Mosaic Cloaking
Google's Matt Cutts: do not stuff your keywords
Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest spamming techniques on the Internet. Many webmasters still use that technique although most search engines can detect it nowadays.
Last week, Google's anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts made fun of a website that used keyword stuffing. Apart from the rather dubious content of the web page, the webmaster included a very long list of related and unrelated keywords in a small text box at the end of the page.
Google doesn't like keyword stuffing
"Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique.
Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags." (Wikipedia definition)
Google doesn't like keyword stuffing at all. If Google detects keyword stuffing on a web page, that page will be banned from Google's index. Google's Matt Cutts puts it that way:
"Webmasters are free to do what they want on their own sites, but Google reserves the right to do what we think is best to maintain the relevance of our search results, and that includes taking action on keyword stuffing."
You might use keyword stuffing on your web pages without knowing it
While most keyword stuffing is done intentional, it can also happen that your web pages trigger Google's spam filters although you didn't want to spam.
For example, if you have very similar keywords that are used often on your web pages, this might look like keyword stuffing.
Forgotten Fundamentals of SEO
SEO Mistake: Tweaking Pages When Changes In Rankings First Occur
Fatal SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid To Succeed
Google AdWords Campaigns. Keep Your Adwords Campaign From Failing
Google AdWord ads can be a big help to marketing your product or service, but your AdWords campaign can fail too.
For example,
Two gourmet chocolate companies tried pay-per-click last year with very different results.
Charles Chocolates spent $3,000 on pay-per-click ads and only sold 5 boxes of chocolates.
Lake Champlain Chocolates sold 30,000 pounds of chocolates last year from pay-per-click ads.
Their products were similar, but their AdWord techniques were a lot different.
Lake Champlain Chocolates, tracked results and learned how to play the game.
They did simple things such as putting in negative keywords to keep from paying for clicks from people who they determined would no not buy and testing to know how much to bid on each keyword phrase, etc.
If you've tried a Google AdWords program and it didn't work for you (or if you have never tired AdWords), don't ignore AdWords for your product or service.
But don't just give it a try not knowing what you are doing. Learn the basics. The best way to start is to buy a copy of Perry Marshall's book, "Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords
Avoid the following things which can get you in trouble with search engines:
-Don't use hidden text or hidden links.
-Don't employ cloaking or lightning fast java redirects.
-Don't load up your pages with irrelevant words.
-Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
-Don't use frame web sites
-Don't use doorway pages or software that makes doorway pages
The worst kept secret in Internet Marketing is the advantages of a well-wrought search engine optimization campaign. Companies are quickly adopting SEO into their marketing plan and looking for someone they can trust to optimize their Web sites in order to achieve top rankings. However, not all SEO practitioners are created equal so be sure you know what you're getting before you sign a contract.
With over 100 million Web sites on the Internet, it is more important than ever to achieve high rankings for visibility. While reputable SEO companies use ethical SEO practices, there are others who will try to trick the engines into high rankings by using questionable techniques. These techniques are known as spam and can get you penalized or banned from the search engines.
Many times, an SEO provider will promise quick, first-page rankings and fail to notify the client that they use spam techniques to achieve those rankings. To avoid falling into this trap, you must be aware of unethical SEO techniques and guard against the companies who use them.
Consequences of Spam
While search engines may have different rules for detecting spam, in the end, the results are the same – you lose your rankings and can be taken out of the index. It is not easy to recover from a ban, so it is important to know the techniques that must be avoided.
Many sites may be unwitting victims of spamming techniques used by aggressive SEO vendors. Whether it happens inadvertently or not, the search engines will penalize and ban, temporarily or permanently. If a significant part of your online business model depends on search engine traffic, you could be in trouble. When infractions are serious, it can take many months to convince the search engine that you corrected the problem and deserve a second chance.
