aknet47 wrote:

Hi,
I´ve got a site with links into a for each product and
I use following text instead of a button: buy xy-dvds

My keyword-density is higher than 6% (up to 12%).
I´m not sure to correct it by now.
How do you know the keyword-density thing?

While this is debated throughout the search world, perform a simple search on keyword density and SEO, you will be sure to fine a load of content and tools for analysis.

Dammit!
Found this http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=51051

anyone heard about this "Quality Score" Algorithm thats supposed to be "kicking in very soon".

Now I know this is intended to raise the minimum bid price for adwords, so that it costs affiliate marketers more to make less, but do you think they could have sneaked it into their main Algo? that would explain (to me anyway) why there are so many results above ours that are actually either talking about us, linking to us or both. It is us with the aff links, not them.

Any thoughts on my latest straw clutching?

(btw #341 today)

Griff,

Been doing some reading this morning, and seeing a lot of people with the same results as yours.

I'm actually one of them with a new site that I made, but it's barely off the ground so I didn't actually lose anything.
I've made some extremely minor altercations in my site, and won't know anything until google swings by for another visit. Until then....

K, there's been a lot of talk lately about googles new adjustments and their blatant attack on spam. Don't blame 'em, as their in a search business, not making on-line marketers money.

One topic seems to be affiliate links. Some people are wondering if their affiliate sites are getting knocked down just because they don't have a shopping cart. Some of that info is found in the link you just posted. If we sit back and think about what google says, ie - constant search for quality, relevant authority sites, then wouldn't it be possible to cast aside site that are purely driven on affiliate dollars? I'm thinking so.... but if your competition is still in the top ten, running the exact same sort of outfit you are, then theres something else at play.

Cue the SEO team! - In google's quest to defeat spam, I've read somewhere that the algo could change in regards to link quality. If your sites revolves around Quids (i still don't know what that means), and you have links everywhere that have Quids in the anchor text, then it's possible that they deem those links as SEO related drops, instead of actual natural links. It only makes sense. After all, we've been taught for so long that anchor text plays a role, in ranking, however, in my most recent Rank Whore quest, we can plainly see that the anchor text doesn't mean crap... at least not at this moment. Not only that, but naturally, very few people link via targeted anchor text vs. typing out the entire domain name, or anchoring with the actual company name. Maybe it'll take some time.... Either way, part of their algo very well could be something like - If there are more than X occurances of anchor text + obvious site optimization with keywords and H tags, then disregard link value for any duplicate links above X. (er... feel free to insert actual intelligent code).

The only thing that I see wrong with this, is that one of my competitors (for my work site) definitely uses anchor text to the extreme. Yet he's still number 1. Of course, there is a slight difference... the page in question doesn't sell anything, there are no affiliate links, and it's nothing more than a big article... a poorly written one imo. So even tho seo is obviously applied there, perhaps it slipped through the cracks because of the lack of affiliate related material, shopping carts, etc... just text.

Finally, there is the keyword density - I know you guys went over this already, but I'm going to use my other work-in-progress as an example. I'm getting ranked for pages that the site is clearly NOT seo'd for. Granted, it's not exactly a competitive term, but what strikes me as odd, is the fact that the terms that I AM seo'd for, I don't show up on the radar anywhere. Like I'm somewhere lost in space. Come on! Shouldn't I at least get #237? The term isn't competitive, and the sites in front of me have extremely little, if anything, to offer for the search term. Where my site on the other hand, has a plethora of information.

In light of the keyword density, I decided to do some checking. The home page has little information, but is SEO'd for the term. When I did a density test, I found the numbers were just crazy. I didn't mean to do it... I guess I just got over zealous. Talks on Web Master World are revealing the exact same thing - People loosing ranking for seo'd terms, but still have decent ranking for non-seo'd terms. Whether we want to admit it or not, the fact is, SEO is Spam's ugly cousin. And googles new algo changes could be directly targeting SEO related concepts.

If you can afford it, what I would do is.... Remove a truck load of obvious targeted keywords from your site... i mean, REALLY strip it down. You'll probably have to replace those terms with something that google deems as 'related'. Use that funky google adsense search thingy that tells you various terms to bid on. I believe it gives you all kinds of related terms.

Then start stripping down some H material on some pages, and any other obvious SEO related tactics... no matter how small it may seem.

Wait to get indexed again, and see what happens. Hopefully you're ranking won't get worse, but if it does, will you be out anything? Use you're own judgment tho... i'm not exactly an SEO pro.

Hey mate, thanks for taking the time!! Theres definately something in what you said "seo is spams ugly cousin" maybe i made it just too obvious!!

Ive already stripped it back alittle, but its hard not to have your sitename all over the place, and lets face it, thats what Im worried about, my rankings for my site name. We've made abit of a name for ourselves in the UK and were getting loads of hits from G for our sitenames search. But now, we're getting hits from alot of other sites that are now way above us in the serps. Actually, I think theyre all on page 1. Some of these sites list us next to our competitors, i hate to think how many customers we could have lost from a stray click on the wrong link or flasy banner!!

If your sites revolves around Quids (i still don't know what that means)

Lol, Google it! you're bound to find the definition before you end up on my site!!

btw #731 today

Found on some dictionary site -

quid - a wad of something chewable as tobacco

hahahahah... No worries tho, I read the other definitions.

I took a look at your site -

quids in uk is not in the meta keywords. Useless, I know, but edit anyways.

The title is too long, and too many occurances of the keyword.. in my opinion.

The description could be rewritten. Maybe just tweaked, but i'd consider a rewrite.

I'd take some of that stuff out of the footer. Just a test tho, as I've heard of some other people playing with the same idea. Theory go's that some SEO's are trying to take advantage of page segmentation to tweak for the search engine, but in reality, nobody looks at it, and it's useless data.

