Urgent help with my site Options

[JMira]

First of all, Hi to all.

I'm from Spain and unfortunately the sites I build are usually only in Spanish so, sorry for this inconvenience.

Right now I have a big problem. I work for a construction company and I made a website for them. I managed to put it in first pages for a set of keywords on Google, MSN and Yahoo!. Everything was perfect until 20 days ago. Since then, I've been dissapearing from Google results, going deeper and deeper everyday or even every few hours.

The first problem that I face is that content, design and keywords are not in my hands, but results are. This is pushing me to use some 'tricks' that might not be well seen, but I don't know what else to do.

Results at Yahoo! and MSN are still right. So I've been wondering about sandbox and other issues. I even removed the pointers from 6 other domain names pointing to this site to make sure that was not the problem.

I'd appretiate some help. As I wrote in other forum in Spanish, the first page results in Google are just not good talking about relevance and quality, and I just can't understand why do my site sinks deeper and deeper.

Ok, the site is : www . grupohabitathumano . es

and a few of the keywords...

construccion alicante
constructora alicante
aislamientos acusticos alicante
promocion alicante
edificacion alicante

Oh, by the way, the positioning is made, mostly from the 'Grupo' option in the index page.

well, I guess you have enough info to help me out. If it wasn't so, please ask me for whatever you need.

THANKS A LOT
Jmira

[bragadocchio]

Hi JMira,

I'm having troubles reaching the site right now. I did get to it earlier, and took a very brief look around. One thing that I noticed was that it was only showing a pagerank 2 in the Google toolbar. I don't know if you've done much in getting links to the pages, but that might be a good thing to do more of if you haven't - look for regional and topical directories, and other places where a link may be appropriate.

What do you mean by "pointer" from other domains? Alternative domain names for the site? If you had those, were you using 301 redirects for them, or something else?

[JMira]

By pointer I mean so, alternative domain names. These have the DNS Zone configured to reach the same site.

I don't know why should there be any trouble to reach the site. It loads fine to me. Maybe, since it's hosted in Spain... and we hava a country internet node here... loads much faster for us. Anyway, the customers are supposed to be from this area.

[JMira]

About backlinks...

I tried the tool someone indicated in a previous subject.
C Class Bakclink Analyzer Tool
http://www.webuildpages.com/cclass/index.php

It reports 48 backlinks, 15 of them from inside the site.

I don't think it's so bad, but I'll try to get some more links. Anyway, the problem must be some other, since pages in first page results for those keywords don't get half of these links.

Thanks bragadocchio.

Jmira

[Black_Knight]

Anything under 1,000 backlinks is very low, unless those backlinks are from some very significant sites like major newspaper and television sites, etc.

48 backlinks, of which 15 are from the site itself is very very very low.

[JMira]

Ok, ok, I'm working on it. But I have the feeling that 1000 backlinks for a spanish page is a huge amount of links. I'll see what i can do

Anyway, Did you see any terrible mistakes within the site code to get such awfull results? The competitors are not great either...

Looks like today Google is in a good mood, my site is coming up little by little, a few positions, just 5 up on the few keywords before the 100th result but, anyway, that's better than sinking down. What surprises me is that I have 38 keywordx on 1st page of MSN and 49 on Yahoo!, but only 3 on Google!!!!!

I appretiate your support.

[Michael_Martinez]

Most sites don't need 1,000 backlinks. That is just overkill. However, closer inspection of this particular situation indicates that some of the competition are depending on massive linkage for support.

Google is showing 55 references to the site, but only 15 are deemed significant:

The site comes up fourth on a search for its title string (in Google.es), out of 34 possible results:


That indicates extremely poor on-page optimization. The first of your search expressions, "construccion alicante", is moderately competitive with just over 1,000,000 hits on the search.

The top page listed has only 1 inbound link, but its parent domain has about 6,500 (6.500 in European numeral designation) inbound links. However, all but 47 of them come from internal linkage.

By contrast, your company has only 38 pages indexed.

The second site listed for "construccion alicante" shows only 3 inbound links for the displayed page. However, the parent domain has 195 inbound links, of which 154 come from other domains.

The third listing for "construccion alicante" shows only 1 inbound link. But the parent domain shows over 1 million inbound links, most of which are internal -- only about 4,000 links come from other domains (I assume from the name of the site, Mundo Annuncio, that it is some sort of yellow pages or classified ads site).

