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I firmly believe that the majority of my site's rankings came from using the keywords in my navigation at the bottom of each page. With a system as such, I have my keywords in link text for every page.
I was ranking quite well in most of them last month, and hoping to see improvement this month, as I changed the text to a little more popular ways of searching.
Right now I am down in nearly EVERY keyword. WAAAAY down in lots of them.
I am really hoping you guys are right about link text not yet being figured, because otherwise I will be quite frustrated.
I'm with rfgdxm on reduced anchor text weight, it's still early but that's how it looks (possibly reduced proximity bonus too).
It's almost like the new index is less Google-like.
Yes it is interesting to observe how the dance develops and try to work out at which point various criteria are factored in.
A number of top notch sites are currently not on the dash board... but miraculously they will appear before everything settles. A long way to go from here.... so I wouldn't start counting those chickens (or equally the costs).
But, this doesn't make sense. If for example someone out there linked on all the pages of their site with "rfg is a doofus" or such, this shouldn't effect my site's rankings on the keywords that I consider important. My site might start coming up high for searches on "rfg doofus" and such, but this shouldn't effect searches on the keywords I am shooting for.
<<I think the major consensus is that Page Rank is calculated once the dance settles down.>>
That hasn't been my experience. Although the dance period can move things around some, in general, I find that what I see in the first hours of the dance pretty much sticks by the end of the dance. It seems to me that PR is already factored in when the dance begins, however you won't see the new PR displayed until the end of the dance.
For the record, my sites have both benefitted as well as suffered some. For a pair of very important kw phrases, we have achieved excellent positioning, which made my entire day. Thank you, Google. :)
The others have improved nicely up a spot or two or holding steady, it's just hard to figure on this one.
[edited by: Marcia at 5:23 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2002]
Please tell me they havn't changed their algos, serious and I mean seriously different SERPS.
A) Backward links don't count for anything
B) Keywords / Links don't count for anything
C) Content doesn't count for anything.
This is Black Thursday!
This is my first time watching the dance- fun. I have pretty established sites, high rank with good PR, and those have held steady...
I have another established site that I have been reworking with tips ganrnered from this site, and I see an improvement on www2 and www3...
I think the page <title> has helped me.
Good luck to all, unless you are after my key words....
dave
Thanks. One thing that helps me in doing this analysis is the keywords that I am shooting for are by no means highly competitive. It is obvious that for the one keyword that at the moment I am #1 in on www2, *none* of the other sites in the top 10 made any conscious effort at all to optimize for. All are doing well simply by accident. In particular, I definitely did some careful analysis when I noticed a PR3 page month after month was consistently beating out my PR5 home page. It became obvious fairly quickly what they had that I didn't was other site's linking to that page with that keyword in the anchor text.
It makes sense to me is that either the weighting of anchor text has been lowered, or that it hasn't been factored in yet. If it isn't that, than it is heavier weight on keyword in domain name.
Interesting note: I removed a link, named say "blue widgets", from about 300 of my internal pages (and replaced it with another internal link). Surprisingly, the "blue widgets" page and subpages don't seem to have taken a big hit. Most have gone down some but one of them has actually gone up (in www2, anyway).
On the other hand, before the August update, I had removed a group of internal links from my home page and THOSE pages went waaaaay down in the August update - much further down than before I put them on my home page. So I'm more confused than ever about the effect of internal links.
Think I'll go back to paying attention to content, content, content.
Beth
It is that text in *anchor links* from other sites that they are cleaning my clock on
Yes! And I don't think text on my own page has been fully taken into account either. That's why sites from down under about truck tools rank above my European site on doogfood (well, not dogfood really :)).
I don't know what the current rankings are based on. I can't even speculate.
It's also worth noting that some of my important new backward links have not appeared yet. This indicates to me that lots is not figured in yet.
That hasn't been my experience. Although the dance period can move things around some, in general, I find that what I see in the first hours of the dance pretty much sticks by the end of the dance. It seems to me that PR is already factored in when the dance begins, however you won't see the new PR displayed until the end of the dance.
[edited by: mat at 5:35 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2002]
is it because its new?
Help!?
However, I've seen lots of variances on this, so anything seems to be possible.
strange...., but all of our PR6- websites are at the same positions. Only the sites with PR7 dropped significantly.
Does anyone else noticed that?
Maybe they started indexing from PR1 to higher....
Though, I can see websites with high PR maitaining their rankings.
I'll let you know what happens. Wish I could figure out what is really going on.
I don't think internal anchor text is being given much weight right now.
I don't think PR is given much weight right now.
I have 12 PR7 pages (with very few outbound links) linked to a newly optimized page for a certain keyword. It's sitting at past 200 right now for that keyword. My PR for the new page will be a 7. I know this since I essentially swapped a page that was already there (which was a 7) with this newly optimized page. I also know that the first page of the SERPS for this keyword has only sixes and sevens.
I hope this will change before the dance ends.
-squared.
i don't really think so. We have several website on same IPs and the rankings are not affected. Some of them are even cross-linked.
But suddenly this site is nowhere to be find , i mean it ...nowhere to be found...its even coming only #10 when searched with the site name.
I think google engineeers decided to tone down offsite creteria like PR and anchor text in favour of inpage creterias ..As someone said its look more like INK rather than google...
Googleguy , you have to remember onething.. as long as offpage creteria weighs more than inpage factors you can minimize spam (note minimize not eliminate) ... if you throw PR out then its very very easy to manipulate SERPS...
I think google engineeers decided to tone down offsite creteria like PR and anchor text in favour of inpage creterias
My site is extremely content rich, with really good quality content, high page rank, themed backward links and very neat html code.....
guess what, its totally dissapeared! :(
One possibility to consider here. I have seen a *lot* of complaining in this forum about sites in the form of keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.com "spamming" Google and consistently coming up high. Is it possible that Google has lowered the weight of just the keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.com type, because that trick was being heavily used for doorway pages created by SEO types? The one keyword I hit #1 on is the only keyword in my domain name, which is in the form of keyword.TLD. I just checked, and the other little domain that I have, which I am just beginning to develop but has been in for 3 Google indexes now, which is in the form of anotherkeyword.org, has shot up from the #5 to #3 position. I know that I haven't done any tweaking of the HTML on that one that could cause a change in ranking. Thus, I'm not seeing any drop in rankings when there is only one keyword in the domain name with my 2 sites; in fact both those now have moved up.
Looking at the clock, I fell asleep about 15min before the dance began.
Good luck everyone!
