Google Drop

[jwm5411]

Hello everyone, I'm new to the SEO world. My website: http://www.esebring.com was put up a few months ago. We have been going up in rankings and we have tried to make the site useful for our keywords by providing a list of what we thought were useful links...though not asking for links back to our site.
As of Monday 1/5 it looks like Google dropped us off a cliff. We no longer show up for some of the important keywords we were going for...

Where did we screw up?

Thanks

[cbp]

I do not thing you did anything wrong. All new sites get a boost when Google first indexes them. Do a google search for 'freshbot' and 'everflux' for explanation. At least this is what used to happen, but there has not been a lot of discussion on this lately. To me this would be the most logical explanation for what has happened.

You are ranked number one for sebring hair styles.

But it will be very diffcult (?impossible ) to rank well for your other meta keywords of hair styles and hairstyles - to do that you need considerably more links to your site with these in the anchor text.

Have you considered Adwords as an option?

CBP

[jwm5411]

Thanks for your reply. Actually the site that comes up is another URL that points to the same website. I have not submitted that url at all. I'm not sure how Google picked it up.
I know that is confusing...the URL that got dropped was http://www.esebring.com and the URL that comes up now is http://www.sebringhouston.com. They both point to the same site...we just decided to change from a Houston focus to a more general url. Again I did not submit to any search engine, the sebringhouston site. Since it points to the same site I am afraid it is going to get dropped in Google's next update.
I re-started Google adwords yesterday to try to compensate for the lost visits...but I have to say that Google Ad Words have never worked for us.

[Mel]

you may not have as many problems as you think. Do an allinurl:esebring.com search and you will see 26 pages listed but all of them are only urls, with no title or description, which usually indicates that google knows about the URLs but has not spidered them yet.

Since you say that your site was put up a few months ago, it appears that Google has dropped all your previously listed pages from their index but seems ready to respider them. It could be that your site was down when Google visted, or your pages may have been mistakenly included in the billion pages or so that google recently dropped from their index, or google could have just messed up yet again.


There is a page reported in Google from the google directory which indicates that you are also in DMOZ, but there don't seem to be many other links to this site.

My advice is to sit tight, work hard on getting good inbound anchor text links, and use the interim period to polish your sites SEO.

If as I suspect your objective is to sell the products as opposed to the hairstyles you should do some serious keyword research, and incorporate those new keywords into your site.

While I doubt that the revisit after ten days meta tag is the problem, it only tells the bots NOT to spider your site within ten days of the last visit, which can sometimes strech out the spidering period for a new site. Get rid of that tag on all your pages.

[jwm5411]

Mel, thanks very much for the info...I did the allinurl:esebring.com search on Google and did not find the DMOZ directory listing. I also checked the DMOZ site and could not find it there...I've been waiting to be listed on DMOZ. Are the searches on Google consisitent?...they don't return the same data all the time.

[mm99]

When I've seen this sort in the past, it has generally been a problem with the code, for the most part in the head. I could have guessed this one blindfolded.

1) you need doc tags, really import
2) you need a longer stronger title, again real import
3) your desc and kws need "" around them. Goog esp seems to view this as very sloppy. All things that say "name=", need "" around whatever it is that it is equal to, like:

<meta
content="sebring hair styles, hair style, hairstyles"
name=keywords>

whoops, no quotes around the word keywords. That is also a very weak as far as your kw selection goes.

Truth of the matter is, you do not have a single thing in the head correct. I just took another look and the title is the only thing there that is correct in the way its presented. Clean up your head and you'll do just fine. You need clean code for the ses to read you properly. "Where did we screw up?". This one's a cakewalk jwm5411.

peace...Paul

[jwm5411]

Paul, thanks for the info. You are right, it was sloppy. I was under the gun to get this website put together and was more concerned with the database backend. I've not had to deal with the SEO side of the package...most of what I have done in the past is intranets behind firewalls...
I've read a lot recently about SEO and did not realize that the Google bots had issues with "" and doc tags. As I think about it though it makes a lot of sense that they can more easily parse a well formed HTML document.

Making changes now...

Thanks again

[mm99]

For what it's worth, I have not seen head that sloppy in a long time. Are you coding it by hand? If you are using software (dreamweaver, go live), it should have done things correctly. Let me know when you've cleaned things up and I'll take a look.

