How to get LOWER ranking

[extra]

I've been lucky for last 3 years, and my serp has been growing all this time. For my most important phrases i've been at 1.posision last year for local search.
But I also discovered that some pages was not represented at all.
I then removed a lot of internal links (ref. [webmasterworld.com...] ), and now numbers of visitors are raising about 30%.

I was afraid when I got #1 position in Go...e last year, but now I'm even more afraid.
I have a lot of visitors coming back (about 20%), and to be dumped could be catastrofe for me. It's better for me to be somewhere down on page #1 or 2.

Doing some "de-optimizing" (described above) gave for me "worse" result as I'm now have more visitors than ever.

Is there a simple way to get lower ranking without doing something that can give a penelty.

I guess this sounds crazy for some of you, but for me it's more scary to be dumped without understanding why, and use a year to climb back to 2.page. It's better to have a slow, long term growth of our bussiness, than have a short boom.

After all I'm a newbie to this, and most of what I learned have been learned from reading webmasterworld.

[edited by: encyclo at 1:48 am (utc) on Jan. 23, 2008]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]

[Quadrille]

If there is a reason for 'dumping' your site, then the search engines will dump it, regardless of which position it is on.

If there is no reason for 'dumping' your site, then the search engines will not dump it, regardless of which position it is on.

The trick is not to go down in the serps, which can only possibly hurt you, it cannot conceivably help.

The trick is to check your site for careless mistakes, shoddy practice or - worse - spammy practice. All of those can and will hurt your site.

Don't fix what does not need fixing - fix what does. :)

[extra]

Thanks Quadrille

I will not do anything with my site as I can't see anything wrong. But it's certainly something wrong with tha algo of Google.
Today I saw they (Google) have a multi phrase test search about something that is not nearby what is described on my pages (a totaly different subject). And still my site was hit. Most of the words (except stop words) was not on my site at all (even the language was different)

Thanks for good words. I will wait and see before I intervent.

[Quadrille]

Today I saw they (Google) have a multi phrase test search about something that is not nearby what is described on my pages (a totaly different subject). And still my site was hit. Most of the words (except stop words) was not on my site at all (even the language was different)

I don't know what you mean by "a multi phrase test search" - and if it's Google's test, how do you know the results?

I don't know what you mean by "my site was hit"

If you think about it, it really, really is most unlikely that 'something wrong with Google's algo' only affects your site. Though it is possible, there's plenty of things that are much more likely, from a coding error on your site, to a server error with your host.

You'll need to be much more specific about the problem to get any kind of specific help, sorry.

[extra]

Sorry for my bad English.

What I tried to say was that I saw two manual search from Google, based on my provider of statistics describing Google as the owner of IP and server name.

Let say I sell "red and blue widgets for clasic music".
The search phrase could have been "Clinton and Obama arguing". Still I must have been in the serp as the Google people was visiting my site (described as hiting my site).
The problem is that I don't have any words nearby the same as "Clinton" or "Obama". Neither do I have the word "arguing". I don't understand why I was listed at all as my site is about widgets and in another language than english.
This is also the reason why I put a questionmark about the algo.

[ZydoSEO]

You can legitimately rank for terms that you do not have on your page if other sites (and/or your own internal pages) are linking to your page with link text containing those words not found on the page itself.

Ex. I have a page about "blue and red widgets". 25 other trusted and related sites link to my site refering to my widgets as "blue and red gadgets"... But the word "gadget" doesn't appear on my page anywhere. I can still rank well for the terms "blue gadgets" or "red gadgets" because others link to me with that link text.

So don't be surprised if you rank for terms that don't appear on your site's page(s).

I support three commercial sites. One of them has approx 1.4 million incoming links, most to our home page. Our home page ranks well for literally hundreds of keyword phrases that we know about(probably thousands that we don't even know about) where the words don't appear on our home page at all. Our home page has very little 'textual' content on it to rank - may 50-75 words - and our <title> certainly doesn't contain more than maybe 3 keyword phrases... The rest of the items on the home page are images and links to other areas of the site.

[extra]

Thanks a lot. This was very helpful.
I guess you are right.
The number of links are growing fast, and some of the sites have nothing to do with our products. Only forums where they i.e. discuss how to solve problems with our products. That means we probably have some links with text that is far away from what we are selling.

Hopefully G.... understand this is nothing we can change.