It appears to me that your company site is being outcompeted by internal linkage and better on-page optimization.

If you cannot change your company's web site, then you may indeed have to shoot for those 1,000 external links. But you could try setting up a secondary site that summarizes the information on the official site and provides clear links to it. The purpose of the secondary site would be to inform people about your company from an outside point of view.

A blog or collection of short articles would work best. If you can create the content as a sub-domain on an existing popular primary domain, you'll have a step up on your competition.

Despite the large numbers of inbound links that the top-ranked sites are showing, I believe it would be fairly easy to get a content-rich site that optimizes its pages for relevance to rank well. You should be able to dominate these results in 3-6 months, depending on how much effort you put into it. It would require less work than finding 1,000 inbound links.

[JMira]

Ok, so you mean that the links to the parent domain are also very important.

Well, if you take a look to the 2nd keyword (constructora alicante) you'll find www. alicante-urbana .com on 3rd position, and that page/site has 19 backlinks, 6 from its own domain with no parent domain. Google reports 32 references to the site, only 10 significant

the 3rd site: infojobs.net has far many more bakclinks, internal and external, but it is the 3rd.

I don't know, I'm afraid there's something else I'm not counting on yet

[Michael_Martinez]

There is an undocumented, unconfirmed principle which I and others have observed in Google's SERP behavior that I have named "child inheritance". Google has not revealed anything about how it treats children of well-established, reputable sites, but it is my belief (based on the performance of new content that I release through my own well-established, well-linked, large content sites) that new content pages are vetted faster, maybe even receive a boost in importance by being a child of an important site.

I did not have time to perform many searches against your list of keywords. I assumed you listed the most important one first.

To be honest, without knowing anything about your target market's search patterns, I cannot form an opinion whether you should be concerned.

For example, although only a small percentage of U.S. insurance agents and brokerages operate Web sites, most of them are marketing unused search expressions.

Take that comparison for what it's worth.

[Black_Knight]

I have the feeling that 1000 backlinks for a spanish page is a huge amount of links

You could be right, which is in turn bringing you two separate lessons.

Lesson 1: The Spanish market may be more 'niche' than you really need to be - the Spanish-speaking market will probably offer you a lot more maneuvering room, and oportunities to work with the latin-American website pool.

Lesson 2: It is hard for a Spanish page to gain 1,000 backlinks unless it says something truly remarkable that people will want to pass on to others. 10 Spanish pages could probably more easily gain 100 links each. 100 Spanish pages would only need to garner 10 links each. Stop trying to collect the ocean in a bucket. Diversify. Think broad. Think multi-chanel strategies.

[JMira]

Black Night,

I have a question related to what you just said about keywords, though I'm not sure this is the right forum to ask it... Google used to ignore parts od the search queries like 'the' 'in' 'at'.... saying those were too common words and wouldn't make any difference in the search results.

But for a while now Google doesn't say so anymore, What would be a better strategy in keyword selection, to choose 'construction in Dallas' or 'construction Dallas' ???

(excuse if the expressions are not right in English)

[JMira]

And yet another one...

What are the results obtained with the Google_id Key if they differ so much from reality?? Are those future results?? Or maybe it's just a substitute to watch Google Dance so long useless?

It's almost a metaphysical question, isn't it?

[Black_Knight]

The answer to your first question is "construction in dallas".

The small insignificant words are called Stop Words and are still ignored in specific, but then again, Google does still know that there was a word in the middle. It searches for "construction * dallas" where *=wildcard insignificant word.

So you get the exact same results for each of the following:
http://www.google.com/search?q=construction+in+dallas
http://www.google.com/search?q=construction+of+dallas
http://www.google.com/search?q=construction+the+dallas
http://www.google.com/search?q=construction+a+dallas
http://www.google.com/search?q=construction+who+dallas
http://www.google.com/search?q=constructio...on+which+dallas

but not the same as
http://www.google.com/search?q=construction+dallas

Because there was no insignificant word in the middle, nothing to match the wildcard.

[JMira]

please take a look to this specific page:

www.grupohabitathumano.es/endesarrollo.php

It's suposed to be optimized for 'constructor alicante' but it appears at the 219th result in google.es.

