Google seems to be dancing these days. There has been plenty of talk on the SEO front by webmasters who are reporting significant fluctuations in SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) over the last few weeks. Being a forum user, I have noticed that some of the digital pointers (A Forum for Webmasters) are being penalised either by a drop in SERPs or by Google’s Houdini Act where the websites don’t rank for their own keywords. A good example are some prominent Web Directories which offer Paid Link Services such as Alive, Aviva etc. Is it the end of road for Directories?
For years, Digital Point has been a great resource for Webmasters, where they have exchanged news, views and expertise and benefited from each other in fine tuning SEO skills. The Administrators have done a commendable job by bringing together hundreds of webmasters with a shared vision. So it comes as no surprise that any changes in the Google World is first highlighted and discussed on Digital Point. Digital Point has been offering good insights into Google’s efforts in optimising the quality of the results, while also conveying the webmaster’s concerns.
Off late, a few webmasters at Digital Point have been hit with Google penalty. We have had official words from Google on how hard they have been trying to deliver quality results to the user. This is clearly reflected in the new message centre webmaster tools, which Google uses to communicate with the webmasters.
After months of effort on search optimisation at Arena Flowers, where we explored every possible avenue of driving in more traffic to Google, we seemed to be breaking into the league of appearing higher on the SERPs for some competitive keywords. Some time mid September, due to Google’s generous tweaking of the results pages, we ranked fairly high for a few of our targeted keywords. But we lasted only a couple of weeks and now we are lost somewhere in the results pages, which has affected our traffic and our conversion rates. As I write this, there have been further changes to the results pages. Our blog used to rank higher than our homepage on the result pages after the mid September changes. Now our homepage appears higher. These changes are giving us a few jitters and raising a few thoughts:
- Are we being penalised?
- Did our competitors get more competitive?
- All’s well, its just Google’s algorithm updation which should happen soon and we’ll be back to normal.
I would love to believe its No. 3. We have always adhered to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. We surely can’t be a victim of Google’s latest tirade on Paid Links. Of course, we have paid for advertising our business on flower related online media. In terms of SEO, we have submitted our site to a few hundred free web directories, while we have exchanged links with flower and gift related sites. But definitely not to inflate our traffic artificially. PageRank doesn’t matter to us. We are not Link Sellers to benefit from a higher PageRank. We are only bothered about ranking well for prominent keywords in the flower business, to make it easier for our customers to reach us. Reciprocal linking and directory submission does not give any quality traffic which could translate into sales. We seek customers who convert well on our marketing spend. I hope Google’s new algorithm helps us achieve this!