Rogue Glass

Serps Rankings Dropping?

This question is from another member and was part of his introductory thead, however, I have moved it to it's own thread to make it easier to reply to.

Why am i here?

Well, my wife started selling maternity clothes on eBay a few years ago (after our first child, and the shock of how much maternity clothes cost), this then turned in to a website designed and hosted by Firepages. We then started on a steep learning curve and the term SEO kept poping up. After a few years we thought we had it cracked we got our web site www.affordablematernity.co.uk up to 4th in Google for our choosen keyword of "maternity clothes" and all was rosey and it was time to sit back.

Oh what a shock we had, the wheels fell off depending on the day, we can be any where between 5th and 35th on Google, sales have dried up and I then lost my proper job. So when we need this business to carry over this sticky patch, the sales have dropped off.

Google moves us about daily 7th yesterday 31st today.

So I need to learn whats changing and what i need to do.

I am looking forward to the challenge ahead and would like to thank you in advance for any help and tips offered.

New Users - Read This...

Hi there,

Welcome to the forum. To stop spam on this forum we have a few extra steps to complete your registration.

1. Post an introduction in this forum by clicking "New Topic / New Thread"

That's it.

N.B. If you cannot post in this forum, please email us.

contact {[[AT]}] seotactics [([dot})} org.

We're sure you can work that out.

Google Analytics Search Engine Recognition

Google Analytics now recognises the following "Search Engines":

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN
• Lycos
• Ask
• Altavista
• Netscape
• CNN
• Looksmart
• About
• Mamma
• Alltheweb
• Gigablast
• Voila
• Virgilio
• Live
• Baidu
• Alice
• Yandex
• Najdi
• AOL
• Club-internet
• Mama
• Seznam
• Search
• Wp
• Onet
• Netsprint
• Google.interia
• Szukacz
• Yam
• Pchome

If this is not enough for you then you can add custom search engines by following this article:

How can I make Google Analytics identify additional search engines in the Referral reports?

10 Seo Tools List

Here is a list of 10 SEO tools...

Happy reading!

http://www.acuitydesigns.net/10-great-free...-and-resources/

Seo Link Building Techniques

A. Directory submission

I wouldn't bother with any directory submissions apart from the big ones Dmoz, Yahoo, BOTW etc. Directories now flood the web and often carry no weight. (If you can pick up 3000 back links from submitting info or paying somebody $25 to do automated submission is it really worth it?)

Also a lot of the directories break Google's Terms & Conditions, bad neighbourhood, non cached pages the list is endless.[/quote]

They can be part of bad neighbourhoods, but as long as you don't link back - it will have no real adverse effect on your rankings and therefore could only be the possibility of positive results.

B. Search engine submission

Don't bother, Google will spider your page from simply submitting your sitemap to Google webmasters tools. (submitting to 300 search engines packages are pointless.)

To have your site spidered by Google & Yahoo! very qucikly, join a forum and contribute with a link to your website in your singature or the footer of your reply post. Don't bother with the submission url, Google will only spider and index your website when they are ready. But if they find you via standard organic means, they will spider you straight away.

C. Link Building

Link building? Is very difficult these days and why spam is on the increase. If you buy a house worth £300k would you want to move it to a different estate with houses worth 90k? Doing that would decrease the value. Get links by posting good quality content people then link to you.

Also, don't carelessly buy incomming links - If the website you buy links from gets court for selling them, you will be penalised too.

D. social network

Watch out on this one. It's been mentioned that google might be checking this reducing the weight they carry. As a user of Digg I always get requests to Digg something for a friend. This is why low quality topics are hitting the first page.

It is true that if you have 3 links from the same website and all three pages have an equal PR of say 3, then each link carries less weight the more links on that website and they all calculate up to a link factor of 1. Therefore one link from the highest PR page on a website is equivalent to 200 links equally spread accross the website.

E. forums posting

A signature wouldn't go a miss but spamming is a no no. Make sure you actively contribute, not just post here and there.

F. blog comment posting

Due to all the spam it's become a funny thing. Instead of using your anchor text as your name take part, visit often and contribute to the post. You will have more chance of building a relationship with the author this might lead to a guest post or even a mention to your site.

However, High profile blog replies are rel="nofollow". This doesn't mean that links will carry absolutely no weight, but every other outgoing link from that page will recieve more link juice than yours. - Therefore only post replies if you are genuinely contributing otherwise you are wasting your time.

G. RSS submission

RSS submission is essential. Particulary if you have a news feed.

H. Article Submission

So many people neglect this aspect of SEO. Research shows that Google (not Yahoo!) gives more weight to inline anchor links than stand alone anchor links. This means that a link in this paragraph is better than the link below because it is more natural.

SEO Forum <- This link is not natural - it is explicitly designed as a link.

So as you can appreciate, an article is a much more natural form of linking and it's 'True Content' therefore Google treats it as such.

Just look at some Wikipedia pages for a prime example - and Google loves Wikipedia!