Weekly SEO news: 1 July 2008
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

This week, we're taking a look at the top 4 reasons why your Google rankings might have dropped. What can you do to avoid this and how can you get better Google rankings?

In the news: Google now indexes Flash sites, Yahoo updates its algorithm, Google uses IP addresses and cookies in its algorithm and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. Top 4 reasons why your Google rankings dropped

Most webmasters face this problem sooner or later. The rankings of your website on Google have dropped and you don't know why this happened.

Google and your website

Here are the top 4 reasons why rankings on Google can drop:

Reason 1: Your website has been penalized or banned from Google

Search for "site:yoursite.com" on Google (replace yoursite.com with your actual domain name). If Google returns one or more pages from your website then your website has not been fully banned.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Find out what you have done wrong on your website. Google doesn't like spamming, cloaking, link building and similar shady tactics. Clean up your website and ask for reconsideration.

Reason 2: Your server rejects Google's spider

Have you installed a new robots.txt file lately? Does your robots.txt file allow Google to index your website? Have you changed your htaccess file? Have you recently installed a spam bot blocker?

Are you 100% sure that the spam bot blocker lets Google through to your website? Google uses different IP addresses for its different spiders and some spam blockers might accidentally block one of the spiders. This might also look like cloaking to Google.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Double check the settings in your robots.txt file, your htaccess file and your spam bot blockers. If possible, avoid bot blockers because they might send the wrong bots away.

Reason 3: Google has changed its algorithm

Google is continually tweaking its algorithm. It might be that one of the latest changes affected your website. Last year, Google released more than 450 changes of the ranking algorithm. That's more than 37 per month.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Check your website with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer and follow its advice so that your website is compliant to Google's latest algorithm. By using the Top 10 Optimizer you make sure that your web pages are perfectly optimized for Google's latest ranking algorithm.

Reason 4: Your competitors increased their efforts

You're not the only one who wants to get high rankings for your keywords. Search engine optimization is a constant competition. Your competitors might have done something better than you.

What you can do to solve that problem:

Analyze your competitors with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer to find out what they've done to get the top rankings. Get better inbound links than your competitors and optimize your web pages.

Things that brought your website to the top of Google's search result in the past might not work anymore today.

Google and your website

If you want to get on Google's first result page and stay there, you have to continually check if your website complies to Google's latest changes.

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week

Google learns to crawl Flash

"Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. [...]

Now that we've launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets."



Yahoo! Search index update

"We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."



Yahoo discontinues Overture's keyword suggestion tool

Overture keyword suggestion tool"It seems like the day has come, the day that Yahoo has killed the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Now, if you visit [the suggestion page], you are redirected to [the search marketing page]. In fact, it is a permanent redirect, not just a temporary redirect."



Google uses people's IP and Cookie data for search relevancy

"Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight webspam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality. [...]

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches."



Google, at 10 years, is looking for more

Marissa Mayer"Google is rolling out innovative features that will allow users to search the Web more efficiently. It is also looking to expand its advertising reach, focusing on the folks who do their queries via mobile phones and car-based systems. Google has been increasing its spending on research and development, which totaled $2.1 billion last year alone."



Search engine newslets

  • Yahoo re-org: A view from the ranks.
  • Search ads trigger trademark lawsuit from rival.
  • Google "Do you mean…?" results baffling.
  • Google Euro Championship doodle.
  • Google tests the new iGoogle.
  • New Google search results pages for BlackBerry users.
  • Google tests using your search data to tailor ads to you.
  • Pomoc Google: Google Answers for Poland.
  • Google spent $620,000 lobbying in 1Q.
  • Google employees even get Japanese space toilets.
  • New domain extensions available.

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3. Success stories

"We are now the dominant player for robotic lawnmowers because we are #1 or #2 for about 20 of the most common keywords in our industry."

"For more than a year we struggled to break into the top 10 for Robomower and robot lawnmower. Since robotic lawnmowers are primarily sold over the internet, we absolutely, positively, and unquestionably HAD to get on Google's good side.

With the help of IBP we are now consistently #2 behind the manufacturer on Google. We float between #2 and #3 for robot lawn mower, out of nearly 1 million indexed web pages on Google.

We are now the dominant player for robotic lawnmowers because we are #1 or #2 for about 20 of the most common keywords in our industry. This, in spite of the fact that 2 of the major dealers are web design experts with years of experience building websites for many companies!

I don't do the pay-per-click thing anymore, that has saved me about $4,000 a year by itself. Am I an SEO expert? No. But with the help of IBP, maybe I am!"
Kerry Clabaugh, www.bamabots.com



"You guys have made internet marketing so very simple."

"I must say, we learnt our first lessons from IBP. It sounds stupid if I recollect today, but facts remain facts. We are a start up, and in our initial stages we had very little knowledge on marketing ourselves on the internet.

Like most of them do, we got lured by one of those service providers, who promised to place us on 1500 search engines, get top 10 ranking on Google, links to top ranked sites etc.... We got sold. We were paying for almost 6-7 months, not knowing how much of our money is down the drains... Until one day we came across IBP while googling.

This was the beginning of another phase in our marketing arena. It was then our learning began. I must say you guys have made internet marketing so very simple. Every aspect has been taken care of so well. The help manual is real amazing. We no longer need any Service Provider to manage our SEO activities. And honestly we are still learning through IBP. The latest version realized is again a nice feel."
Purnima, www.ipott.com



Share your success story with us

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better.

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4. Previous articles

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