Search Engines, Friend or Foe

[Paul Dillinger]

We've all been there. You have a web site that's ranking well, you're watching your traffic build, then one day the ranking drops. You're knocked back several pages and you have to climb your way back up. This is a place dedicated to sharing our thoughts and experiences on search engine marketing and optimization. It also makes for a great networking location for those looking to outsource their skills. Join, share, and enjoy!

[Carl Galloway]

One of my sites did exactly this, it was ranking well for it's primary keywords, it was completely white hat, yet one day it was knocked back to about page 6 from the bottom of page one, sometimes hovering around the top of page two.

The scary thing is that it hadn't just dropped, a whole bunch of new sites were suddenly filling pages 2,3,4 which had never previously even been in the index at those pages. It kinda proved to me that page 1 isn't a right, and you should never be complacent.

After doing a lot of research I discovered that whilst I was happily adding content, I had completely neglected my off page campaigns. It was a hard lesson and that particular site has taken at least 8months of hard work to bring back up to page 3 (not the 1 or 2 that I previously had).

[Paul Dillinger]

Yes. You can move up in ranking quickly by adding content, but you need to backup that new content with backlinks. The best thing to do it write something that people will link to. MSN loves onsite optimization, Google loves links, and Yahoo is more of a mix of the two. I find it easy to rank on MSN with little links. Yahoo will rank well with a few good links. Google wants the links to regualrly be coming in, and it requires some vigorous outreach to get.

[Carl Galloway]

Mmmm, I've had great success with MSN/Live and Ask.com and I can almost guarantee a Google listing of some sort if I think about my optimization, Yahoo is a different kettle of fish, very hit and miss for me although the traffic is good when they do index a page but they really seem to like hobby pages in preference to my usual templating type articles.

[Paul Dillinger]

Yahoo likes sites to age a bit. I find that Yahoo is much slower to index things, but you can get great results over time. There are tools you can use like Yahoo Site Explorer which makes Yahoo pay a bit more attention to your pages and tends to help in the rankings. Also a HUGE bonus comes from the Yahoo Directory but it costs about $300 per year for most businesses. Yahoo is tricky to optimizer for because it's so slow moving. It does bring good traffic though, and the it's quite strong in the US for those looking for lots of Organic US traffic.