Site in question: www.iconrate.com is about 2 years old, has pretty strong links but in and out of google (serp ban at yahoo), and does pretty good in msn. Yesterday I believe it was, I went from ranking for only two keywords in google to not ranking for anything.. not even ranking top 50 on most dcs for 'iconrate'. Did I trip a filter or is this the beginnings of a ban? site:domain.com shows 47,000 pages, 95% of them have not existed in over a year and a half but still in the index. One week before jagger they disappeared and I ranked VERY well that week but then jagger came and it was demolished. Just started ranking well and now hit again. What am I doing wrong someone please tell me Thanks to anyone who can help..
Iconrate, I already wrote a long answer to this before clicking post and realising that I was no longer signed in I'm too lazy to type the whole thing again so here is my long and probably bloody boring post in a nutshell. 1. Titles: this is one of the most important and effective areas of SEO. You should be using your most important keywords first and doing so on every page, tailored to that page. Not Iconrate AIM and Buddy Icons but AIM and Buddy Icons. Same with product pages - not Iconrate AIM and ... but Anime buddy icons etc. 2. I also note that at least on the ANIMAL page you have used the same descriptive phrase over and over ... animal buddy icons from iconrate. Even if this was a highly searched term, you'd be skating on thin ice because the overuse of the term may trigger a spam filter. Much better to throw a wider net and catch more relevant terms ... cute duck icon, grumpy monkey AIM buddy, bonking horse AIM buddy or whatever. 3. Your competitors seem to be optimising for emotion as well as the actual graphic. For example funny icon brings in a gazillion SERPS but I don't actually see this aspect of buddy icons used much on your site. love buddy is another one with over 6 million results but I am not recommending you jump in there and try to compete with that. Rather find tighter niches (patriotic buddy icons had only 114,000 results) and work to OWN those sectors. Then work from your success. Best of luck with it. I must admit to knowing nada about this whole buddy thing so if any of what i have just said sounds intensely stupid, just ignore it and wait for the next poster.
First of all sorry about not being signed in, I've done that before. Thanks for answering my post with some very good tips. I will implement probably all of what you've said and take into consideration the other serp areas to target. I now see many areas where the site is lacking and look forward to making the changes (though seems it's a little late as far as filters go). The idea behind 'iconrate aim icons' in titles was based on what I'd seen matt cutts explain as proper titles and also how his wp blog is setup. But I see your point and will have to spend some time adjusting those. Again thanks, and I will reply later on.
Well, missing from my original post was that you had a PR5 which would certainly not indicate a ban. I never looked into your link popularity compared to your competitors but that might be another area to look at. You know, it has happened to me too when I have been coasting along doing fine and then been hit by a weirdo google update. jagger got me good. I was down to about 30% traffic after that but I followed good advice on this forum and hung tight - adding content but not changing content or SEO to much. Jagger settled down and my site recovered and soared past where it was before. Too often we are so sensitive to what the big G is playing at that we don't give the latest algo a chance to settle in and be tweaked back to reality. Don't worry about bans or filters, just work on improving what you have.
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