Hi, I've been recently working on the SEO for a site called lighting-direct and we have been slowly moving down the rankings from page 1 for the lighting keyword. I reckon that the page loading time may have be a reason for this, as we rank quite popular worldwide in comparison to our competitors. I used to work on the Meta data everyday but I stopped and worked on it every other day due to the fall. I reckon that the slide show which is in JavaScript may be the cause for the slow page load, and I'm thinking of implementing flash. I would be grateful if you would be able to assist me in whether I should, 1) continue doing Meta changes daily 2) change the slides show to flash and 3) make any other changes.
It's hard to say without seeing your website but....... 1) Don't waste your time with the meta tags 2) make sure you are using lots of different anchor text to make your links look natural (this is a big one)
I think there is decent data to say load time has a much greater affect than Matt Cutts first indicated (1%). I have about 35 sites. 2 were very bandwidth intensive. Guess which sites dropped in rank just before they announced the site load time addition in the G algorithm? Those 2 sites. Dropped for page 1 to page 2 or 3 on most searches. I'm still #1 on a couple of terms, so I doubt there was some kind of penalty giving to me. Also, I never do anything Blackhat. I'm scrambling to make new clean ultra fast loading, Markup Validated templates for those sites as we speak. We'll see...
Have you been adding links? If so, how many? How many links did the site have to start with? It's possible this is just a case of the infamous Google Dance and that your site will come back in a few more days or weeks. It's frustrating, but most of us go through it at some point
1) continue doing Meta changes daily <-- please stop it!! frequent change made on meta tags will not help you and could harm your ranking instead for any Spam attempt define by Googlebots. 2) change the slides show to flash and <-- this won't help much either. Google cannot read both Java and Flash object. 3) make any other changes. - be descriptive first. What kind of change you have made? I would recommend you to focus on "quality" link building and add content as textual content, not Flash or Java as Google cannot read both object properly compared to textual content.
I second what Sxperm says. It seems to be the theme of forum. Every 20th post says "Why do I not have good rankings? or why are my rankings dropping?" The simple answer as Sxperm said is: 1. Build high quality original text based content. And keep it coming. It's better to launch a site with 100 articles and add an article a week for a year than launching a site with 152 articles. 2. When designing your site make sure to make each page unique and target one or two phrases using basic SEO techniques: I.e. Title tag, H1, Link breadcrumbs, Unique meta data. 3. Build some kind of link bait. Could be a web tool or great articles, forums, whatever adds value to the web. 4. Chase down quality links to variety of areas of your site using variety anchor text. Find sites that already link to similar content and tell them about your site. Yeah, we solved about 2,000 posts on the board. Yes, there are little things you can do outside of this, but this is the solid plan for great rankings. Outside of penalties and banning, we said it all.
See if you have a penalty or ban. Sounds like a penalty. Go back through everything and see if you did any black hat stuff.
This will give you the basic idea: seopenalty dot com If you do. Make changes and do a reconsideration request.