My sites are 1 month - 1 month and half old and I'm trying to rank them for a couple keywords. they both finished google dance about 2 weeks ago. site # 1 was top 40 for main keyword and top 8 for second keyword. Site # 2 was top 20 for both keywords. First site mantained for a few days and second got to #14 for both keywords. However for the past week and a bit more my sites are fked up for no reason. Site # 1 top 36 for main keyword (got to #20 before.) and top #12-18 for second keyword when it was #7-8 2 weeks ago. Site # 2 top 20-25 for main keyword and not in top 250 for second keyword. Both of them dropped for NO reason. I have been getting 5-10 backlinks per day (atleast ahrefs are finding 5-10 everyday) and they just keep dropping. I optimized my site , the keywords are now between 1.8-2.7% and they are in H1 , H2 , H3 Title , Desc and both my pages got over 400 words atleast in homepage. 50% Dofollow links , 50% Nofollow links to mantain balance. Anchor text very diversified main keyword is only 10-15% second 10% and then generic anchors. 70% And still they are not going up in rankings... N#1 in rankings/competitor from my main site has 60 fucking backlinks 40 dofollow 20 nofollow and it gets 1-3 backlinks per month and its top 1 while I got 700!!! WHAT THE FUK IS THIIIIIIS?
You're either still Google dancing or your competition's doing as good a (or a better) job, IMHO. One of my sites was #1 for keywords for ages, then suddenly did a wiggle, disappeared totally, came back, disappeared again... There's always a reason for a drop. 99% of the time you just can't see what it is because you don't have all the variables. And by the way, SEO has simply changed. The old techniques don't work like they used to with Google any more. It's no longer a simple case of keyword density and backlinking - there are other factors like quality, authority, bad link profiles, author ranking and loads of other things. (And it's painful.)
Funny, you mention all this stuff like it is a formula you can follow and nothing about content. Did you ever think that maybe his site is just a better site and that all the formula crap like you showed us here is not the end all be all of websites?
Well, your site is not the only one in business. Remember, there are few millions another players on field trying to win the same game
A) Your sites are, by your own admission, a month and a half old. B) You experienced a ranking drop a week ago, don't jump the gun. C) SEO is not a 45 day task, it's on going. D) If you haven't already realised by the tone of my post, SEO is most certainly NOT dead. WebDev
Your site is new, and google considers the age of the site as a ranking factor. You can overcome it, but it will certanly not happen in a month.
And you want to claim SEO is dead on that basis? First lesson - SEO is not instant results. There is always a reason. Getting how? Paying, building them yourself? From where? You optimised and this is your first problem. You're optimising for search engines. As browntwn mentioned, what about content? Firstly, H tags make such a negligible difference. It's not one of the "important" on-page factors. More important is your content. Written for humans. Meta description - again, this is for humans (did you write it for them?), it's your sales pitch and encouragement to click through in search results. Title is important - especially for humans, it's another sales pitch chance. Was it written for humans? Content length is not important, but the quality of content. As an example: very good text can be short: it's to the point, informative, well-written and not stuffing in content just for the sake of having a longer piece of text. It's written for humans. The keyword density bit is another myth; the importance is the content is well-written and interesting for humans. When content is well-written, you'll often find the keywords aren't used that much, but always in a natural way. Now, keyword stuffing is a different matter entirely, so don't get confused between the two. Again, you're doing something for search engines. You're really answering my earlier question - you're building the links yourself. Again, it's all just like a maths formula. Your whole process is about search engines and not humans. Do you understand why yet? Forget about your offsite junk and focus on your content. The Google updates and algorithm are about ranking good content, not ranking some SEOs optimisation formula. I'm not surprised you're outranked.
Excellent point. WHERE you are getting your links is the most important thing to note. Not all backlinks are created equal. If you're getting backlinks from directories or STD (spammed to death) websites then that's probably a big part of your problem. What's the PR of the pages (not the domain) that are linking to your website? What type of content is on the pages that are linking to your website? Relevant, high PR links are the most powerful links you can aquire. I recommend scrapping every other type of backlinking you are doing and set a goal to find these types of links. Guest blog posts (providing that the blog has PR1+) are a great way to get good links, as well as buying PR links. The more relevant the content is to your website, the better; and the higher the PR of the page that's linking to you, the better. It's not just about building links anymore, that old SEO trick IS dead. It's about getting high quality links. This is totally inaccurate. H1 tags still have a huge role in on-site optimization. I've ranked web pages for keywords with nothing more than a h1 tag and 1 paragraph of text. I totally agree that you should write for humans, but H tags do make a big difference.
HX can help with presentation/document structure (so can CSS, though), but in terms of "SEO benefit" it's very negligible (compared to content, title, anchor text, alt text, etc). And again this just comes down to over-optimisation (getting H tags in there for the sake of it). The content is by far more important than trying to do every "SEO trick in the book".
I don't know I think I'd be very interested in seeing proof to back this up. And I'm not trying to challenge you on this or anything - you seem to know what you're talking about so I'm sure you've tested this and found it to be the case. I understand the need for good content and the whole over-optimization thing, but I can say for certain that when I evaluate a website for SEO, one of the first things I do is look at the meta title, meta description, Heading text (if any), and image alt and title tags. Usually by fixing one or all of those four on-page factors I can get them a better ranking right off the bat. Times like this I wish I documented everything, but I'm sure I can think of a case or two where getting the keyword into an H1 tag has made the difference. I am sure to go out and test this now just to prove to myself that it's right, lol.
Buy a crappy domain (or two) that no-one has registered and try it, mate. Just make sure the domain name and keywords are random gibberish. Compare the benefit of H1, H2, H3 vs title, anchor text, etc. Or alternatively you could just change one of your existing sites from H1 to <span> (for example) and watch whether it tanks (or not). If you're correct, then it should massively tank in rankings. I've done this in the past by accident when changing themes in Wordpress a few times and finding up to a few months later that the post pages don't use a H1 for the post headings (no drops in rankings noticed, though).