other type of HTML markup."
That is a patent, and not testing results of the actual algo in practice. But it does seem to suggest that these are areas that Google might score. So they might help rankings -- and they also might be overdone an incur a penalty.
I think you should take things a bit slower, particularly on blasting 10 links at the problem page.
Yes, I understand and agree. What I ended up doing was adding a link to the page(page a) on 5 different pages (pages b) that were related, where this article in question (page a) builds off of what is discussed (pages b). I checked GWT and noticed that I didn't have any links to the page, even though I had one previous link to it before. I'm going to let this sit for a few days and see what happens.
As far as the italics/bold/capitalization - I haven't done anything with that, and I'm not going to until I see what happens with the linking on its own. (Is a week a sufficient amount of time, or should it take closer to a month/month and a half to see any changes?)
First, the Google link: operator is useless.
Yes, I've read through most of the Hot Topic posts. I assumed the Google link operator would at least give a decent view of the links. I should have known better since I was assuming, and we all know what happens when someone does that.
Also, get a better sense of your competitive area.
I checked keyphrase itself, and the results are in the 2.8 million range. Adwords External tool doesn't have much for searches or competition (although the competition wouldn't make sense here, since it would be between advertisers). Is 2.8 million results fairly competitive?
Is it good enough to deserve a high ranking?
I believe it is. I've read it over a few times as well as the competition, and in my opinion (which is obviously biased no matter how objective I try to be) my article contains a lot more and higher quality information. But what I think, Google thinks, and searchers think are three different things. Another example: just recently I published a different article that received some decent traffic (for me), and a few delicious saves (again, for me). When searching Google, it's number one...for the Digg submission! Meanwhile my article isn't even in 10 pages of the SERPs (with only about 10k results total)!
So my new questions are:
1) Is a week a sufficient amount of time to see changes in my article's standing?
2) What kind of data should I be saving for each keyphrase I use? Just the search result number?
3) Finally, if adding links to the page is a fruitless effort, what's my next step?
Again, thanks to all of you helping me out with this and for the welcome. It's much appreciated. I'm not close to taking the site down as I once was.
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Side note:
I think the root of my problem is that I've been bombarded with information. The past few days I've read this forum for quite a few hours. I've been trying to implement some of the different things on my site, since my traffic has been less than 5 uniques a day since the start. I don't think I have the big picture outlook on SEO and site building. That I've taken different ideas and smashed them with other ideas, and the result is where I'm at now: utterly clueless as to what the heck I'm doing.
If a page is important to you it should be linked significantly from your other webpages, preferably as anchor text within a naturally occuring sentence but in a side menu is OK, in the footer is a little weaker than in the header.
If you have 50 webpages, significant attention would be about 10 webpages. You want the search engine to be aware that this page is very important.
Emphasizing keyphrases is another way to indicate that the keyphrase is important. Over-optimization is when you repeat the same method of emphasizing excessively. On the important webpage, since you are using blog software you may not have the ability to use Headings, or you may, I don't know but you can bold a keyphrase here, Capitalize the Synonymous Keyphrase there, italicize the plural form over there and then bold the abbreviation in the second paragraph, or whatever. Make the keyphrase important, support it with keyphrase dynamicability, avoid excessive repetition. Use word variables, altered prefixes and suffixes, abbreviations, synonymous keyphrases, plural forms, even morphology if you need to get innovative etc.
Your idea to touch it lightly and wait (no more than two weeks) is prudent.