Some of your text seems to be redundant of your existing meta description and your title. Definitely need a re-write, imo. I'm looking at the strings of text like 'put the purchasing power.. blah blah blah'... you know what I mean. Make everything as unique as possible, and good for the reader, not the SE. In fact... at this point, you should rewrite your content while completely IGNORING the search engines... see what happens.

How are your ranking in Yahoo and MSN by the way?

At the moment ranked very well in both. top in MSN (just jinxed that) and about 3rd in Yahoo and all others (just jinxed them too)

Not a wad of tobacco btw, well, not in this sense,
a quid: Slang, unit of currency in UK (GBP) equal to One pound.

The meta stuff is all my long tails, same as the title really. You may well be right about that footer stuff. Ill take that out and redo my metas, see if I cant slow this decline down alittle.

Ok, more straw clutching times to be had.
check out this blog entry by Matt cutts: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm … mb-impact/

Ok, wtf am i thinking here?

Well, my forum siggy here and on other sites has a link to my site. the siggy doesnt change at all, the link text remains the same.

Now, the whole "miserable failure" algo is likely (imo) to take into account the number of links to a page with the same anchour text. It is likely to take into account the context of the page that the link is on.

If the page (or site) isn't directly related to the target site and there is a large amount of similar links with similar or identical text, then google might think that the target site is getting bombed for that term and reduce it's serps for those keywords.

This may explain why Im still ranking pretty well for some terms, yet Im dropping like a stone for my website name, which is contained in the link text in my siggy. #753 today

So, have I previously google-bombed myself into decent rankings? have big G just algoed me out?
Im changing my siggy and seeing what happens.

btw MrStitch, I think that your "rank whores" experiment may be related to this.


*edit*
Just changed my siggy and posted on Matts

griffinsbridge wrote:

If the page (or site) isn't directly related to the target site and there is a large amount of similar links with similar or identical text, then google might think that the target site is getting bombed for that term and reduce it's serps for those keywords.

This may explain why Im still ranking pretty well for some terms, yet Im dropping like a stone for my website name, which is contained in the link text in my siggy. #753 today

Well I would hope that Google doesn't count sig links as much as that, but I know what your meaning here.  Some very strange filtering going on in the past 4-6 weeks and this little nugget from MC helps explain a little of what they want to do.

I think you might be reading into it further than you should.

Removing your siggy link probably isn't a bad idea, however, there are a couple of things you need to remember.

First - Supposedly, no site can be harmed anymore by bombing. What they're talking about is manipulating the serps for obscure terms (like what I'm doing with Rank Whores), and the site in question has nothing to do with the term in question. I'm not sure why this is part of the algo, as the only time I've seen this is during the recent elections when politicians where hiring groups of people to do this. So when you typed in the word 'retard', you'd get their opponents website.... er, something like that. Either way, I'm sure the adjustment isn't for sites like yours, but more like something to stop spammers with long tail terms or phrases. I very well could be wrong, so please... someone correct me on this if need be.

Second - How many posts do you have? It's my understanding that google only counts a siggy link from a forum as a single link, all by itself.... NOT equal to how many times your sig got splattered around the boards. I believe this was a problem a long time ago with spammers. Again, I could be wrong on this, so correct me - MY theory is that the sig link is pretty much like a little html file that gets fetched by the forum php system. Google is nothing more than a document retrieval system, so guess how many times it retrieved your sig? - Only once, as there is only one file, with only one link. On the other hand, I am literally the LAST person to refer to for php anything.... never touched the stuff. I'm just imagining thats how it might work.

When was the last time google bot came by to index your site?

incrediblehelp wrote:

griffinsbridge wrote:

If the page (or site) isn't directly related to the target site and there is a large amount of similar links with similar or identical text, then google might think that the target site is getting bombed for that term and reduce it's serps for those keywords.

This may explain why Im still ranking pretty well for some terms, yet Im dropping like a stone for my website name, which is contained in the link text in my siggy. #753 today

Well I would hope that Google doesn't count sig links as much as that, but I know what your meaning here.  Some very strange filtering going on in the past 4-6 weeks and this little nugget from MC helps explain a little of what they want to do.

I think that it's very likely that they're testing out some tolerances for SEO spam like anchor text, keyword density, etc.

Googles record in webmasters tools shows they came by on Jan 22, 2007.
haven't got them in my logs though as far as I can see, might have to look abit deeper.

I dont think they see it as one link. They dont have access to anything the user doesnt. it is my understanding that they simply download the same thing that any browser does. i imagine they would then use some form of explode() to discover the link url.

Youve got a Gbot scraping for links, they'll do that job. probably index the anchour text here too.
Youve got a Gbot scraping for content. I imagine that would download the output and stick it through a simple strip_tags() function.

You could always just remove the siggy, as this site isn't on theme anyways, and just see what happens.

Yello!

Ok BIG update to this story.

posted on Matt cutts blog commenting about the possibility of me being algoed out by the G-bomb algo.
He has looked at my site, but only at a few pages that i consider desposable. they only hold aff comparison tables and get little if any traffic. He says that the algo hasnt affected me but didnt say that it couldnt affect me.

Anyhoo, checked my rankings half an hour ago and beleive it or not #3

Cant tell you how releived I am about this. I dont know exactly what it was that caused it, or what it was that put us back, Im just glad this appears to be over.

The only changes i made to try and get it back were:
less mentions of the company name on the homepage, different text in every h1 heading. But I suspect i was right with the forum links thing. honestly i do. I changed everything on site and all that happened was i dropped 50+ places a day. 2 days after replacing the contextual link on my siggy with a simple URL, I go back where i was. thats up by nearly 800 results.

Anyhoo, Ill be watching this like a hawk from now on!