SEO Techniques to Avoid
Search engine optimization practitioners are often divided into two camps: the so-called Black Hats, who use questionable techniques to trick the search engines into ranking them highly, and White Hats, who prefer to work with the search engines guidelines in order to achieve lasting success. A number of Black Hat vendors have turned to White Hat techniques over the past year; however, there are still many unethical vendors claiming to practice SEO soliciting business.
Below are some basic spam techniques to avoid. Obviously this list isn't exhaustive but it will give you a good idea of the types of things that the search engines find to be unacceptable. Familiarize yourself with Google's Webmaster Guidelines and make sure you know if what is being done to your Web site is in agreement with those rules.
Keyword Stuffing: This practice involves the repetitive use of the same keyword phrase over and over in your Meta tags, Comment tags, ALT tags or in the copy on your pages. When determining the appropriate keyword density for your page content, plan to repeat your targeted keywords no more than six or seven times within 200 words of text on one page. You can use the keyword density analyzer available on our free SEO tools page in order to determine if you or your SEO is using a particularly keyword too often.
Hidden Text or Links: This practice involves inserting hidden text or links that are readable by search engine spiders but cannot be seen by your site's human visitors. This can be accomplished several way, the easiest of which is by using a white link or white text containing relevant keywords on a Web page with a white background. Your site visitors won't be able to see this text and will not know it is there, but the search engines will. All search engines consider hidden links or hidden text to be spam and will penalize the page, if not the entire site, for it.
Cloaking: This involves using a software program to direct search spiders to a group of pages specifically created to trick the spider and re-direct the user to a different set of pages. The user does not see the group of spam pages and is simultaneously re-directed to the real site. Cloaking can have proper uses--some sites use it to redirect based on location. For example, if they sell a product that is illegal to market in a particular area, they can direct those users to a different page where the illegal products are not mentioned. However, by and large, cloaking is used to deceive the search engines and must be considered a spam technique.
Doorway Pages: Also known as Gateway or Bridge pages, these are low-quality Web pages that exist only to pass visitors to the main Web site without providing value of their own. Doorway pages are used to achieve high rankings for a particular key phrase while leading the user to a different page irrelevant to the search query. These pages frequently auto refresh to a second Web site. Be sure that every page on your site that you want indexed can be accessed by at least two internal links and that the page provides value to the user.
Mirror Sites and Duplicate Content: This involves the creation of several sites with identical content and placing them on multiple servers with different domain names. These sites link to one another and are constructed for the purpose of achieving multiple rankings for identical keywords using the same content. Search engines suppress duplicate content because it holds no value for their users. An optimization company who suggests that you interlink all the Web sites that you own is doing you a great disservice. These types of incestuous link rings are a clear violation of the search engine's spam guidelines.
Link Farms: Google's quality guidelines suggest that pages contain no more than 99 links. Link farms typically consist of one page with hundreds of links to sites within different categories that are unrelated to your site content. Such pages contain poor quality content that is useless to visitors. Reciprocal links from these pages hold no value for you at all and could potentially associate you with poor neighborhoods. Avoid these inbound links at all costs because they will result in serious penalties and banning.
Ask any prospective search engine optimization company about their best practices and be sure you know what they're doing to your pages. Beware of spammers who claim to be legitimate search engine optimization experts. Realize that no company can guarantee results and if a company claims a special relationship with Google or any other search engine, run the other way.
Unethical SEO techniques can bring you high rankings; however, visibility is short lived. When you use spamming techniques, your site may benefit briefly from high rankings that last for days, weeks or months. Once the search engines discover the use of spamming techniques, they will penalize or ban your site from their indexes. If you are removed from a search engine index, it can be difficult and time consuming to be reinstated. You might even have to start over with a new domain name. So beware of unethical SEO techniques and ask any prospective vendors if they adhere to a Code of Ethics and/or a Code of Conduct. Once achieved legitimately, organic links can last indefinitely. That's why it's important to acquire your search
SEO Firm Banned For Life By FTC
NOTE: This is why it is so important to really ask
the SEO company questions before you hire them. Read How To Pick An SEO Company
Unethical SEO Can Ruin Your Rankings
The worst kept secret in Internet Marketing is the advantages of a well-wrought search engine optimization campaign. Companies are quickly adopting SEO into their marketing plan and looking for someone they can trust to optimize their Web sites in order to achieve top rankings. However, not all SEO practitioners are created equal so be sure you know what you're getting before you sign a contract.
