Does anyone seem to know any of the latest changes google has made in its Algo? I lost rankings completely, and then they came back.. but they are not as good as they once were. Anyone know what they are now stressing / penalizing for?
Hi, You will get tonnes of replies stating only Google knows. However, I do agree with you, I had similar in Spetember, then I shot to page 1 and I have stuck there! Someone told me it's called the Google dance. All I would suggest, is keep building backlinks, social bookmarking, blog commenting and article submissions, you WILL get there in the end. Good luck.
Your rankings will change everytime your pages are indexed. They will move +- 5 positions. When your rankings change by more, then it is related to links, specifically the "quality" of the new links. In Sept, there was a major BackLink update and the PR update. It's the BL update that made the big move. If it goes down, Google will have removed links for some unknown reason. Usually, a Blog, Forum or Article source has "archived" the pages (moved them to a nofollow directory). At one time, I have over 20K links for various sources, and one day "poof", they were gone. But the ones that did stay are still there and they were from real sources not link building schemes. I'm running with ~ 5,200 now (WMT data) and Google reports 152 (Google Toolbar). My ranking doesn't move unless I have changed the OnPage SEO elements. Don't worry about this, as the quality and stability of your links increase, your ranking will also.
Nobody knows what Google is up to, especially in the short term, we can only tell you based on long term observations (except when they publicly state something).
Do you huys really think that PR is as important as it once used to be? If you are waiting for an update to get better PR, don't hold your breth. I am doing work on a white bar website for a client that gets better results than they ever have when they had pr before it was accidently not renewed on time and dropped back t godaddy's parked page for a month.
Just to let you know, 1 of my sites has increased in the SERPs to #3 on the first page, due to backlink building. I ain't interested in PR, I just want more sales...