Ranking drop after adding what I thought would help

[driver105]

I've been doing SEO on a corporate website for the last two months. Though I'm admittedly an amateur at this, my position at the company dictated that I implement some of these techniques. I read up a lot on the subject, and since there was absolutely NOTHING SEO-wise done to the site before I got my hands on it, it was easy to do a few key things to boost our rankings. And it worked for the keywords we were targeting -- going from ranked in the hundreds for a particular keyword, to #16.

Last week I did a couple more things to help increase our rankings. All I did was add some content that's relevant to our site and business. We showed a small jump of 3 spots or so, and then today we dropped by 16 in Google and 174 in Yahoo. We've held steady at around 18 in Google and 9 in Yahoo for about a month now. What would be the cause of the sudden drop? :confused:

Site is http://www.angel.com/ and the recent additions include the brief text next to the logo at the top of the page, and the block of copy at the bottom of the page.

Maybe this is just a fluke, but it's just odd to drop that number of spots on both Yahoo and Google the same day. Can anyone tell me what the issue might be? I don't want to see it continue to drop and possibly be delisted. :eek: Thanks in advance!

[gabs]

You might want to add a h1 .. :D


Maybe this is just a fluke, but it's just odd to drop that number of spots on both Yahoo and Google the same day.

Yep.. these a differing animals..


Drops like this can be caused by 1,000 of different thing e.g. 1 link can make you top 10 so say that link drops in value then your see movement.
(e.g. by having more links the on that page pointing to you)

The other side maybe the fact that the page has been changed and in some case SE hate it and other its loves its..

I really need to find out what made you top 20 and find out whats changed..

All just imho

:D

[Chris Boggs]

not to get into a deep analysis, but I see what may amount to "over optimization" especially for "IVR" which appears too many times in the Title, description, content... etc. Is this the term you were looking for?

[gabs]

I have to agree .. you might of pushed it over the edge.. ;)

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:http://www.angel.com/&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-32,GGLG:en&strip=1

143 times "IVR".. ummm...

[Chris Boggs]

one more thing...take a look at the exact changes you made before the initial rise, then before the sudden drop here: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.angel.com/ this might help pintpoint it too...

[dazzlindonna]

Also, Yahoo just had an update, so what you did may have had nothing to do with the drop in Yahoo. Could just be coincidence, and the Yahoo algo is now different than before.

[driver105]

You're right that I may have pushed the envelope. "IVR" is (as is apparent) the main keyword I was targeting. I've kept careful track of the changes I've made all along, as well as our rankings along the way. What I did in the beginning to boost the rankings was all the simple SEO stuff -- new Title tag, Description tag and added Alt and Title tags to all images and links. That was really all it took -- amazing what such little effort can do for you!

I started the SEO mid to late November, and our rankings have grown ever since. I'm assuming that Google and Yahoo have updated since November. So it's odd that after gaining in the rankings after inundating the page with keywords, that adding some actual relevant content to the page would make it drop. I'm keeping my eyes on it, so maybe it's just a day to day fluke. I think I will, however, get rid of some of the alt tags that are there mainly to stack the keywords.

[driver105]

Would "over optimization" of a certain keyword result in a Google drop of 15 spots? I thought if Google (or Yahoo for that matter) were to punish you for such things they would bump the site from the search results/rankings all together?

[gabs]

Its a scoring system..

So .. over optimise and your score will be reduced.. So yep 10 spots could be a OO penalty..

[driver105]

http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:http://www.angel.com/&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-32,GGLG:en&strip=1


Can I hit this URL on a regular basis to see when Google last indexed our site? Or what's the best way to see when Google and Yahoo have last indexed our site? I don't have personal access to our log files as they're stored on a protected server.