With over 100 million Web sites on the Internet, it is more important than ever to achieve high rankings for visibility. While reputable SEO companies use ethical SEO practices, there are others who will try to trick the engines into high rankings by using questionable techniques. These techniques are known as spam and can get you penalized or banned from the search engines.
Many times, an SEO provider will promise quick, first-page rankings and fail to notify the client that they use spam techniques to achieve those rankings. To avoid falling into this trap, you must be aware of unethical SEO techniques and guard against the companies who use them.
Consequences of Spam
While search engines may have different rules for detecting spam, in the end, the results are the same – you lose your rankings and can be taken out of the index. It is not easy to recover from a ban, so it is important to know the techniques that must be avoided.
Many sites may be unwitting victims of spamming techniques used by aggressive SEO vendors. Whether it happens inadvertently or not, the search engines will penalize and ban, temporarily or permanently. If a significant part of your online business model depends on search engine traffic, you could be in trouble. When infractions are serious, it can take many months to convince the search engine that you corrected the problem and deserve a second chance.
SEO Techniques to Avoid
Search engine optimization practitioners are often divided into two camps: the so-called Black Hats, who use questionable techniques to trick the search engines into ranking them highly, and White Hats, who prefer to work with the search engines guidelines in order to achieve lasting success. A number of Black Hat vendors have turned to White Hat techniques over the past year; however, there are still many unethical vendors claiming to practice SEO soliciting business.
Below are some basic spam techniques to avoid. Obviously this list isn't exhaustive but it will give you a good idea of the types of things that the search engines find to be unacceptable. Familiarize yourself with Google's Webmaster Guidelines and make sure you know if what is being done to your Web site is in agreement with those rules.
Keyword Stuffing: This practice involves the repetitive use of the same keyword phrase over and over in your Meta tags, Comment tags, ALT tags or in the copy on your pages. When determining the appropriate keyword density for your page content, plan to repeat your targeted keywords no more than six or seven times within 200 words of text on one page. You can use the keyword density analyzer available on our free SEO tools page in order to determine if you or your SEO is using a particularly keyword too often.
Hidden Text or Links: This practice involves inserting hidden text or links that are readable by search engine spiders but cannot be seen by your site's human visitors. This can be accomplished several way, the easiest of which is by using a white link or white text containing relevant keywords on a Web page with a white background. Your site visitors won't be able to see this text and will not know it is there, but the search engines will. All search engines consider hidden links or hidden text to be spam and will penalize the page, if not the entire site, for it.
Cloaking: This involves using a software program to direct search spiders to a group of pages specifically created to trick the spider and re-direct the user to a different set of pages. The user does not see the group of spam pages and is simultaneously re-directed to the real site. Cloaking can have proper uses--some sites use it to redirect based on location. For example, if they sell a product that is illegal to market in a particular area, they can direct those users to a different page where the illegal products are not mentioned. However, by and large, cloaking is used to deceive the search engines and must be considered a spam technique.
Doorway Pages: Also known as Gateway or Bridge pages, these are low-quality Web pages that exist only to pass visitors to the main Web site without providing value of their own. Doorway pages are used to achieve high rankings for a particular key phrase while leading the user to a different page irrelevant to the search query. These pages frequently auto refresh to a second Web site. Be sure that every page on your site that you want indexed can be accessed by at least two internal links and that the page provides value to the user.
