Why is our site slipping in Google?

[rcmedia2004]

Hi,

I have a question I'm hoping someone here can help me with.
Our website was #33 in Google for our top search phrase all summer until this morning when it dropped down to #51.
Any feedback or suggestions would be very welcome at this point.

Thanks in advance.

[theiceman]

What is "allinanchor:"? I've never heard the phrase before, but when I type in "allinanchor:cincinnati wedding photographers" in google...my site comes up #1 for the search term that I am working so hard to get a #1 SERP in...with no luck whatsoever!

So what does this tell me?????

Please enlighten me!

ice man

[rcmedia2004]

Hi Iceman,

The allinanchor: command tells you what position you are in for number of backlinks to your site containing that particular anchor text.
While it does not tell you the exact number, it does place the sites in order from #1 down (as you noticed) based on which site has the most backlinks containing that anchor text.
If you got a #1, it means you have the most backlinks containing the key phrase 'Cincinnati wedding photographers'.

Now having said that, we all know that Google loves anchor text conatining keywords (*but it must be done properly... i.e. you should remain consistent with your anchor text and insist every link partner use it.
You can also go overboard with anchor text and it might draw a penalty from Google however, so depending on the competitiveness of your keywords you should alter your anchor text after a time so not to draw too much attention from Google.
For our site we target a number of different keywords so our anchor text is already varied just because of that fact.
In your photography industry I would imagine you are going after only the 1 search phrase so you should definitely mix it up a bit... nothing too drastic, but just tweaking the phrasing a bit...such as 'Wedding Photography in Cincinnati' and 'Wedding Photographer - Cincinnati, Ohio'... you get the idea.
still have them all point to your homepage of course.

We are having the same problem obviously but we are in a very, very competitive industry while I imagine the competition for wedding photographers in cincinnati isn't that much so it shouldn't be too hard.
You also have to SEO your pages as well of course.
Backlinks and anchor text can only take you so far.
(*it took us to the top 50 out of over a million sites in our genre.. but no further, which is the problem I'm having now.)

Hope this helps!

[rcmedia2004]

Hi,

After exhaustive research I've found we compare almost exactly the same in all areas with the top ranked 'wedding favors' sites except in 2 areas:

- They have over 2,000 pages in thier websites... we only have 980 (*which I think is preventing Google from recognizing us as an 'authority' site which I've heard they really like... content, content, content).

- Marketleap is only showing aprox.2,200 backlinks for our site, while it shows double that for the #1 site.
Although we have the same PageRank, number and quality of links, not to mention at least the same number and quality of directory listings... Google seems to be either sandboxing over a thousand of our more recent links or does not think we have the 'senority' (kinda like a union) of the other top sites (*all of which have been around a lot longer than us... we have been live for only 1 year).

Does these theories of mine make any sense to anybody?