Is this a Spanking by Google or a Change in the Algorithm?
January 10, 2010
I noticed only yesterday that my page for SEO Training had been filtered out of Google for the search term “SEO Training” but was still there for “SEO Training Course”. It is never a good thing in my opinion when I start tipping something in the Google algorithm.
Investigating this was not as easy as it has been in the past, as it was not the only page was had been filtered out. This page on link building had also been filtered for all of its main key terms – three good ones and a couple of long tail phrases.
So off I went this morning trying to see what was going on. The first thing that I looked at was my changes during the last couple of weeks.
- More links had been built
- I had changed the page copy
- I had changed the menu anchor text
- I have some advertising that is pulling visitors to the page
Advertising
The simplest one to discount was the last. More visitors to a page if anything should be a good reason for the page getting more links and I have never seen a page on any web site be penalised for referrers, if that happened we would have the seen the results in various Google Adwords accounts.
Page Copy
There are a few instances of the phrases “SEO Training” and “SEO Training Course” in the page copy. It is not an over optimised page, the page reads well and it is not keyword stuffed. I haven’t keyword stuffed a page since early 2006 and it really didn’t work too well even back then.
Inbound Links
There have been a few more links pointing at the page during the last week. I had taken advantage of a PR Web special offer for a half price press release. At$100 it is well worth it, for the links and the exposure. The page has only 11 links, according to Yahoo!, pointing at it. However doing a search show me that the PR Web article has ended up on about 70 other sites. This could be a small problem – however I would expect Google to filter out all bar the few strongest of these with its duplicate content filter.
Another issue that has me convinced it has anything to do with the inbound links is that two pages have been taken out for various phrases. If it was only the training page I might think it had something to do with the links, but it is also the link building page.
Additionally the link texts from these new links were not “SEO Training” but “SEO Training Course” and the page still listed in the first page for the latter. So not a links problem.
Menu Anchor Text
This morning I was convinced that this was the problem. I had changed the anchor text from training to SEO training just before the New Year. This would be the only item that I would consider slightly aggressive. This has been something that I have used on sites for the past couple of years. I want Google and visitors to be completely sure what a page is about. This has work well. Since it was the only item that I was not sure about I decided to change it back to only “Training”.
The End Result
Shortly after changing the menu anchor text the page came back at number 2 in the search results, this happened within an hour. So nothing to do with the changes I have made on the page today. Google might index and find pages on blogs within seconds but it will not do this with pages and / or page changes.
So all this work and investigation and the end result is that Google is playing with its algorithm. It just shows however that depending on search traffic from only Google carries risk. The end result for me a little bit more understanding of Google and number 2 in the search results for SEO Training – I’ll accept that…
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