82 replies to this topic

[diana]

Hi everyone,

I'm new here and just came across this site today.

My company was listed on the first page of google in the #6 position when you did a search for "pet sitting Toronto" or "Toronto pet sitting". I just checked it today and I am gone completely. There seems to be a lot of sites up there that aren't really relevant, yet mine is not listed. I don't get it.

Sorry if I have repeated another post but at this point I am panicking. I went 16 pages in and still didn't see my company and gave up after that.

Can someone please tell me what is happening. Do I need to resubmit my website again?

Thanks,
Diana
[URL removed - please create signature file where you can add your web site link]

Edited by searchrank, 24 March 2004 - 03:23 PM.

[Grumpus]

It seems that for the past few weeks a lot of "Town/regional" type searches have gone kaplooey. The condition (if it works the same as other sectors that have been affected for periods over the past 3-4 months) should be temporary. Hopefully, it should be back to pretty close to normal in a few weeks. Keep your fingers crossed, don't panic and go redoing your whole site to fix something that probably isn't broken on your end, and try to stay calm. I know it's tough, but it's about all we can do.

G.

[SearchRank]

Welcome to the forum, Diana!

Sorry I had to remove your web site link but you can create a signature file in your control panel and add it there.

Is your site new or have you made any changes to it recently? There are alot of things that can affect positioning.

[diana]

Oh sorry, I didn't realize that I needed to place it in the signature. Yes, there were changes made to my website over a month ago. There were some more key words added in the titles and the home page was redone a bit. The changes shouldn't have knocked me off completely though. The changes were done to get me higher on the listings!

Thanks for the advice. I will try not to panic and will check it periodically.

What was exactly done to google? Does anyone know?

Thanks.

[SearchRank]

Sometimes when you make significant changes to a site, it will drop from the SERPs for a month or so, almost like the new content is being analyzed or something. As a general rule, whenever we make changes to a specific web page, I give it 2-3 months to be able to measure the effect the change had.

[OldWelshGuy]

Google is broke again IMO I spent ages again today wading through directories to find any real sites. I am losing faith rapidly in the long term use of Google for the all important local searching, which , to be fair, are making up the bulk of searches according to a recent nielsen survey.

Are google lowering the relevance of local place names in their searches? maybe in readiness for their own local searching thingy maybe. It certainly seems to me though as if they are more or less ignoring regional qualifiers in searches.

<rant over>

oops Hi diana welcome

[Grumpus]

Are google lowering the relevance of local place names in their searches? maybe in readiness for their own local searching thingy maybe. It certainly seems to me though as if they are more or less ignoring regional qualifiers in searches.

Nah, they're in the middle of improving them. Remember all the other terms/sectors that (depending upon the week/month) that were in play in the first months following florida? And remember how, once it went through its inner workings, most everyone reported "Pre Florida" looking results in their sector?

Well, it's my bet that "locations" are now the "terms in play" and once we muscle through the math and things that are going on, the location searches will be more relevant than they've been in a long time. It just takes time.

(And fear not, as soon as they get done with the location sectors, another sector will go into play for us to complain about...)

G.

[Shep]

I hope you fellows are right about google. My top keywords with my state is my most important key phrase. I can't even get in the top 50 in google. I would be terribly distressed except that yahoo and MSN are making up for the lost google traffic. I rank in top 10 for my best phrase WITHOUT my state in MSN and yahoo. in the past few weeks google is a definite third in referrals. I am stumped with google at present.

I have decided to make my site the best it can be and not be overly concerned with the google of the moment.

[anthonyparsons.com]

I agree with Grumpus on this. I did think at one point that G might be taking it out on copywriting techniques to gain that targeted traffic; but realistically, that would just be stupid off them to keep it that way. SEO's refine websites so they are found for relevant terms and not the irrelevant.

When you want something local, you include a local name offcourse. I think they are just mid cycle of fixing the problems to maybe look deeper within page copy and not just a few local town words or the like thrown in. They may possibly be going deeper within the analysis so that a webpage may require towns, surrounding towns, local region etc to put a match to the website. Who knows? It will be interesting.

[blackpool]

Welcome Diana

I agree with searchrank.

I have just gone through what you and a lot of others are going through at the moment.

This may help you all relax a bit.

I reported about three or four weeks ago that I had "dropped off the face of the earth" with Google. I had completely restructured my site. I began to think it was a stupid thing to do. It turns out it was'nt.

Anyway.......I was advised to sit back and be patient and I found that terribly hard to do being the sort of person I am. BUT I DID!

Low and behold I'm now back in the same positions as before. Better in some cases, slightly less in others, but back on the first page with a HIGHER pagerank!

The sites that came from nowhere to replace me three weeks ago (and IMO were spammy in their structure and LOW in page rank ) have dropped back to where they came from.

Every page in my old site had a rank of 3. My home page now has a rank of 6! Some rank 5 and the one's I need to finish off....... some have PR0.
That tells me Google likes my site and as a result pops back almost daily to visit me and will rank my PR0 pages higher when I sort them out! Believe me I will do!

