42 replies to this topic

[Pushe]

FWIW, we did name it (in another thread) and the official HRF name is "Hypodrite."  (Don't ask! )

I`ve read in couple of places that the name is "Allegra", but may be that is its local name

[torka]

I`ve read in couple of places that the name is "Allegra", but may be that is its local name 

Yep. We march to our own drummer over here at HRF.

--Torka

[Jill]

What do you guys suggest should I tweak it or continue to wait.

Impossible to say.

Do you feel your page is the best it can be for your users? (The on-the page stuff.) Would changing it make it worse or better (again for your users).

If you see changes you could make that you feel might enhance your search rankings, that will also enhance your users experience, then it certainly never hurts to make them.

If by changing anything it will do the opposite, then it may not be as good of an idea.

[Argos]

If you see changes you could make that you feel might enhance your search rankings, that will also enhance your users experience, then it certainly never hurts to make them. 

If by changing anything it will do the opposite, then it may not be as good of an idea.

Well lets put this way if I change I am quite sure I will get higher ranking for this new update but if google would decide to go back to the one before update I would get less ranking than before.

My users would not get that affected, I would just do some minor changes. This site is to "honest" thats why I need to work on it little. My other sites have really gone up where I didnt think I had a chance. None of them are spammy sites but they have been tweaked for better ranking and this affected site was just done for the usability which worked fine. But if nobody can see it then maybe I have to sacrife little from the usability.

The only thing is if this will be lasting or will it go back to the oldway then I would just leave as it is.

[Jill]

Sounds like a no-brainer that you should change it then. If they go back, you can always go back too, right?

What makes you so sure your changes will make a difference?

[Argos]

Sounds like a no-brainer that you should change it then.  If they go back, you can always go back too, right? 

What makes you so sure your changes will make a difference?

Of course I am not 100% sure it will go up I presume it will go up. My other sites has gone up and I have one site I only use for testing purposes and I succeeded on that one.

What I noticed is that except the links from outside internal linking inside the site seems to be little more important now.

On my test site I just put some important keywords and linked to the first page and as soon as Google saw that its ranking went up. This is one of the examples and of course maybe I am completely wrong. I could maybe change to the old one later on but I am not sure if I would get penalty for this, so i was not planning over exagerating just "help" google to see the important keywords. But if this is considered spamming I will not do it.

[thx1138]

I too have noticed that sites with over the top internal linking have jumped ahead in the SERPS. What I mean by over the top is internal linking using anchor text that is purely designed with achieving higher ranking as opposed to helping the user.

It's a shame that Google is currently rewarding such spammy behaviour, but hopefully they'll tweak and see the error of their ways.

[Jill]

If the text in the link on your page pointing to another page of your site makes sense and just happens to use a keyword phrase, there's surely nothing wrong with that. It's how a good, usable, accessible, search engine friendly site should be designed.

If that's what you think will help, then by all means, you should go for it. Even if you don't think it would help, you should still go for it, because it sounds like it would also help your visitors. Remember, anything that helps your visitors can't be bad for the search engines.

They don't penalize you for helping your visitors. That's one thing we know for sure!

[Jill]

What I mean by over the top is internal linking using anchor text that is purely designed with achieving higher ranking as opposed to helping the user.

How do you know it's not helpful to the user? Do you have a general example? (Not a real site.)

[thx1138]

Try a search for flowers UK, take a look at the what is currently the 3rd place listing. I would categorise any internal linking that is in a miniature font or barely distinguishable colour from the background as over the top or spammy, wouldn't you?

[clanmesa]

My client's site, the official website for an actor -- is a year old now. For at least the last 3 months it has been ranked at #3. I did a link:patrickwarburton check, and several backlinks I've just confirmed are still present are *not* listed. The pagerank for the home page is 4.

The site isn't even in the first 700 results now. MY site's portfolio page linking to that site shows up, but not my client's site. If I do an allinurl, the site comes up, so I don't think I've been banned.

All I've been doing in the last few weeks is adding fresh content (he's a busy actor). To the best of my knowledge I haven't used ANY black hat SEO techniques.

My sister said she noticed the site was gone a few days ago (why she didn't let me know, I don't know...), so it's not even like it's a blip on a particular day.

I mean, this is his Official Website, and it's nowhere to be found.

I'm afraid to do anything, for fear of incurring Google's wrath. Any thoughts? I have a bunch of sites I'm designing and optimizing--two that I'm getting ready to launch, and I'd sure like to know if I'm doing something wrong

Edited by Jill, 18 February 2005 - 10:50 PM.

[Jill]

Theresa, Google only shows a small sampling of links. It's nothing to worry about. We have a very large pinned thread about this, I believe.

As to why the site doesn't show up, that's more concerning. Is some other site using your same content? Have you made recent design changes that could impede the site's spiderability? Have you changed servers, and perhaps there's a misconfiguration? Is your robots.txt file excluding the bots by mistake?

[clanmesa]

I checked the site on copyscape.com. Nope. No plagiarism. No design changes. The design has been static for months. No change in servers (that may be changing in the next few weeks, but for right now I've been with the same hosting company using the same IP addresses for about 9 months). The site is up. I have no robots.txt file on any of the pages.

!!!!

[Randy]

Hey Theresa,

Part of the problem is that you're going to be competing against some pretty authoritative sites, even though yours is the Official site. You're up against sites like Yahoo! Movies and Biz, NPR (looks like he was a guest at some time), IMDb, NetFlix, etc. Those sites all have a lot of built-in in authority.

Ranking the Official site below these may not make a lot of sense, but that's probably going to happen unless some of these very authoritative sites also link to Patrick's official site.

I wonder though if these recent moves might also be related to thing that some have mentioned about Blog sites being de-valued in the normal serps? I didn't see any blog footprints on the main page, but maybe Google has decided to extend that to anything they deem to be a "personal" site? Hard to say. I've certainly not researched it at all, so that's just a off-the-top-of-my-head question.

The only cure I can think of for the short term would be to get some of these other very authoritative sites linking to his site. It is his Official web site after all. That should be enough to get their attention I would think. And it certainly wouldn't cause any harm.

[Jill]

It is weird that you'd drop that much. (I just realized who Patrick Warburton is -- Puddy on Seinfeld...cool!)

There's nothing inherently wrong with the site, so I'm at a loss. Randy's suggestion of seeing if you can get the other fan sites to link to this official one may certainly help.

Hopefully, it's just a temporary glitch.