179 replies to this topic

[jant]

Dumb question here.
Is update Jagger finally over?

[mal4mac]

Google's searches are about finding pages on the web that are relevant to the enquirer's search

Unfortunately Google just isn't clever enough to do this in the general case. For instance, you may decide that the phrase "travel downunder" is "more poetic" than "travel to Australia". But, if you want to be found in the search engines, it would probably not be sensible to use it.

(I say probably because you can never guess the psychology of searchers, or other content creators. You would need to check with Wordtracker or similar to see if searchers are typing in "downunder", and what the competition is like.)

It's not the other way round - that pages on the web are created to be relevant to Google's searches, at least in theory, in Google's stated guidelines, and Jill's oft-referred to mantra - create and write the pages for the reader, not for search engines.

I don't think this is Jill's mantra. I get the impression that she is for creating great content for the reader AND ALSO for the search engines.

[marian]

[Merged this into the existing thread on the update. - Jill]

Hello!

My name is Marian. I have some problems with a website after Jagger. It's an old website, created and first indexed by Google in early 2004. It was doing quite well in Google rankings, showing up at the 3 first pages for quite competitive keywords.

But after Jagger update everything seemed lost. The website continues to be indexed by Google when searching 'site:www...', but it dropped down in the serps for all the most important keywords. It seems as if it has been banned or something, although I've done nothing "evil" to deserve it...

Some people suggested me to try the command 'allinanchor:keyword' in Google (to check if maybe my website had fell into sandbox or something), and surprisingly, all of my keywords appear very well ranked in Google.

Does it mean I'm in sandbox?

Moreover, my website is achieving great results in MSN and Yahoo, therefore, I think maybe my website has been lost in some sort of sandbox, in spite of being an old site.

Any ideas?

And... if my website is in sandbox... what can I do to recover the old positions? The thing is that I've done nothing evil to deserve that, no keyword stuffing, no hidden links, no link farms,... So, why has my website been lost in the infinity?

Can you help me? and furthermore, do you know if Jagger is already over at all?

Thank you very much for your help! Your'e doing a great job, I'm used to read your posts quite often, although I never post anything...

Thank you!

Marian

[Jill]

I don't think this is Jill's mantra. I get the impression that she is for creating great content for the reader AND ALSO for the search engines.

Well, close.

My mantra is actually that you should make your site be the best it can be for your users and the search engines.

I don't actually talk a whole lot about specifically creating content because to me what is a website if it's not content?

[Randy]

It doesn't sound like a sandbox issue to me Marian.

We've got a couple of threads dealing with Jagger that you may be able to gain some insight from. One of those is here. You'll find some theories there that you can compare against your site to see if anything looks familiar.

One thing that Google have stated recently that they're going to be coming down on is hidden text and/or hidden links. So if you had anything like this anywhere on your site previously you'll want to take a second look at it.

[boonchuan]

My web site about 8 years old, went from top positions to disappearing altogether, than went back to 400+ positions and move up quite fast , now is within the 20 positions, when will this thing end?

[Jill]

when will this thing end?

Never. That's life in SEO. If you want more control, buy PPC ads.

[boonchuan]

Jill, you are too frank , I mean normally when does such wild fluctuations end.

[Scottie]

She was right- there is no normal end time.

[Jill]

You think I'm kidding?

The fluctations NEVER end. You can check your rankings for a phrases on any given day, week, month and sometimes minute, and they very well may be different.

[boonchuan]

But my position was very static at the 4th position for my key word for a long long time before this wild fluctuations happen, after that it never seems to stop.

[Scottie]

Then you were lucky.

The fact that a site used to hold a certain position and it seemed to be stable doesn't mean that it was- while your site stuck where it was, many others were going up and down.

At this point, the sites I monitor really haven't ever changed position much but that doesn't mean they won't start changing tomorrow! It all depends on what factors the engines decide to mess with this week, what your competition is doing (more competitors, more pages, better optimized pages, new links, etc) and tons of other things that we don't always know about.

Once upon a time when Google shifted everything at one time (the Google Dance) you could be fairly certain you'd keep a spot at least until next month's "dance". But those days are gone.

[Jill]

Perhaps you were just lucky before.

Any time you are only looking at one keyword phrase (as opposed to the hundreds/thousands of relevant ones, it can be quite a wild ride.

[Scottie]

Ha- I beat Jill. I said it first!

[Jill]