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Pre Florida, I was #1 for a very competative keyword1 keyword2 phrase that typically returns 1.3 to 1.5 million. My site held that position for about a year and a half thanks to the good people of this forum.
Post Florida, I dropped from the first 1000 of the SERPS for about 3 weeks, then came back to #18 or #20. It was at this time that I started to do some tweaking to see if I could actually invoke the "filter" which is what everyone was bantering about back then. I added the KW1 and KW2 to most all my internal anchor text, had the phrase in the title, had the phrase in 2 H headers, had the phrase in italics and bold and had about a 10% concentration of either the phrase or the individual words in the text.
Sure enough, the site dropped from the first 1000 of the SERPS. Remember, we are still in post Florida but pre Austin. I decided to back off on the phrase to see what would happen. It was around now that all the talk about stemming started, so instead of just dropping the phrase, I changed it to related phrases... example...
old -> custom widgets
new -> personalized widgets
new -> customized relatedwidgets
new -> personalized relatedeidgets
new -> custom relatedeidgets
etc etc etc
I left the original phrase in the title and now the phrase had a 5% concentration in the text.
Sure enough, I popped back to #33 and stayed there until Austin.
Pre Austin, I saw radical results in the SERPS for a couple of days, My site was popping in at #1 ocassionally, then popping out to #33, This happened with every refresh. Then it started alternating between #1 and #10 and #13.
Post Austin I disappeared from the first 1000 of the SERPS again. In the last 4 days, I altered the title to customized widgets and custom relatedwidgets. I changed most of my anchor text to various synonyms of the phrase. I added three links on the home page to authorative sites on the types of materials used for the widgets and html checked all pages for errors and corrected. I also added a robots.txt file that disallowed to a bogus directory. AND I added adsense to the main page.
Today I popped up to #5 for the KW1 KW2 and #1 for most all my 3 word phrases.
Conclusions so far...
If you are gone from the SERPS, try re-optimizing/deoptimizing your main phrase. Drop it from the title if the concentration is too high. Definitely use synonyms when you can to reduce the concentration of the main phrase in the text and anchors. Link out to authorative sites, preferrably from your main page. Add robots.txt if you need it or not. Add adsense to your site if you can stomach the competition.
Not sure how the new algo weights the various things that I changed, but it seemed to work for me. Yesterday, hits increased by 600% and seem to be in line with pre Florida logs. My site gets crawled on average of once per day.
Just sharing some info here :-)
Most of them are gone post austin and I have started making some changes to some of them in anticipation of a couple early theories and worse thing I will roll them back and try again if I'm wrong... to me it's better than waiting for a 6 day update to finish.
Add adsense to your site if you can stomach the competition.
Hi webdude,
Perhaps this is most of the answer. Yours is not the only experience in which Adsense has helped the page to get back to #1. I guess that if you are getting exactly relevant ads then your site and page must be on theme but there is something about having Adsense code in your site that seems to confer a special privilege.
Best wishes
Sid
Things I did were:
-add a link from my home page to the money page
-decrease keyword density to 6% from about 25%
-add a link to the number one page for this search term that wasn't affected by florida or austin.
basically i paid closer attenion to Brett’s “26 Steps for a Successful Site in 12 Months”
I did this in steps.
-adding the link from my home page raised the ranking to about 150
-decreasing the keyword density took it to about 80
-adding the link to the number one page for the search term raised the ranking to 8
it was kind of fun to watch. I guess i owe Brett $89.
You say you added a link from your home page to your "money page". How exactly do you think this would help your rankings? I'm just curious.
Just out of curiosity, after over a month of being non-existent for my main search phrase I decided it was about dang time to do some tweaking. Instead of blindly following webdude's advice (no offense!), I decided to critique his "steps". Well, after hours and hours of researching various SERP's I've come to one main conclusion.
