Hi, One of our client's web site has ecommerce website whose pages are dynamically generated from one global page template. This template has Five areas/sections designed with <div> tags. Everything was working great and fine since last 26th dec update from google. and since than he is constantly loosing trafic and SERPs for his major two words keywords for which he was coming top since last 3 -4 yrs. After through analysis i found that the global page template was such designed that it might have give problem to google in this update. He has five sections 1)Top 2)Left 3)Center 4)Right 5)Bottom If we think in terms of table then the Top section should render first and the left and then center and then right and lastly bottom. And thats what we see. But his <div> sections are such designed that his section was rendered first and then the rest, which seems to be good in terms of SEO technique but google might not have liked it any more. so what i was asking do you think if i change the <div>'s back to the normal standard and render the section as we can see it might help him to come up again. Please let me know what u think thanks vicky
Hi, No this is not spam and has been used for years by the more professional seo's. Now it seems that everyone is using it. It was a real big thing last year in the US.
they why is my client being penalized. I have checked his competitors and the only thing which my client is doing different is this layout only .
hi kh7, no site is not new it is 6 yrs old with Pr5 and was doing great till dec.... I would like to express that i think it is normal seo technique which everyone is following..why i suspect this is because the client who is got affected by this 26 dec changes is the only one in his industry, rest all are ok and doing great after that update. And the only think what my client has different from them apart from content is the rendering data to google or browser. So what you see is not what u actually get. What actually you see is top section and then left ,center,right and lastly bottom but what u actually get was center,top,left,right and bottom, he is sounds bit spammythought it is not. What i would like to know from you guys over here is that..is anyone else following same rendering pattern as of my client and is anyone of you feel that u r penalized for this rendering technique. hope to get response from you all thanks vicky
I just don't see how that's possible. Do you think Google will manually review these sites? How can an algorithm decide which order blocks of content should go in? There are many, many, many legitimate reasons for moving content around with divs...
hi thetafferboy83 , i think google is smart enought to know read css and know how we are presenting data as per my knowledge.. thanks, vicky
Whether Google is smart enough or not, it makes no sense to give more weight to content found earlier in the document. Why would it? See this article: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3624222 "Some designers will use CSS to position content first in html thinking it helps with rankings (it doesn't)"
Vicky might have a point , i was going to post and say that Google didnt read CSS but according to Matt Cutts - Its possible - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-unwise-comments/ But this seems more around using css to hide text... Ive seen the method of showing content before nav all around the web and seems to be the best method ....for now
if you want to know how Google sees your site try this search. Type in cache:www.yourdomainnamehere.com and it will show Googles cached copy of your website, now at the top where it says Google blah blah, theres a link called 'Cached text'. Click that and bingo! that's what Google sees
That's not how google sees your site - that's how it caches the site, but without the images and colors. What it sees (for the serps, which is all that counts) is just the order of the text as one would see it if one were to look at the site in a text-editor. Anyhow: this is the first I've heard of the order of the text being changed for the SE's and that in itself impacting the place in the serps negatively. So I'd be very hesitant to say that this is what's causing it. I'd look for other reasons like: - did the filenames change? - did the subject of the site change? - did significant sites that linked to you suddenly stop linking to you - did the competition gain more (relevant) links than your client's site did in the past year? - are the sites that link to your client in some way less 'trustworthy' then the people that link to their competition? - did they optimize for keywords better? We know that google is intent on looking at hidden text, and will perhaps already look at CSS for that purpose. But since you are not hiding text, that should not be your issue.
I disagree.. Most of Google's SEO algorithm looks for things directly related to user experience.. Surely the content of a page (even for user reasons) would be indicated at the top of a page? This should give you a clear indication on what the page is about. Also, if you have a particulary large page with a load of junk code in it, googlebot can just give up and drop it if it can't make head nor tail of it. I'm not saying you're wrong, however I can see from a user point of view why this would work, so I'll keep designing this way.. Doesn't take any extra effort really and it may well work, theories aside nobody can conclusively tell me it doesn't - so I don't see why somebody should advise me not to do it.
Hi Taff, Well first of all I'm not advising you not to do it. I'm just sayiing it's pointless. Maybe, maybe not. But if we are talking about my user experience, as a listener I don't attribute more value to the first x% that a speaker says or the first x% of an article I read. I read the whole article and derive its meaning on things other than content placement. So if search engines are trying to mimic my user experience, they won't assign more weight to content occurring earlier. That's just my take on it. And the guy who I quoted (but I don't know who exactly said it at the conference).
It's an old trick, and I know it has worked in the past. Seems that the quicker you get to the point on a page, the better the ranking, and this trick does just that. I call it the Delorie Method, it's the first place I saw it years ago. (Check out http://www.delorie.com/web/ses.cgi too.) I can't see Google penalizing for it, particularly when using divs and css. I could see them compensating for it. But I really doubt that is your problem. Look for someone duplicating your content, or a proxy site picking up your content and feeding it to the crawlers.
That's because you sit and listen to a speaker all the way though, people scan websites for information. You don't read a webpage from start to end if you can't immediately see the information you want. It's just behaviour matching.
what's the client's url? I'm sure that the layout is not the reason your client's site is dropping. It could be that his competition is doing better seo than he is. Or he has something on his site that Google just devalued so his site is dropping. I've been seeing this kind of thing on sites that exchange links. It seems that with every update, google and yahoo devalue link exchanges. If you post the url we would be able to offer more precise help else this is all speculation for nothing.
In my example I am the search engine that attributes weight to certain pieces of information, not the public who read your web page. If I then go and give the information to someone else, they are analogous to the people who scan websites for information. My job (the search engine's) is to extract the information from the speaker (the web page) and give it to someone else. I'm the search engine again - If I attended 3 different seminars on the same subject and made notes with a view to giving notes from only one of them to a colleague, I wouldn't let position of the speaker's content affect my judgement on what the 'best' information was. The search engine's job isn't to second guess the intended recipient's behaviour, it's to determine the meaning the communicator is giving.