Carl’s SEO & Web Design Blog

Well, the latest Google dance is stabilizing. What did it do to your PageRank? More important, what did it do to your positioning on your keyword phrases and what did it do to your site traffic? Did it hurt or help you?

If your site dropped in the rankings, remember that Google is really trying to improved the quality of the returned results on searches. If you dropped in ranking 0r positioning, the chances are it’s because you are spamming the search engines or either you made some changes in your site that affected your ranking. Here is a quick checklist to run through:

1. Be sure you aren’t using keyword stuffing. You can spam this way by using primary keyword phrases too much on a page OR by using the same keyword phrase as the anchor text (visible text) on too many of your incoming links. Also, avoid using hidden text or cloaking.

2. Be sure sure your pages have lots of text. Splash screens are murder on search engine positioning. Your home page should have 300-400 words of text.

3. Search engines can’t see image links or JavaScript links. Flash links don’t work too well, either. Even if the search engines can read a Flash link, it won’t use the link to help your position much if any. They also don’t like redirects.

4. Search engines can’t use dynamic links; that is, URLs with special characters in them.

5. Be sure all the code on your pages is valid. Some code errors can prevent indexing.

6. Be sure you aren’t linking to any sites that are spamming the engines. Don’t link to link farms and similar types of sites. Be sure when you do reciprcal links, that you are only reciprocating with sites that directly related to your topic. With a directory, you site should be in a section of the directory that relates to your topic or location. If you haven’t made changes in your site, this is more likely the problem for a lost ranking.

7. Be patient. During a Google dance, your PageRank and position may go up and down. Give Google some time. Also, if you are a new site Google generally won’t rank you too well for several months. There are some ways to defeat this (see our book); but this is the general strategy.

For more information, get the latest version of our book.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Google, Search engine optimization, Internet Marketing and Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.