Knocked from the top spot by a newcomer - did multi-language help them?

[stuartc1]

Hey guys, been a while since I posted.

One of my websites, which has maintained the top sport for several years, has recently been moved to second placed (sometimes it's further down based on location). Traffic levels from G have not been effected.

The website which has gained to top spot on almost every location has only been running for a short time in comparison (not sure when they started, but the domain is no older that 2 years). My website has been online for about 6 years, and held the top spot for the last 3-4.

Now, my main page has over 50,000 organic backlinks from various websites, with steady growth. This new site has only about 10,000.

Now, I noticed this new website offers it's content in various languages.

Could this really be the reason for the boast? has anyone else noticed this?

[miozio]

It's not much about backlinks and the age now, the amount of useful content and its freshness are the factors making your site move lower as various languages make your competitor site look better.

But of course there could be other reasons.

[stuartc1]

Thanks miozio, I think you could be right in this case. The nature of my website does not require much freshness - however, I've been trying to at least make it more useful and fresh. Hopefully this will help bring it back up!

[indyank]

Traffic levels from G have not been effected.

that is the key...this is what the throttle is all about.

You also say that it is ranked lower i. a few other regions and this is exactly how I feel the entire throttle mechanism works - [webmasterworld.com ]

They seem to rank the page in such a way that you don't get the extra traffic but they try to maintain what you were getting before...

[HuskyPup]

The website which has gained to top spot

It's not a keyword domain name by any chance? I'm seeing keyword MFAs all over the place and they're absolutely garbage in general.

[stuartc1]

that is the key...this is what the throttle is all about.

I've long suspected google traffic throttling, I'm sure I posted something about it several years ago.. but I'll leave that for the other topic.

[stuartc1]

It's not a keyword domain name by any chance? I'm seeing keyword MFAs all over the place and they're absolutely garbage in general.

Not entirely, it's a 50/50 keyword domain with almost zero content (only a handful of very light pages) and zero adsense.

[leafgreen]

Remember that experts often point out that a newer site will get top placement for their kw's, and then drop down quickly. How long have they been #1? If less than a week, and you've fully optimized your site, I'll bet you'll be back to #1 in a month.

Only other thought is to analyze the influence/pr of some of their incoming links. If many have higher pr, then perhaps that's something to look at for you to get more incoming links from higher pr sites.