Mirror Sites and Duplicate Content: This involves the creation of several sites with identical content and placing them on multiple servers with different domain names. These sites link to one another and are constructed for the purpose of achieving multiple rankings for identical keywords using the same content. Search engines suppress duplicate content because it holds no value for their users. An optimization company who suggests that you interlink all the Web sites that you own is doing you a great disservice. These types of incestuous link rings are a clear violation of the search engine's spam guidelines.
Link Farms: Google's quality guidelines suggest that pages contain no more than 99 links. Link farms typically consist of one page with hundreds of links to sites within different categories that are unrelated to your site content. Such pages contain poor quality content that is useless to visitors. Reciprocal links from these pages hold no value for you at all and could potentially associate you with poor neighborhoods. Avoid these inbound links at all costs because they will result in serious penalties and banning.
Ask any prospective search engine optimization company about their best practices and be sure you know what they're doing to your pages. Beware of spammers who claim to be legitimate search engine optimization experts. Realize that no company can guarantee results and if a company claims a special relationship with Google or any other search engine, run the other way.
Unethical SEO techniques can bring you high rankings; however, visibility is short lived. When you use spamming techniques, your site may benefit briefly from high rankings that last for days, weeks or months. Once the search engines discover the use of spamming techniques, they will penalize or ban your site from their indexes. If you are removed from a search engine index, it can be difficult and time consuming to be reinstated. You might even have to start over with a new domain name. So beware of unethical SEO techniques and ask any prospective vendors if they adhere to a Code of Ethics and/or a Code of Conduct. Once achieved legitimately, organic links can last indefinitely. That's why it's important to acquire your search engine rankings fairly and maintain them ethically.
Google Adsense: Don't Trick The Google Ad Click
The many ways webmasters can arrange their site elements could lead them to drop their AdSense units in inappropriate places. When there is a chance something could overlap the AdSense unit, people may click on the ad without meaning to do so.
It's something Google looks for in its continuing analysis of ad clicks. Accidental clicks can cost an advertiser money if they aren't sorted out of the legitimate clicks.
Google's AdSense blog addressed this recently, and gave examples of elements that
should not have ad units placed too near to them:
- In close proximity to Macromedia Flash games
- Under pop-ups or download prompts
- Near site navigation controls on your pages, such as
drop-downs or menu links
Putting AdSense units too near these elements may make Google's mechanisms think they have been placed intentionally, in order to grab a few accidental clicks and boost the site's ad revenue. It's against Google's policies and could get a site punished for doing so.
In turn, publishers have been asking for clarification of AdSense placement. As a rule, they are encouraged to have their ad units integrated in a way that allows them to attract relevant ads based on the site's content.
A follow-up post from Google on this placement with regards to optimizing ads showed examples of acceptable and unacceptable implementations.
"You can understand that increasing the possibility of accidental clicks on your sites is not in the best interest of users or advertisers, and we wanted to make you aware of this risk," Mike Deeringer from AdSense Publisher Support wrote.
"This is why we ask that you maintain sufficient distance between your ads and any elements of your page on which users may often click."
The advice also comes across as a reminder that Google is watching for sites generating a lot of accidental clicks through their navigation or other element placement. It's likely that some people have realized the benefit of accidental clicks, forcing Google to give this subtle reminder about doing AdSense the right way.
Source: WebProNews
http://ontheavenues-diy-seo.blogspot.com/
http://www.ontheavenues.com/
Social Media Marketing Do's and Don'ts
While search engine optimization (SEO) is often perceived as the equivalent of spam by many users on social media sites, those same sites can benefit from them. Besides that, SEOs are often among the early adopters of most social media sites, and they can help them reach critical mass and grow, according to Fishkin.
To get along well with those groups, it's important for an SEO to not act like an SEO, he said. Patel elaborated on this with a list of things not to do on social media sites:
1. Don't Self promote. Get a fried to submit a story for you, if it's on your own site
2. Don't add biased information
3. