I was ranking on the first page now I am back on page 10, what happened?????
There is no single answer to the loss of rankings, in fact if your site is fairly new your rankings may go up and down on a weekly basis until your site gains some authoritative back links and trust.
I have found that with new sites it takes around 12 to 18 months for your rankings to start to settle. Also if your a blogger your rankings will change depending on the content you present on your front page. I usually rank on the 1st page for Google SEO, however if I write an article that does not mention the keyword I drop a few pages. This is also relevant to my site being new, so if your site is under 18 months old and your rankings are a little jumpy, don’t worry and concentrate on building strong back links.
There are other reasons why your rankings may drop, some within your control and others you simply have to battle with. I want to take a little time today to go through these in order to help you best tackle them. So here we go…..
I would say you should look to anchor 30 – 40 % of your links with your targeted keyword and then make up the rest out of variations and natural link backs.
Do this and your preventing a possible penalty.
The best way to avoid this is by building strong links to not just your home page but to all your pages, this shows a deeper level of interest in your site and should be enough to secure your ranking…. You really think scrapers are going to build links to sub pages??? Nah, it’s a pain but unfortunately we have to deal with these things.
Reciprocal links aren’t all bad in fact they are a natural part of the web linking process, but my advice?? Keep it natural, if a large proportion of your links are reciprocal your going to struggle to get the rankings your content deserves.
I know I have some directory links in my sidebar but I am afraid they are going, maybe not for good and I might keep 1 or two but I want to see what impact it has. In the past dropping some reciprocal directory links has always increased my rank.
I talk a lot on this blog about the line of RELEVANCE this does not mean I want you to use the exact same key phrase all over your page. Like anchor text use variations, think what relates first and then how you can use keyword variations. If your a blogger ensure each page has it’s own unique title tag headings.
Remember to rank for;
Broad terms = In Community Links
Longtails = Page Content
Your rankings will definitely drop for broad searches if you do not create the right amount of relevancy.
OK…As well as the above there is also manual and automated penalties, see my article on the Google penalty for more info on this.
Hope you got something out of this
Tim
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for sharing this informative techniques.
No problem
Tim,
Even though I want to rank high for “SEO Blog”, I make sure all my anchor texts are diverse. The percent of the same anchor text to my site is very small. I don’t do any counting, but just make sure everything looks “natural”
@kai,
Ye you must play it safe, however it’s a good idea to make sure your using the exact phrase enough otherwise you will lose out to a more focused competitor
I’ve been learning so much from your blog posts and I wanted to stop in and say thank you. I really appreciate all the effort you go to to demystify SEO for us everyday bloggers.
Thanks again,
tt
@tt
My pleasure, and thanks for taking time to leave a comment.