http://www.diamonds.uk.com Hi Our site used to rank highly on G for some very competitive KWs till about 6 months ago. Now, sadly, it's not even in the top 50. The intersting thing is that it still ranks highly on MSN and Y!. I can only assume that the site is being penalized for one reaosn or another (it's not completely banned though) Having done some research, I can only think of 2 possibilities, but I do not claim to be an expert at SEO: 1) Meta KW stuffing (excessive use of certain KW) 2) I have a number of domains pointing at the same site, which I did instead of parking them (I submit and optimise just 1 domain) Everything else seems ok. I also refresh the site with new original content regularly. I am obvioulsy careful not to change too many things all at once in case I lose the rankings achived with MSN And Y!. Can anyone comment on the possibility that the 2 factors above get penalised by G (whereas MSN and Y! don't). I actually read somewhere that Meta tags are largely ignored by SE nowdays. Any other ideas/comments as to what's going on here? a puzzled Doublespresso
If you are keyword stuffing, it absolutely will not help you, and very probably is hurting you, especially on Google. MSN and Yahoo! are probably not very far behind on this, so I'd encourage you to remove any kind of spammy stuff on your pages if you want them to rank as well as they are capable of.
No one has addressed this issue. If you do a Google search for any of the domains you have pointing to main domain, do you find anything? I had a domain pointing to a page for a couple of years then someone linked to the domain name I was pointing. It appeared to me to cause us problems with our SERPs. Shannon
Thanks for that, I have now edited my original post to include the URL. @Shannon: I didn't quite understand your post... it implies that an outside site linking to you can negatively affect your SERPs? I read in G's guide to webmasters that an outside site (e.g. a competitor) in no way can negatively influnce your own ranking...
I think Shannon meant having multiple domains pointing to the same pages/text with links could trip a duplicate content/penalty.
My point is that we ultimately had same page indexed under two different URLs at the time our SERPs dropped. I still think we were hit with duplicate content problems. There are those that claim there is no such thing as duplicate content penalty. Shannon
Thanks Shannon It's interesting... in theroy, assuming a duplicate content penalty exists, a competitor can "sabotage" a successful site's ranking by registering a domain and pointing it at the competitor's site, thus triggering a duplicate content filter... Am I right?? Does anyone else have any experience on this issue?