is there a ground to question Google's integrity?

[Absur2]

Hi, I work for a Flood Mapping and modelling company called ambiental. We are a commercial organisation and have been using the web as a marketing tool extensively. I've been handling the web strategy and have focused on both healthy organic ranking and careful PPC campaigning.
I am pleased with our organic ranking, as we have broken into the first page in the past six month for our main keywords. The top spots are still occupied by Local Authorities and Government organisations (EA, etc...) but we are consistently topping the list of commercial consultancies. Part of our work is extremely specialised (we produce Flood Risk Assessment to accompany planning applications) and there are, at most, a dozen serious competitors. Having the "organic ranking" edge is therefore crucial.
Our use of Adwords has always been very important because of the abundance of site with little relevance for our potential clients when they search for a commercial service.
i have noticed in the past three month that our main page has "disapeared" down the organic rankings before coming back after a few days (up to ten) to a stronger position.
the only thing i have discovered so far is that when the page comes back it has recently been cached.

question No.1: does anyone knows why this happens?
question No.2: how do i prevent it from happening again?
question No.3: when this happens to the major 10 payers of the PPC campaign at the same time; would it not result in the ad word expenditure going up (in order to compensate for the lost revenue) and therefore increased revenue for google?

I don't believe this could actually be the case and I trust google would have too much to lose to go after such petty gain. any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards

Absur2

 

[temi]

Absur2,
Welcome to UK Webmaster Forum. The problem you described above is now unique to your website, quite a few other webmaster has reported this in the last few weeks including me.
Google seem to be playing about with their algo, they seem to be inserting some factors that they did not place so much emphasis on before and down grading some factors they placed strong emphasis on in the past.

I do not think your site disappearing or appearing has anything to do with you PPC campaign though I can see how one will arrive at that conclusion becuse this meas you increase you PPC ad spending to make up for lost organic traffic.

Here as some thing that could help:
1. if you site links to other site, review the links, if possible do not link to any site without adding nofollow to it (Google could have mistakenly taken identify a link from your site for paid link)
2. Review where you incoming backlinks are from, if you have many links from directories/link farms or site of low quality consider removing them
3. Build up high quality backlinks, links from government department that seem very active in your niche would help post your organic ranking tremendously.

Hope some of the above info helps.

 

[Absur2]

temi,
thanks for that quick reply, that was... hmm, quick.
i terms of SEO, i have worked mainly on the site content. as you say it is a niche sector and therefore people have been looking for information just as much as services in the recent past and i have therefore focused on providing that.
I am not a professional IT consultant, and have had to learn as i went along. (For a flood risk consultant, i think i did a pretty good job). you raise the issue of inbound links which most SEO expert seem to regards as the holy web graal. I am not sure there is even a remote possibility to get a link from the top ranking sites without paying for it (I naively have put a link to their website from mine, although i think they will have to go).
can you see a reason why the dip would occur so abruptly and get fixed from one day to the next? because that really is the key issue here. i am not in competition with Governmental organisation and in fact if i am just below them, it is all the better, especially if i am the only commercial company on the first result page.
To give you an example (i'd love to stick a link in the post, but apparently, i can't) the main competitive phrase is "flood risk assessment"; out of the first four results, one is a pdf, and one is a word doc.
another thing i also thought of is what is the domain name going to do? the page in question url is ambiental. co. uk/html/services/floodriskassessment. html.
I am aware that it is very long but what can i do to change that without losing all the good work i have done on the page so far?
would redirecting from a more relevant url help?

thanks

 

[temi]

Like you have correctly pointed out, inbound link is the holy grail of getting to the top all major search engines so also is contents like Martin pointed out here
Given the fact that you have done and excellent job getting good quality contents to your site, the next think is to get the inbound links, I know its much easier to buy link thank to take time contacting govermnent webmasters to link to you but if you can get just a handful of links from local govt websites to yours, it will be worth its weitht in gold. It usually seem impossible, I never belived I could get links from BBC but I have manged to get two links from BBC Birmingham to one of my sites. Sometime you do it by stealth rather by straightforward asking for links, the links we got from BBC was in return for writing an article for them on a subject matter my partner in that project had some expertise on, we told them we do not want money, but we want two links to our website, they agreed.

