I'm getting frustrated with my google rankings for my main keywords. On Yahoo, I rank top five for everything. On Google, Top 100. I've seen flux- moving to the top 20- but now again back into the 90s over the last couple days. For searches of allinanchor: and allintext: I am top five on google. I have over 3,000 pages of content on the site, while all of my competitors have just a few hundred. My PR is compatible to that of 6 of the top ten. All of my catagory pages are PR4. I use H1, Bold, Italics, no JS, and still am not seeing the results I would like. Any clue why this is going on still ? I only wonder because of the climb upward then drop back down- doesn't seem like a sandbox effect type thing.
Can I assume that the site you are referring to is the site listed in your sig? Is one of the keywords wrestling shoes? How old is the site? How old are the links?
On 12th May some of my "secondary" keywords started slipping and have continued over all our sites - I have a "gut" feeling what it is but until I have further proof I will not say. Like you I have allins in the top 5 but what I find interesting is the size of your site as compared to ours and yet it is responding the same, also some of our sites are 1999 onwards so not new - Yahoo results are like yours.
I agree that Google doesn't seem to be following what we all think are the rules of good SEO. The question then becomes what rules are they following. I have one site that reported 778 backling two upgrades ago. The that was reduce to 300 and something two upgrades ago. The it was dropped to 135 on the last upgrade. What the hell is that all about? The only thing I've done in the interim is add more links, and I paid to get the site in all the top directories. The lower number of backlinks just doesn't make any sense. I managed to get this site as high as 20 or 30 for several keywords, but recently these have all backed off to 50 or 60. I have one keyword that keeps boucing in and out of top 200 hundred according to Shawn's tool. The site either deserves to be ranked well for that term or it doesn't. The relevancy of the site can't change that radically from day to today. I frankly don't know what the hell Google is doing at the moment. Can anyyone see any patterns in the sites that rank well? One interesting side light is that my best ranking site in a really competitive market uses a ton of reciprocal links. The site I described above does not use reciprocal links. Very Strange. I'd really like to know what the hell is going on.
Bob My site and all KWs are very stable. This is what I have done : > Added thousands of forum pages > Kept getting IB links of VARYING DESCRIPTION > Paid IBLs > Posting on forums > Links to inner pages OK, I have not moved up the ranking which I am really frustrated about especially when I see what is above me, but I have not moved down. Now, something really interesting. I finally got my listing into business.com 2 days ago and I added it with a really non competitive 3 word phrase (first 2 words are what I am really competing on plus another word) I MOVED UP 50+ places overnight. Seems to suggest that new links are not sandboxed Site is 3+ years
mcdar- Yes it is the one with the keyword wrestling shoes. Im still seeing a slip in the results, I just can't make any sense of it though.. Im going to try switching the anchor text in this forum and see how that effects it.
The site in its present form was created in October. The links are mostly all from within the past 3 months... Perhaps waiting it out, but the only reason I question that is because I have climbed as high as 17.
schlottke, I have read a lot of grumbling around the forums in the last week regarding sites slipping quickly down in ranking. It is hard, at this point, to discern exactly what Google has been up to most recently. To get a grasp on yet another Google switch. The experimental page in the "nice tool..." thread has experienced a similar fate as you are reporting and I think we need to gather more information from those effected similarly, to accurately evaluate what the change/changes could have been. Google is certainly a hard one to keep up with these days!
I changed the text title to read wrestling equipment now. Here is what I have noticed: My Catagories without the word wrestling in them are unaffected. Running a search for Singlets or Kneepads yields JRWrestling top 5, while a search for Wrestling Singlets or Wrestling kneepads positions me out of the top 200.
schlottke, I have checked to see where your site ranks for allinanchor: for each of these terms. wrestling singlets - #52 singlets - #4 wrestling kneepads - not found kneepads - not found. Accept for "singlets", it looks like whatever placement you are getting is due to on-page factors ONLY. You may want to work on acquiring inbound links with your targeted keywords as anchor text. I would highly advise AGAINST trying to rank the same page for all four keywords! To do so will only serve to disolve the value of you anchor text.