If you have more than a %5 keyword density in your "visible" on page text, then kiss top rankings goodbye. Without a SINGLE exception, every top placement (Top 10) for various keyphrases did not have more than a %5 keyword density in on-page text. In fact, most had 2.5% or less.
I had 7.62%...interesting. So, I have just lowered that down to 4.8% by using other variations of my main phrases. It'll be interesting to see what happens. I will keep you posted.
Dave.
Dave, I think your right about keyword density all my pages that have a first page ranking have a pretty low density.
I'm in what I would consider one of the non-targeted areas and the top pages in my area have density of about 12-14% for each word of a two word phrase.
Can you give us starting date and end date for the things you did?
I'd be interested to see how long it took.
Today my new site is in the google index. I'm very happy, i have 1-5 places for 80% of my keyrords and this page has pr=0 ;) in few weeks i should have pr 5/6. I didn't used any fance SEO, just the basic. My site has about 2500+ html pages, each with unique content, themed, many sub-directories ....
The market is very competitive, ringtones and logos for mobile phones.
I started all of this on the 24th.
The joy has been short lived. The page is nowhere to be seen again .
totter
Have you come back yet? I noticed that during Austin and even post Austin (if you can call this post yet), my site is still fluctuating between #1 to #20 on any given day. See [webmasterworld.com ]
for a more recent post on this.
Hissingsid
This is pretty funny because since I started using AdSense, I got a lot of click throughs to aother sites. So much so that I took the sites that were directly in competition with me off the filter list :-) Seem I made more money last week on the clicks then I made in sales. Well, if I can make a buck from my competition... why not?
As for the reason for this post, I am just trying to put in logical order the things I did to stay in the SERPs.
BTW - today I am at #15 for my money phrase. I am almost positive it will change tomorrow. It seems that it changes every day. I think this may be a new way for the G to keep us off the aglo. Just my opinion.
Wondering what was up I looked at the referral terms from my stats that would be related to this page and it is getting all of its referrals from various four word searches. For each of these four word searches it is resting at no 1. I guess I'm happy.
I have found that changing the H1 and title tags is necessary to get back in the SERPS.
I try to go for what looks good on the page rather then the optimizing of the page.
have you not tried using a style sheet?
have you not tried using a style sheet?
:)!
I find it a waste of space to add uneeded tags. Seems to work for me.
1) You need to be using <hx> tags for a properly formed document.
2) Google will not penalise you for using styled <hx> tags
3) There's no evidence that Google will reward you for doing so either, but other search engines might and Google might do in the future
<h1>My Page Title</h1>
does not tell the browser: Write 'My Page Title' in a Times New Roman font, 22 pixels high. (The browser decides that).
All it tells the browser is: this text is my main page heading.
<h2>My subheading</h2> tells the browser this is a subheading.
<h3>My subcategory</h3> tells the browser that the sub-section indicated by the title <h2>My subheading</h2> is divided further into subcategories and that <h3>My subcategory</h3> is the heading of one of the subcategories.
SE robots will either see <hx> tags for their structural significance or ignore them. You can style the headings however you want. The way the browser presents <h1>, <h2> etc. is an arbitrary decision made by the programmers of the browser.
Of themselves, <hx> tags contain no implicit style instructions.
I know what your saying, but I have never used the <hx> tag this way. I usually check my sites with css on and off and always try to get the sites to look the same regardless. This has always worked for me. Personally, when I view my pages with css off, if I have a <H1> tag, it pushes all the text down and looks bad to me. There are big gaps between the header and the following text.
This might not be the way to do this, but it seems to work for me. Of the sites that I host, I have 20% of them on the first page of G with two of them ranked #1 and all of these sites either do not have the <hx> tag at all, or have nothing larger then an <h4> tag.
Am I missing something here? I have never really used the <hx> tag as an optimizing method and it seems to work for me.
20% of them on the first page of G with two of them ranked #1
oops -- sorry
Just checked and of the 2 sites that were #1 yesterday, they are now ranked #3. It seems the results are changing daily for me.