If you go down the route of buying links, buy carefully, do not buy from site that already has many outgoing links, and before that nofollow attribute is now added to the link so that you can get the full SEO benefit.

On the question of what to do to ensure your site does now fall so drastically in future, two suggestions:
- Get enough links to get you to page one, and the get about 10 additional links in reserve so that should one link be removed or lose it value, you still have 10 backup to help you maintain you position
- Consider a second site, target the same keywords with a new site BUT ensure you do not duplicate the contents of your first site in the second site, this way, you would have 'put your eggs' in two baskets rather than one.

I tend to do the latter with websites whose keywords are crucial to my bank balance.

I don't think you need to change your current site in any way, just remove the links to other site (this may actually be the problem , this forum for example lost its position in search engines about 4-5 weeks ago, I suspected it was some sites I linked to, I remove the linsk and a few days later, we were back to page one again.
so remove outgoing links from your site first and see what happens

Good luck

 

[Absur2]

before that nofollow attribute is now added to the link so that you can get the full SEO benefit.

what do you mean by that?

also, if i get a new website called w. my- main- keyword . com .
Am i taking a risk by putting a redirect on it to my main page? is it going to serve a purpose besides readibility for my customers? do i have an interest in using that as my link in google adwords for example?
further, what difference does it make to redirect the frame rather than the http? i realise that for frame redirect it will keep the my-main-keyword. com url and i will be able to use meta tags and keywords etc...?
what do google crawlers make of these, and can they get a good ranking too?

thanks

 

[temi]

When you link to a site or a site links to you, it can be done on one of two ways@
- Standard link, when search engines see this on your site, they follow it and pass any benefits that page has to the page it links to, for example PR.
- Link with nofollow attribute, with this second link, by adding nofollow attribute, you have instructed search engines NOT to follow that link to the site it links to and not to pass any benefits the page may have to the site it links to.

Hence, if you buy a link with the view to using the link to bost you site, and the link has a nofollow attibute, it will not help bost your site in search engines.

If you decide to start a second site, it should have not connection whatsoever with the first site, and I will even suggest you do not link to the second site from your first site so that the second site is completely independent of the first.

Thanks

 

[OldWelshGuy]

i have noticed in the past three month that our main page has "disapeared" down the organic rankings before coming back after a few days (up to ten) to a stronger position.
Common problem with sites that are not balanced with inbound/outbound links etc.

the only thing i have discovered so far is that when the page comes back it has recently been cached.
This indicates to me that you possibly have server response time issues, slow load times etc and that the site is down/slow to respond.

question No.1: does anyone knows why this happens?
LOTS of possibilities really not least the fact that there is no single 'google' there are hundreds of different googles at any given time as the datacentres are rarely (if ever) synched.

question No.2: how do i prevent it from happening again?
Strengthen your backlinks and make them natural, do NOT buy links as they will stick out like a sore thumb and likely end up getting your site flagged as a possible spammer.

question No.3: when this happens to the major 10 payers of the PPC campaign at the same time; would it not result in the ad word expenditure going up (in order to compensate for the lost revenue) and therefore increased revenue for google?
Possibly, but as google is 98% algorithmic, it is not really a consideration.

I don't believe this could actually be the case and I trust google would have too much to lose to go after such petty gain. any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards

Absur2

I would advise you get someone who knows what they are talking about to take a look at your site and the market competition, and come up with a plan of action report!

 

[Absur2]

temi,

thanks, that's how wikipedia has stopped becoming an inbound link factory i suppose; nofollow. (i suppose i should do that on my outbound links, shouldn't I?).

as for the other point, i am not keen on restarting the work i have done quite yet; but if i was to use may-main-keyword. com as redirect (in order to make it simpler for users for instance; our current url is long and complicated!) should i do it as frame redirect or html redirect? and would it actually affect the ranking whatsoever?

 

[Absur2]

OWG,

thanks for your response.

Common problem with sites that are not balanced with inbound/outbound links etc.

Balance? is it that there are too many outbound links and not enough inbound links?

 

[OldWelshGuy]

be VERY carefull about removing outbound links IF they are on topic relevant links to good sites. You mention LA sites, those are EXACTLY the sort of sites that are often authority sites.

