One of my sites used to show up around the 5th or 6th SERP on google for its main search term "venture capital". Then one day about a year ago it just disappeared from the index. A month later it returned but at around the 90th SERP. For the next few months it worked its way up to 35th and then finally sank back to around the 85th SERP. (Using googlerankings.com) If you were to look at the site antiventurecapital.com it's tightly focussed around "all things venture capital" including a free directory of about 500 venture capital sources. BTW, the site does well on Yahoo (6th or so) and the other search engines. To quote Ed Grimley, "It's making me mental." What the hell is going on? To pour salt on the wound many of the sites in the first 10 SERPS are really crappy.
Welcome to the world of google. Did you link to a bad neighborhood? Did you buy a bunch of links at one time? Anything that Google would consider spammy? But then again many on this board think google is just !@#$ up so maybe your site got screwed over but venture capital is a pretty competitive term.
Nope, I didn't do anything funny at all. Here's the irony. My philosophy is give the visitor a ton of free stuff so that they spend some time on the site and maybe even return. Because I sell a proprietary startup manual I can afford to give away for free all the stuff my competitors try to sell like VC directories, legal documentation, etc. Yet G still screws me like this. The number one site on my key word is an old dinosaur which hasn't changed much since 1996. This site has nothing for free. They try to nickle and dime the visitor to death. But being Korean War vintage they have 10,000 incoming links. So, they are sitting pretty atop the rankings.
Did something happen to you that we dont know about? Any reason you run yahoo ads instead of google ads? 104 pages linking to you per google - that isnt very good. Outside of that, I really don't know what to add.
I can't think of anything that happened except for a rebuild of the site around then. I switched to a new page template and added many more pages. As for running Yahoo ads, I switched over because my per-click earnings plummeted with adsense to the point where it wasn't worth the bother anymore. Yahoo pays a lot more.
Two months ago I could have told you exactly what you needed to do. Right now, ugh. Google is playing around with things. It may take a few months before anyone can tell you what changes you need to make. Things need to settle down and we need some time to chew on the results. Right now the serps are very fluid and inconsistant. More incoming links is pretty easy though. No matter what google ends up doing, that is always going to be a part of the recipe.
Yes, but isn't link building a lot tougher in the new millenium? There are two factors at play here: 1) Those that already gots aren't interested in sharing. 2) The rest just have link fatigue. They suspect that it's no longer worth the bother. (I have even heard that G penalizes both sites when to link back to one another.) Back in the 1990s everyone was interested in trading links. These days websites ranked 1,253,785th by Alexa can't be bothered to trade links with you.
I noticed a number of your pages are Supplemental in G, IMO due to too much duplicate content. Try putting in quotes "The Smart Startup Guide is the entrepreneurial equivalent" in G and you'll see what I mean.
Perhaps, but if it was easy, everyone would be in the top ten. Just depends on how bad you want it. As for your other comments, no so. Those that are up - fight to stay there; google doesn't penalize link trades (may not be as highly valued as before); and besides, link trading is not the only way to gain incoming links.
So last night after I checked dmaoz and discovered my the site in question was longer listed. Per-maybe-haps that explains the drop in ranking? I hadn't checked my dmoz status in years. I just assumed that it stayed in there forever once accepted.
I'm not sure what "supplemental" means in this context. I did as you said and got two hits. Both are for my site. The second one can look a bit decieving because it's an affiliate hoplink to my site.