My site ranks well on MSN and Yahoo, but is nowhere to be seen on Google. I’ve done everything for it to rank well, but Google refuses to list me.
Or
I used to rank well for my industry key phrases, but 3 months ago my ranking on Google went awol. I just can’t get back in their index. What can I do?
If your site suddenly disappears from the search engine listings, it is usually because you have violated one of their (sometimes unwritten) codes of conduct. Either text was hidden or hard to read, the links pointing at your site have been reclassified as ‘extremely ‘spammy’ or you’ve done some naughty (ip cloaking, javascript redirects, etc,) and you’ve been reported by your competitor. If that is the case, all you can do is rebuild your site in a search engine compliant way, and wait until they lift the ban on your site. For smaller sites, this can take an eternity.
If you swear hand on heart that you have attempted nothing to deceive the search engines, then there are a few other reasons why your listing might have disappeared / dropped:
New sites are constantly emerging and maturing, and old sites compete with you by hiring their own SEO marketers. There is bound to be some upheaval in the rankings and in light of the intensified competition, you might need to invest more time and effort in maintaining your rankings.
All major search engines have been tweaking their algorithms quite a bit over the last year, and that has caused some shifts in the appreciation of relevancy of sites and their subsequent rankings. You might have used certain SEO techniques that artificially kept you high up in the search engines, but now that Google has depreciated this technique, you’ve dropped like a stone. Changes in the search engine algorithms are happening faster and more elaborately as the industry is maturing, competing harder and has greater wealth to buy new technologies.
In all fairness, if you are a small brand and don’t have a large amount of relevant back links and you want to rank well, you will need to use a ‘content structuring’ techniques (= tags, journalistic writing structure, content hierarchy, etc.) that help identify your key content. Even big brands are still well advised to take these techniques to heart, but have more freedom to ignore them. You will always be in danger that Google develops a smarter algorithm that depends less on identifying the most important content (e.g. by looking at the title tag first) and instead has an improved syntax algorithm that puts the emphasis even more on a certain style of content.
Therefore, never rely on a few keyword phrases alone for your business. Cast a wide net, so that you remain visible in the search engines, even if you lose your ranking for some of your important keywords. Just rebuild your pages for those keywords through my tried and tested methodology, and opt for a PPC campaign in the main time.
Also: don’t panic if you loose some of your keyword phrase rankings; you might be gaining elsewhere. When the words you rank for change, be sure to consult your analytics tool: has your overall conversion rate improved? Has your traffic really plummeted or did the contrary happen? Use at least two months data since your new ranking structure and analyse whether it was a curse or a blessing – and whether you want to change existing pages or create new pages to re-conquer your position in the search engines for your lost keyword phrases.
If you have the time and the money, you can diversify the ways you try to target the search engines, by building alternative pages for the same product, perhaps in different categories. Or allow for a discussion board at the bottom of the product page, and allow users to generate content for you. Users naturally talk in the language they search with. Create a mini-site for each of your key products, and have it be an alternative way of your site being found. Make sure that you have a strong reciprocal linking with the mother site, so that no link juice goes lost, and emphasise your link building on the mother site, while generating buzz in the press and the blogs to point at your mini-site – have marketing create a new angle for the mini-site every 6 months, and generate new buzz, perhaps through competitions.
As always, cast a wide net, reinvest your profits, and keep growing your SEO strategy in the most diverse matter. This will ensure that your SEO will remain the goose that lays the golden eggs, if not always for the same old keywords. However, if your SEO strategy is sound and mature, it will become harder over time to lose your ranking for the key phrases most relevant to you.
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Here is a comment (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/boston-pubcon-2006-day-1/#comment-22227) from Matt Cutts of Google dated April 18, 2006 on his blog:
IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address. Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.
IP delivery includes things like "users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr". This is fine-even Google does this.
It's when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebo...
We have been told that IP delivery would be the right SEO strategy by our consultant. But when I looked this up, I found out that his suggestion is actually an illegal strategy called IP cloaking?
What should I do?...
The "best" keyword depends on the following main factors:
1.) The amount of traffic it will generate.
2.) The difficulty of attaining a top ranking.
3.) The profitability of that keyword.
In this answer I will address each point and give recommendations on tools to use to help you in your assessment.
The Amount of Traffic it Will Generate
Often people choose keywords based on how popular they think they may be. Mostly it is based on "real world" factors rather then fact which is readily availa...
You should place your keywords in the following positions:
• Title tag.
• H1 and H2.
• In paragraphs and general text on the site.
• In STRONG tags: Keyword
• In the file names of the web document: www.domain.com/keyword.html
• ALT description attributes on image tags:
• TITLE attributes on anchor tags:
• SUMMARY attributes on tables:
• In the file names of images: ...
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