For some reason, the software on the forum is not giving me notification of posts. Feel free to email me using the email address in my sig if you have questions or would like me to review your changes.

Be sure to contact me when you are through. It is a real easy thing for me to make sure you did things perfectly, no problem...

peace...Paul

[jackson992]

hmm I very rarely use the doc tag. Is it really necesary?

[mm99]

This is very import. It tells the ses what it is looking at, and for what it's worth, leaving them out is not a very bright idea at all. I see it all the time and I know what a diff it makex.

peace...Paul

[minstrel]

re: DOCTYPE


It tells the ses what it is looking at, and for what it's worth, leaving them out is not a very bright idea at all. I see it all the time and I know what a diff it makex.
Why? Doesn't that depend on the page? - if you leave it out, what happens? the browser should default to loose mode - that may or may not cause your page to display in a way you didn't intend but since not all browsers or versions of browsers are really standards-compliant anyway, that can be a problem with or without the DOCTYPE declaration.

How does having it or not having it affect spidering?

[jwm5411]

mm99, I've made the changes to the site you suggested. Thanks

The development tool I use is Visual Studio .Net and it can be setup to edit HTML without inserting quotes and doc tags. Normally I code HTML by hand to avoid the "adjustments" to HTML that Microsoft likes to do. Since a great deal of the code is emitted from the server using aspx pages...the HTML result is sloppy. I've cleaned up both the server code and HTML...my fault, not Microsoft's.
Regarding use of doc tags...I actually grab and parse a great deal of data off of the web and it is easier to make sense of well formed HTML that meets the standards...when we get the doc tags...we know what we have. I would bet the search engine spiders like the same thing.

[mm99]

I've never used the the visual studio set so I don't know anything about it. In my exp the single most import thing is to have good clean code so the ses can read things properly. Believe me, I have sites that rank much better then they should, just because the competition had crappy code and mine was clean and easy for the ses to read, so it flew past everything. Here's an example of that.

Google "survivor island". I had really intended to make something of my site but I was too busy with other things, so the site is very minimal. That's me at #2. The url is:

http://www.survivorisland.tk

This site is a piece of crap and a redirect at that. Every episode, I just put up a new pic and links to the latest info. Big deal. This piece of junk has made money for me, believe it or not. Good clean code is the single most important thing to getting ranked well, in my opinion. The ses just have to be able to read your stuff and you have to have stuff (content).

Re minstrel question :

How does having it or not having it affect spidering?

Having the doc tag tells the ses what you are. You could be a java script file or whatever, for example. Every html doc should have a doc tag. I'm not really sure how something this simple is getting by so many people but I see the problem over and over again.

How does it affect spidering? The single most noticeable item is that if you identify yourself properly, they will spider you when they visit the first time. If you do not have them, they come back later. I have seen this repeatably.

peace...Paul

[Mel]

Actually Paul the bit that tells a spider that he is looking at an html site is that mandatory bit right at the top that goes <html>. ;-)

I know from experience that a missing DTD will not stop Googlebot from spidering a site, but I suppose it could affect the priority of the spidering. At any rate it's good to get things right, but I do not think it will solve JWMs spidering problems

The document type description tag is meant for browsers and tells them what specificationt the page is coded to so that they can display it properly. Of course spiders can be considered a type of browser, but I do not believe that they require a DTD, since they do not display pages they just read the code.

[jwm5411]

To everyone that responded to this post...as of this morning my site http://www.esebring.com is back on Google with stronger rankings than before...I appreciated very much everyone's help and support.
It looks like my largest competition was dropped. It appears...at least for our keywords...that there was another update last night.

Thanks again

[Mel]

Great news John,

Now focus on which keywords you want to target and getting more inbound links.

[fctoma]

Same here, we had one of our landing/keyword pages completely drop off the world... previously we had a #8 ranking for a very popular KW phrase. Then, the next day...notta, nowhere to be found.

I also noticed on that same day that our pagerank on all 5 domains, dropped to a 5. Previously, the last few months, all had a PR of 6!!!!

So, what the )(*#$)@#*????

Best to all of ya!