IMO Google are making sure that these regional sites (mine is one) are relevant for what the searchers are looking for and then sticking the sites which are, back in the results with a better ranking.

This then tells you that Google likes the structure of your site and views your site as quite important.... hence the higher pagerank.

IMO it's telling me I need to sort out the PR0's for those other pages within my site that still need those finishing touches to keep the rank Google thinks you deserve for your efforts.

I would be interested to hear other opinions on this when the pages DO come back up in the SERPS. If they don't, then IMO it's only Googles way of telling you a bit more work is needed.

[bkernst]

I think that they came to the realisation, that the results so far have become insufficient and are too broad what any search based on geographic location concerns. They are most likely trying to improve the results when the geographic searches are concerned to give geographically more relevant results, which should be good in the long term and searchers will actually find what they are looking for instead of having to waste more of Gs processing capability.
I did find recently, that my rankings imrpoved quite a bit when geographical searches are concerned (city names, etc.), the geographical location is what makes every business unique and a place that is further away from the location searched for is therefore less relevant.
This seems to me like yet another add-on to the already complicated rankign algorithm just to get more relevent results.
If results are more relevent than before, it should help filter out spam, and make it a little bit easier to optimise for a small niche and actually get traffic that is actually looking for what they find by searching.
Wait it out, and you should hopefully get more luck with specific searches, the broad searches have mostly become useless.

Bernhard

[qwerty]

I just added my address to the include file that populates the heading div on all of my pages about a week ago, and now for the first time my site is showing up in the top 20 for a local search (search engine optimization somerville).

Actually, I'm all over the top ten, what with forum posts and listings on SeoPros and SEO Consultants, but this is the first time my own site is showing up well. So it seems that at least in my case, adding the word Somerville to every page got me picked up for that term pretty quickly, and I didn't even stick it in any title tags. Of course, it's nowhere near as competitive as it would have been for a larger city.

[bkernst]

What I did on one of my own sites (small home based rental business) was adding the city and country into the title as well, ever since then I have been getting top ten results on Google for a related search where that kind of regional information is involved, now my only problem is that that site is for such a small niche that there are not many searches for the area, so I end up getting requests from other cities which are useless for that particular business since it is only for one city.
I also try to keep the text and title very much focused what the page is about, so the visitors are few, but I do get quite a good percentage of emails and phonecalls from those. The range of items to rent is still too limited still, but that will be fixed over time.

On that site I haven't actually bothered checking what pagerank was listed, I just typed something about the products, added a very simple title and main heading with a subheading plus some contact details, and uploaded the files.
The other issue is that the searches so far a very broad what the local market concerns (they don't actually expect to find much).

This site of mine is one of many examples where regional and specific content keeps the network traffic low, the enquiries ratio high and due to lack of products the turnover low.

Another observation I made, and this applies mainly to companies, is that people in companies always seem to expect constant top rankings for very general and broad search phrases or even single words, when there is a competition of two hundred thousand and more. This is still an old way of thinking and it is the money greed talking as well because everybody wants big exposure to get lots of sales, which practically doesn't work anymore on search engines like it used to many years ago. Every industry is becoming more competitive every year as the general population grows, so eventually we should be happy in many years time if we only get haf the traffic that we are getting now.

Bernhard

[BobetteKyle]

Google is broke again IMO I spent ages again today wading through directories to find any real sites.

This one's looking a bit different in my tiny corner of cyberspace. I wonder if they are experimenting with adding sponsored listings right into the same list with the Web page results?

Observations:

During the past couple of days, vaguely relevant sites are sometimes returned in the #2, #3, and #4 spots of "marketing plan" (no quotes) search results. I have never before seen these sites in the rankings.

Those same sites also show up in Overture.com search results, where each is labeled "sponsored listing".

These "new" sites are not labeled "sponsorship listing" in Google and - based on prior search results - seem to be inserted directly into the natural rankings, with no differences in formatting.

AdWords are still along the right column and the offset sponsored link(s) at the top of page remain.

Conclusions:

None - I don't do SEO. I just like to feed bits of info to the smart SEO folks here.

These are just my observations based on a single search term. It is definitely not my imagination, but could simply be hiccups as G refines a new algorithm (I hope. I really like my #3 spot...frustrating if I'm going to be bumped down by sites with inferior/no marketing plan content. ).

[BobetteKyle]

Google is broke again IMO I spent ages again today wading through directories to find any real sites. <rant over> 

, , , and !

I am a VERY frustrated consumer right now.

I use Google searches to find a lot of information - both personal and business related. These last two days, ALMOST EVERY TIME I search I get a list of "Find _______ Using This Search Tool" pages.

I search Google to FIND INFORMATION, NOT to FIND PLACES TO FIND THE INFORMATION I'm looking for!!!!

OK, done shouting now. Just had to vent some steam.