Personally I wouldn't just run around making wholesale changes to your site as it could kill it dead.

PM me the URL and I will take a really quick glance at it.

 

[Absur2]

i can't PM until i have 15 posts!

here is what i tried to send:

.ambiental.co.uk/html/services/floodriskassessment.html

this is not the index page, but it is the page that needs to be seen on the internet. it's the one we link to on the ppc.

what do you think of having a domain name called
my-main-keywords. com (in this case: flood-risk-assessment.com) and setting a redirect to the above page? perhaps using that url in our ppc campaign?

could it do any damage?

 

[Absur2]

further

be VERY carefull about removing outbound links IF they are on topic relevant links to good sites.

should i include more outbound links to more relevant sites? I suppose that could also set us up as a dedicated page.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

You have had articles published on the BBC you should contact them and ask them to link to you. Looking at all the articles you have written, plus the list of blue chip companies you have as clients, link building should be a walk in the park if handled properly.

The redirect thing is a spam attempt and should be avoided at all costs. I would also say that the page you have shown me is a really Poor landing page for PPC (sorry). Having a different domain for PPC is Ok, but ask yourself why! I would create different landing pages for various phrases, and test them. I would also exclude them from the spiders so that they do not get indexed. I would also have different adverts running also for testing.

Finally you started really well by saying that you could have links to relevant sites (as I suggest), then you dived head first into the trap of thinking that a link is a link is a link

Outbound links to authority pages IN CONTEXT are what are good. links to authority pages are ok, links pages are a waste of space unless they are categorised into a directory and are highly niche!

I don't have the time to go into detail tonight, but here is a brief outline.

The ONLY things a search engine algorithm has to work on is what YOU say your site is about, and what OTHERS say it is about. So how can you tell a SE algo what your site is about?
1. content
2. Links

Nothing else really is there?

So content is fine, but think about how experts re-enforce what they are saying, the 'cite' other experts. This happens in court all the time wit lawyers citing precedent. It happens in Acaedemia, with professors citing each others works, yet for SOME reason this basic eleemnt is ignored on the web.

Your subject matter is niched, you need to focus each of your pages tightly to one specific area of interest. ie planning applications, insurance risk assessment etc. then you can attack those phrases by getting specific inbound links to them, and also linking out to other specific pages like the EA deep linked content that is 100% relevent semantically.

 

[Absur2]

OWG,

thanks for that; your comments are gold to me.
although i have been handling some of the web design (I inherited the site) and have done most of the SEO (all our pages used to have the same title) this is far from my field of expertise and i end up working on it at the weekend (it does interest me). although with all this advice, i am getting much better.

you're still talking too fast:

then you dived head first into the trap of thinking that a link is a link is a link

are you refering to the bottom of the networking page (met) as opposed to the top (EA)?
Having a different domain for PPC is Ok, but ask yourself why!

the only reason would be to have a domain name that is more obvious to people in search of that keyword or for quick reference in marketing material for instance.

I would also exclude them from the spiders so that they do not get indexed.

are you referring here to a redirect scenario? What is the harm in having a http redirect from a page with a more relevant name? How is that seen as spamming?

I would also say that the page you have shown me is a really Poor landing page for PPC (sorry)

no need to apologize, i think the body is ok but it looks like overtime, weed has invaded the page and has rendered it very messy. This brings me to my next point. we are currently going through a rebranding (new logo, new fonts, etc...) and i am keen to tidy up the site (perhaps even redesign the whole thing).
If i maintain the actual content - including titles, headings, keywords, tags, etc. - is there a risk that it would affect our SE ranking in a detrimental way? My initial thought is that if i clean up the codes, it should make it easier for spiders to read, and therefore should benefit us eventually?

thanks again for your thoughts

ps: if you need flood risk/planning advice; you know you can count on me!

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Will reply tomorrow

 

[Absur2]

oups.

I'll check in again tomorrow.

thanks

 

[Absur2]

more trouble i'm afraid,
the page is now almost systematically down, although i haven't done anything to it. when it does pop up, it is on page one, but it is not frequent enough at the moment to be of any use.
anything new on the reasons for this yoyo effect?