I suppose this ties in with the strange things happening in serps thread in a way - after suddenly jumping up in my rankings again i checked out my backlinks - both DP tracker and webCEO say i have 40 links instead of 27 a few days ago - however if i manually query google it says "showing 1-10 of about 34" yet when i look at each page it only shows me 14 of these (17 if i include "omitted results" -) the thing is Google seems to give me so many different figures depending on whther i view it with 10 results per page, or 100 or if i include ommited results or not -it's always hard to tell (and remember ) what the actual amount is that G is saying i have. - so based on the manual results i find it hard to tell - but based on web CEO and shawns DP - it is definitely showing an increase - could this be another omen of an upcoming update? also as i mentioned in another thread (and a few other have mentioned in the "weird things in serps" thread ) and at the beginning of this post , my rankings have increased more in the last 2-3 days than they have in the last month and a half - and none of my SEO habits have particualry changed recently - so perhaps this is an indication of something about to happen - well actually i tell a lie i have changed my linking aims to more directly copmetitive pages (a la local rank) but this has only been in the last week or so - and most sites have not reciprocated - so surely the movement cannot be as a result of this. p.s - my ranking for my uncompetitive keyword jumped 11 places to number 9 and competitive jumped 60 places from 254 to 195 - both after being completely static for almost 2 months (perhaps it may be that i have moved out of the sandbox after 7 months!? )
Wrong assumption. At least in many people's experience including mine. An outgoing link to an autority page or a 'local' page close or higher to you in the SERPs can have the described impact on your ranking.
well when i say a week or so - i actually mean during the last week - however i have just thought of something else which may have had this effect . over the last 3 weeks i registered the property whichs is the subject of my site to several directories ( the property that is NOT the site/link to the site) however one or two of these directories do allow a link to the website) i was extremly gutted at first as i realised that as i had used my the same keywords when adding the listing to these diretoires as i used for the website - the directories instantly pushed my site down several places as they entereed my serps in good positions. however as these directory pages know became "direct competition"(as they entered my serps due to my keywords being in there) perhaps the fact they were linking to my site gave this sudden boost. - hmmm - i think i may have to submit the property to more sites in that case! as for the backlinks DP and web CEO have defintiely reporteed an increase from the last time i checked (week and a half ago approx.)
Yeah, I haven't seen any back link movement either. I'm still stuck on the same number for 3 months now; and I've probably doubled my incoming links in that span of time. Looks like google is actually moved back a day. I was at 64 for a word the other day (home decorations); I'm back ~75 today, where I was middle of last week - but still up from nowhere a month ago, so I'm not too upset.
I ran an informal experiment a few months back on outbound links to authority sites. I have a search engine news section on my home page which has links to almost every major search engine and directory, so I changed those to javascript links which could not be read by the spiders and waited two months with no discernable change in rankings. Put the same links back in html and waited again two more months with again no discernable change in rankings. Not definitive, perhaps but good enough to show me that they are not major ranking factors. Now for those of you who thinks you have to wait longer than that to see results, I have run other tests where I put nonsense words in various places in my code, and within a week those words (at least the ones in locations which the search engines use for ranking) were ranking on Google.
I agree that SE's will pick up on new words within quite a short amount of time - the comment i made though was that the only chang i had really made was aimng my reciprocals at my serps (i started doing of doing this at the beginning of my campaing but as i "exhausted " most of the relevent ones i moved a bit further a field to general travel sites - then within the last week i moved back to more relevant serps -and out of thos i don't know of any i would consider authority siotes which have yet reciprocated. - as for the outgoing links having effect - i beleive what you say wil - and i especially can't see how they could effect my index page when ther linking out from my link pages. (incidently - i just decided to try and test the outgoing link theory by adding some links to what i woiuld consider important/authority sites on my index page - but no results yet ) other than the reason i described in my second post i can't really see why my results should jump so much when my linking campaign has been running at a steady speed - unless a couple of authority links from a while back suddenly were attributed more weight - it's just this combined with a couple of other peole noticing things happening in the serps that makes me think something may be about to happen (PR update?) - that and the fact were drawing near to the end of the month..
While I can't give you scientific proof of it, a couple here (Foxy, I and others have commented on it in the McDar thread) have seen increases when adding OBLs. I had a page stalemate at 14 and got it up to #5 now and all i did was link to the manufacturer of that particular product on that page with the optimized KW being the product name. It gets hundreds of searches a month and has plenty of competition. This OBL has been the only thing I've altered in months. It is not the homepage. The homepage's PR has stayed the same but I did get more links to the homepage. Not to this page though. Hence my opinion that this could have been the reason he say ranking changes.
I'm with tops... I have seen exactly the same thing... Not linking to the index page of sites thoug, but when linking to articles on authority sites which are closely related to the subject I am trying to target. I then saw fairly substantial jumps in the SERP's for the keywords I was trying to target. Hilltop in effect...