The Google Drop

[jdavis]

We had a web site designer on our site for six months, and noticed that our Google pages were slipping from the the top 10. Once our pages slipped past the top 20, we let him go. After going through the web pages myself, I noticed that he had put in a lot of 1 pixel gif's throughout the site, hidden links, invisible text of keyword dense paragraphs.

He also added a links page of which I'm not too thrilled about, considering those pages are not really relevant to our site except for the ones located on the first link page.

I show that our pagerank is 4, which has remained the same for the past year.

I have since gone back into the site, taken out all of the spam crap that he put in, and we have gained some ground, but not where we should be. Although, last week we did jump to the top five, and now we seemed to have slipped out of the rankings all together. I searched all the way to 150 and didn't see our site at all.

Is this going to be just a temporary slippage, or is there something I should be concerned about? Our website is http://www.usamerchantsolutions.com. If someone could check it out I would appreciate it.

[greeneagle]

jdavis,

Evidently your ex-webmaster wasn't in touch with the Search Engines. There are many good webmasters here on WPW. I suggest reviewing posts by several and then reviewing all posts by them, in final selection. Shouldn't take more than a day. You still have a PR4, so you are not in "Dire Straights". I could name several here but it would seem prejudice among peers.
You choose!
Good Luck!
Ken

[RadarCat]

Hi, jdavis,

How does your site do with AllTheWeb and Yahoo?

I try to code to W3C standards and get a lot of #1
rankings on AllTheWeb and Yahoo but have always been buried under a ton of old "popular" sites that haven't been maintained in years.

Also, I notice Googlebot isn't visiting nearly as often. My referrals from Google have fallen drastically while Yahoo is sending more traffic than ever.

Good Luck!!

[jdavis]

Hey Radar:
We do fairly well in both AlltheWeb at #6 and Yahoo at #9, also showing a #10 rank in MSN under keyword credit card machines, which is our main KW.

I went back on the site again today to look over some coding and check my tags. I found a couple more pages with several 1 pixel gifs, which link off my index page.

I'm not sure if this makes a difference, I believe it does though, but, like an idiot, in the meta tag description and keywords, I had left a space. Example: It's where the Affordable is at.
<META NAME="description" CONTENT=" Affordable credit card machines.">

If I'm not mistaken, the spiders will see the empty space after the " and believe the tag is empty.

It's getting somewhat monotonous considering we probably have 500 - 600 pages to modify.

I worked on the home page today, setting the keyword prominence a little better making sure it was at minimum 28%, and renaming some of the link url's with better KW prominence. I also adjusted our side navigation bar, with our main KW catagories at the top of the bar, and less important KW links at the bottom. I went through the alt tags and found that there were several instances where our KW's were overkill, and the tags were too long. I redid a lot of the body text to disperse our KW's a little better through the site, and reset the headers.

Can you think of anything I may have left out? And by the way, thanks for the reply.

[RadarCat]

Hey Radar:
. . .Can you think of anything I may have left out? And by the way, thanks for the reply.

Hey, jdavis, Your welcome for the reply!

I don't what to say about the one pixel gifs except that they may be benign tracking gifs. Perhaps someone else coming through this forum has some info.

As far as the "(space) in your metatags, I'm not sure
that you should worry about them too much until you can get better information as I thought browsers basically ignore blank spaces, but I could be wrong.

I took a quick look at your source code after I saw that I would have to scroll to the right to read your web page. You may wish to reset your HTML tables to percentage widths instead of fixed pixel widths to avoid aggravating your potential customers forcing them to scroll to the right. After recoding the tables, I would be sure to check them with other browsers to make sure that your pages are not too
wide. Some browsers seem to need a
tag in the anchor text to keep the pages from becoming wider than Montana. I last checked my pages with FireFox 0.9, Opera 6.04 and Netscape 4.61 as well as Internet Exploer 5.01 and 6.0. Some of my pages were wider than Montana (!) until I put
tags in my longer anchor text. (I really need to do this again on my own web site as it has been far too long since I last did it.)

As time goes by, you may wish to consider coding with
Cascading Style Steets. They are great! A minimum amount of work in your .css file can change the appearance of every page on your site in a moment!

Also, I noticed this in your source code:



I am unfamiliar with checksums on web pages and was just wondering . .

Also, do some credit card machines, like ATMs in banks, use the OS/2 Warp computer operating system?

[freehits]

It's getting somewhat monotonous considering we probably have 500 - 600 pages to modify.

There is a nice simple program at www.ultraedit.com that can edit in bulk and may help.