6 replies to this topic

[Dasick]

A couple of days ago a guy contacted me and offered to do some SEO for my sign-making website. I asked him what he can do and he said he'll call me later. He did call the same day, and asked me to google search the word "lawn sign", which is a very competitive keyword in my industry, and I distinctly remember my website showing up on the third page (I look over that kind of stuff every couple of days). I googled that keyword and lo and behold, it showed up first. After thinking about it for a minute, I turned off personalized search, and my website only dropped to being third on the first page. I declined and now my website is going back down again (it's on second page for this keyword).

I am completely baffled by this; Not only did that guy significantly improve my google placement for a very competitive keyword, he did so without access to my site. How is that possible, especially so fast?

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Edited by qwerty, 05 March 2011 - 07:13 PM.

[qwerty]

If he really did something to change your rankings and he didn't have access to the site itself, then he must have pointed a bunch of links at you, probably using "lawn sign" as the anchor text of many, if not all of those links.

If you check Yahoo Site Explorer for links to your site from domains other than yours, you'll see that quite a few of them are coming from the site of a basement waterproofing company. According to the WayBack Machine, those links weren't present 10 months ago.

You're also linked to from Wikipedia's page on lawn signs, and it looks like that link was added in late January.

I don't know if the person you spoke with controls these links, and I can't tell you exactly how long most of them have been in place, but that's all I can think of if he really did affect your rankings.

By the way, your site comes up at #1 for me when I search for [lawn sign toronto]. If I drop the city name from the query, you're not in the top 10 for me.

[oldmatt]

That does sound weird. I have a hard time believing rankings adjust that fast. If they do, then the index is used in a variety of ways because I edited a couple of titles on another site I manage a while back and it took days to show up in the results and the index.

[chrishirst]

I have a hard time believing rankings adjust that fast.

They don't, it is your view of the index that changes.

Google has multiple datacentres, each DC has multiple server clusters that are load sharing and these clusters are continually updating. Your query could be routed to any cluster in any datacentre and each cluster could have a slightly different version of the data index and a slightly different version of the ranking algo.

There is no "master copy" of the index or the "algo" any more and hasn't been for 2004. In 2010 Google rolled out "Caffeine" which speeded up the whole process (amongst other things)

[piskie]

And all this is further twisted by such things as Dynamically assigned IP and search history of "You" built up by Google using various methods. For instance, what if any BHOs do you have.

[Dasick]

And all this is further twisted by such things as Dynamically assigned IP and search history of "You" built up by Google using various methods. For instance, what if any BHOs do you have.

I thought that too. I turned off the personalised search setting with the "&pws=0", though I am not sure how much that helps...

What do you mean by BHOs by the way?

If he really did something to change your rankings and he didn't have access to the site itself, then he must have pointed a bunch of links at you, probably using "lawn sign" as the anchor text of many, if not all of those links.

If you check Yahoo Site Explorer for links to your site from domains other than yours, you'll see that quite a few of them are coming from the site of a basement waterproofing company. According to the WayBack Machine, those links weren't present 10 months ago.

You're also linked to from Wikipedia's page on lawn signs, and it looks like that link was added in late January.

I don't know if the person you spoke with controls these links, and I can't tell you exactly how long most of them have been in place, but that's all I can think of if he really did affect your rankings.

By the way, your site comes up at #1 for me when I search for [lawn sign toronto]. If I drop the city name from the query, you're not in the top 10 for me.

The search query we rank low in is "lawn sign".

The thing is, our position for that keyword went from 4th page, to first page, to fourth page, all in about 24 hours. How is that even possible??

[Jill]

The thing is, our position for that keyword went from 4th page, to first page, to fourth page, all in about 24 hours. How is that even possible??

Different data centers.