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