4 replies to this topic

[gstark]

Howdy,

I think I may have done something very bad for a good customer.

I have been working with several of my ecommerce customers for years to get and keep them on the first page of searches for their products.

One thing I did several years ago was to use some of my 'spare' domains as a way to generate links to their sites - I think there are still 8 or 10 of them - I haven't thought about them for a while - maybe even a couple of years. They weren't egregious... maybe 20 links total, and one page even calls them 'Sites We Promote In Search Engines'.

I also got in the habit of re-submitting whenever we added a new product etc. to one of their sites and of re-submitting monthly in general. In fact there is a log where each re-submission is tracked by date for each site. It used to be that missing a month caused an immediate drop in traffic as more recently added sites seemed to 'push'our sites down. A week after re-submitting all would be well again.

I spents lots of time worrying about the keywords and tweaked them regularly to get the merchant's phrases just right (or so I thought). There is a fair amount of repetition involved - here is an example for a wheelchair page:

meta name="description" content="Wheelchairs, Folding Wheel Chair, Lightweight Wheelchairs, Portable Wheelchair, Patient Transport">

meta name="keywords" content="folding wheelchair, lightweight wheelchair, detachable arm wheelchair, Passenger Transport, Travel, Companion Wheelchairs">

TITLE>Lightweight Wheelchairs, Ultralight Wheelchairs, Patient Transport Wheelchairs, Portable Folding Wheelchair, Companion Wheelchair, Patient Mobility</TITLE>


I used the alt tag on the page header graphic for yet another repetition of the keywords as in:
alt="Lightweight Wheelchairs, Ultralight Wheelchair, Patient Transport Wheelchair, Portable Wheelchairs, Companion Wheelchairs, Folding Wheel Chair, Patient Mobility"

Finally, I recently added H1 and H2 tags to the product category pages (I hadn't used them in years), and tweaked the cart code to use the product description in the dynamically generated page titles.

So, given that I was using every trick I could learn to achieve decent rankings (page one is the goal), and given that the wheelchair page mentioned was steady in the top dozen for more than a year - maybe two - and is now on page 14 for 'wheelchairs' and none of my pages show up in backlinks, I am pretty sure I crossed some boundry and I am being whacked.

Sigh... I never did any of the obviously unethical things one could do, just tried to figure out what kind of candy the spiders liked to slurp so I could feed them better.

What do you think and what should I do for my customer now? Does anybody have any real info on what causes penalization by Google?

Thanks,

GStark

[Jill]

Welcome, gstark!

I would simply delete those alt tags and you'll probably be fine.

Jill

[qwerty]

I do think you're overusing the words "wheelchair" and "wheelchairs" in that title tag, but I don't think it would get you penalized.

[Scottie]

One thing I did several years ago was to use some of my 'spare' domains as a way to generate links to their sites - I think there are still 8 or 10 of them - I haven't thought about them for a while - maybe even a couple of years. They weren't egregious... maybe 20 links total, and one page even calls them 'Sites We Promote In Search Engines'.

This may be causing it. It is very likely that Google is changing the way it looks at links. If you don't have other incoming links, it is likely that your cross-linking has been discounted. It's not a penalty as much as a loss of relevance. Get rid of those extra sites and work on some quality incoming links.

I also got in the habit of re-submitting whenever we added a new product etc. to one of their sites and of re-submitting monthly in general. In fact there is a log where each re-submission is tracked by date for each site. It used to be that missing a month caused an immediate drop in traffic as more recently added sites seemed to 'push'our sites down. A week after re-submitting all would be well again.

This may not hurt, but I doubt it is helping. Who are you submitting to every month and what are you submitting?

Welcome to the forum!

[gstark]

Thanks for the welcomes,

I used to submit to lots of search engines, but now it's just Google, AV, and AllTheWeb. I add new sites to DMoz of course, but that's it.

Thanks for the advice - I will remove the Alt tags.