If you look at the 'text in cache', google's toolbar highlights the words seached found in the text. I think it should rank much better

Don't you think so????

By the way if been doing a little link building as you suggested, and I'm thinking about other versions of the pages or some kind of blog as you also suggested, but I'm going nuts.

I'm 1st page on Yahoo for 61 keywords and 1st page on MSN for 43 keywords but still on Google I'm only 1st page for 2 keywords. It's so annoying! After all Google is the target!

[Black_Knight]

Okay, we need to go back a little to the end of the last decade and millennium when the "on-page" criteria was all there was. Back then, showing me the use of keywords on a page was all that was needed to see if a page might rank well. Your question above would have been perfectly reasonable back in 1999.

However, even then a little search engine called Google was around and a very small percentage of users had heard of it. Google didn't care too much what was on a page because cloaking, invisible text, hidden layers, and off screen CSS positioning, made anything it could 'see' on the page questionable anyway. Maybe what Google could see was not what the user would see. So Google placed far more emphasis on human review data.

This means that google was not as much interested in the words actually on the page as in the words that other human beings used to describe the page. It was easy to find this data by looking at the words used in and around links that pointed to the page.

Want to see just how big a factor that is?

http://www.google.com/search?q=click+here

Look at the number one result out of the billion results for this search.
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.a...html+click+here

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: click here

If you want to know what page should rank highest for a phrase, survey all the links of the web, and see which page most of the highest reputation sites link to using that phrase and parts or variants of that phrase. That's how Google do it.

[JMira]

Thank you so much for bringing the light to my mind

That's an example!!

The real problem now is how to! I'm afraid there's no chance but heavy link building.

Anyway, if I keep looking at the first results in some of my keywords... not even this rule applies, at least not so much to figure it out easily

[Michael_Martinez]

Google has ALWAYS cared about on-page content. They have never wavered from their stipulation that on-page content factors must be taken into consideration. They have varied how much on-page content helps, but over the past two years on-page content has helped far more than SEOs in general have realized (because they have invested so much time and effort in link-building they have missed the boat on the shift in Google's priorities).

Google determines RELEVANCE before it determines anything else. A page may have external data (mostly derived from inbound links) which helps to establish its relevance, but Google cannot and never has ignored on-page content when determining relevance.

After it determines RELEVANCE, it looks at other factors, among which is what it regards as IMPORTANCE as measured by their distinctive PageRank (not the Toolbar 0..10 values) algorithm. PageRank measures importance on the basis of a product of the total cumulative importance of other pages linking to a page (divided by their outbound links) AND an arbitrary but adjustable term they call a Damping Factor, which represents the probability that a random surfer will abandon following a chain of links from page to page.

Favorable damping factors can outweigh the cumulative PageRank conferred by inbound links. Unfavorable damping factors can also outweigh the cumulative PageRank of inbound links. Google technical papers imply that a majority of Web documents are assigned a standard, arbirtrary Damping Factor. When competing only against each other, these documents will be ranked in importance on the basis of the importance of their inbound links.

No one outside of Google is able to determine how they determine relevance or how they set the damping factors.

[Ruud]

No one outside of Google is able to determine how they determine relevance or how they set the damping factors.

Couldn't you infer it from testing?

[Black_Knight]

So, Michael, of all the articles pointing out that 'click here' is bad text to use in links, the thousands of usability articles and debates, plus all the hundreds of mentions of this issue by SEOs, any of which would really be a relevant result for "click here", why has a single one of those never beaten the absolutely irrelevant number one result which has not one single solitary mention of either word, and thus has zero on-page factors?

Because with enough off-page factors, on-page can never ever beat them. The same is not true of on-page factors.

You may not like it, but its hard to dispute the evidence.

Of course, if you believe you can write a page to rank at #1 for "click here" I would be delighted to see it.

[JMira]

Yeah!

Now we're getting to the point!

So this means both factor do influence on results but one is more important than the other or, perhaps they weight the same, but an overwhelming amount of backlinks makes on-page factors irrelevant.

The thing is that if I understood right on-page factors can never offer such weight as 1 milion backlinks can, so that's why, in some cases on-page content doesn't matter at all ( besides the fact that without quality content you never get such amount of backlinks).

Did I get it wrong?