I'm still seeing depressing results for my site which previoulsy held very good rankings for a large number of keywords in G. As much as I hate yahoo and other SE's, they are my only hope currently. In G, I'm lucky if they show up in the top 100. I was just wondering if anyone has been able to figure out, at least to some degree, what changed with Google and what should be done to get back up in the serp's? It's especially frustrating when sites that do not appear to be nearly as relevant show up so much higher on many of the kw/s. It's gotten to the point where I've actually considered 'black hat' techniques to get back up in the serps. I hope someone can show me that the way of the 'white hat' really is the way to go.
Just sit down and wait. There really isn't anything we can do. Don't do any drastic changes, or you will just mess up your ranks at MSN and Yahoo and then you will really be screwed.
Nope, I have pretty much taken a wait and see posture just I did back durring the Florida update. I have gone in and cleaned up several titles and descriptions that were pretty weak. I'm mainly curious if anyone has found any new techniques for getting back in the serps as they currently stand?
I normally read your posts as well as other respected DP members for help with my own rankings. Before implementing changes suggested on this board and adding the COOP, my site ranked top 20 and with all of your suggestions for most(50+%) of my key phrases I rank 1st. I am even starting to rank top 10 for some medium competitive keywords. I hope that things turn around for you. Sorry I dont have any great advice or answers for you. Worst comes to worst I would start over with a new domain on a different ip and create a mirror site while maintaining your current site. This way within a decent time period you can start getting back your G serps. Keep the name the same just under an alternative domain name. I know it will be a pain in the ass but at the same time you can keep tweaking things on your current domain. if possible run both under the same db so that it is more of a mirror site than anything else but atleast should get you your regular G serps. Just an idea... Sorry to hear about the turn of bad luck...
mopacfan, you need to manually check your results several times per day. I'm tracking six datacenters that are randomly rotating in Phoenix. My sites are anywhere from the top 10 to "in oblivion" depending upon whichever datacenter is displaying, and I have not seen much movement in any particular datacenter in the last week. I suspect that these are the new results and G is intentionally displaying a range of results to inject variation into the search results. Don't depend upon Shawn's Ranking and Keyword Tracker right now. I have not seen any correlation between it and actual results for about two months. I'm still watching it, but I'm getting dizzy watching the ups and downs. Shawn has indicated that it pulls results similar to a Web search, so that means the results will vary depending upon which datacenter is active.
Well I got hit on five sites I did re jig one site two weeks ago ( its now back to where it was ish ) the rest I have left and one other is back in the top ten So I Changed one - back to before the feb update (ish +/- two ) Left four - one is coming back but not to ranking before the update
I too am still feeling the rankings drop since the beginning of Feb. Most of my DP tracking graphs go up in Feb. grrrr. I do well in Yahoo! and MSN though. They are keeping us afloat. But to be fair we recently did a 301 (redirect) to our pages because we updated the entire site, so some pages are gone, some are renamed, etc. But it's been long enough to where Yahoo and MSN have updated, but with Google we are still ranking worse than before. We are just hanging in there and creating new content to show Google we are still around and keeping fresh. I hope that helps.
Juls, Thanks for the note. Up until the 3rd of February, I thought I had a pretty good grasp on how the game was played. A lot has changed since then. I've tried a few techniques with limited success. I know there are a lot of webmasters in the same boat and we're all co-misserating. That being said, even as long as I've been doind seo, I still find new things to learn from the folks around here. Thanks for everyone's input and we'll just keep bailing water till the next update.
Be patient, mopacfan. All I can say is that every single one of my keywords got wiped out on the last update. And I mean realy wiped out, not to be found even in the first 1,000 results. I now see evey keyword in the hundreds position. They are slowly moving back. May take some time, but it sure is refreshing being able to find your keywords at googlerankings.com again
I had mostly improved serps for our KWP. But I stay from doing anything extreme, just slow and steady. Make small changes and add some pages for 'fresh' content weekly. get a few BL weekly