Hi there - I'd be very grateful for any help or ideas I've a new site (about 1 month old): http://kintail.walkhighlands.co.uk I've got a few good quality backlinks in there, and there's not really any decent competition for keywords such as 'Kintail walks', and there's lots of original content. Initially I ranked well (4th) on Google for the keywords above and others and took longer to index elsewhere. Now I have lots of pages indexed on google, but rank outside the top 100 results, which is baffling as most of that above the site is rubbish or completely urelated to the keywords. To make things stranger, MSN has gone the opposite way. I'm no. 1 for the keywords above, which I might have expected, but all sites on the main domain, even those with no backlinks and not much content as I've not spent time on them yet, rank brilliantly. e.g. walkhighlands.co.uk now has 7 of the first 10 results, and 11 of the first 14 results for 'highlands hostels' What could I have done to upset Google so bad, or make MSN so happy? I did have links between the different subdomains in the footers to help navigation and suddenly thought these might be spam so I removed them last week, but have reindexed to no avail. I don't think this was it anyway as my other site (www.skyewalk.co.uk) ranks well and also had these links.
Well I think you need to get more quality backlinks using your targeted keywords as an anchor text to make google happy with your site. There's a lot of factors that google consider in ranking a site but I think they give importance to quality backlinks.
I saw some people mentioning Google Bump - a new site gets bumped to the top of the SERP at the beginning, but then it sinks back down. Another thing I noticed a few times is that with a new site (in both cases sites were around 3 months old) there is a sudden drop in SERP that lasts about a week. Then it gets back to normal.
Thanks. My backlinks do have good anchor text with my target keywords. Although there are only about 50 of them, they are on relevant sites and there's not really any competition for the keywords, so there must be some other problem for Google? The sites that link to me all appear above mine, returning their link to me as the relevant part of their results! From the post above, sounds like I might just have to wait and see. But does anyone have any more definite ideas? Thanks again
How long is the SERP drop? If it happened just a few days ago I think you should just wait a few days more and you will be back in bussines. Just do the normal stuff you do, post quality content, get links etc... Good luck!
well as we all kno tht google, msn n yahoo have diff n opposite alogos for ranking a site in SERP.... so wht has happened with u is very obvious... anyways go in for gud quality backlinks as they are the ones which will help in gud SERP in google .. n while doing link exchange use ur most imp keyword in the anchor text... surely this might help... all d best
I also read about this, and it can be true... some of my sites where also ranked good at the start and sinked after that on google. But usually they went back up after some time.