This page should be all clean now - 9-1-2006

Yesterday I wrote about how I did my first search of the day for portland web design and we weren’t there anymore. The previous day we had moved up from position #10 to position #6 out of millions of results.

Then for some reason yesterday, we were completely gone from the first 3 pages for our target term. I thought we were penalized for some reason. There are so many reasons why our website may have been penalized, I wasn’t even sure where to begin. I admit for half of yesterday I was letting it get me down…. Thinking to myself ohhh boy is this a snapshot of what’s going to be happening for the first page of portland web design or am I some how going to be shuffled back into the postion we desire ?

Well, today is another day and I’m happy to see we are back at #6 for portland web design. Hope that it sticks….

- G

Scratching my head today wondering if I really did shoot myself in the foot for writing about ranking well for portland web design.

Yesterday and for the past several weeks we’ve been in the top 10. After I checked this morning it looks as if that page got shuffled pretty good and now we are not even on the first or second page.

It’s useless to get upset so from here I’m just going to have to be patient and see what happens. Makes me wonder if we’ve been penalized, shuffled or if Google is doing it’s little dance?

-G

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

This expression is coming back into play for the SEO arena. In another effort to stay one step ahead of the link spammers, Google is rumored to be gearing up for yet another shift in calculating rank among the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

Turning to Click Behavior

Word on the street is that click behavior and page content will supplant inbound links in order of importance when determining page relevance. There will still be a reliance on back links, but the weight given to this metric will be declining and that of click behavior increasing. I wouldn’t be surprised if searchers were being tested on this already.

Improved Snippets

Google also recently invested in an up-and-coming technology from an Israeli doctoral student named Ori Alon. Ori recently developed an advanced text search algorithm to better categorize related content across the web for use on his search engine. This will help Google build better, more relevant snippets on their SERP’s: even more evidence of improving the click-through to relevant content.

One More Round

In my opinion this is all being done to take a step away from the flaws in the back link analysis Google and others rely so heavily on. Does this mean you should stop building links? No, that would be silly. Think of this as just another round in the game. Once spammers and black hats figure out ways to beat this system, there will be something new introduced. The game just keeps on playing.

How can I keep up?

If you don’t have the time, stomach, or resources to participate in the black hat games, stick to adding value and creating something remarkable that people want. If you chance the algorithm, you could win and get ranked, but you could also lose and drop from all search engines.

Recommended Reading

Barry Schwartz -Google’s New Popularity Rank; Traffic Versus Links

RustyBrick - http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003631.html

Had a good time last weekend with some old friends in Eugene, Oregon.

Thanks Marta and Jocelyn for inviting me down. I really enjoyed being with you all… Marta and Jim thank you for putting the party together, the food was great, who cares if the EM’s lost - IT was fun hanging out with all ya’ll. Nice to meet you Christan and Kristen, GingerLY, Dillon and to see see Koree and Marlis again….. Peace Out!!!

Heres the pictures from the reunion and rafting.
………………………….::::::::::::::::::::: Click here for the Party and Rafting Pictures <<<

You can see all the pictures if you click the link above or below

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http://www.greggaylord.com/pix/reunion/

- G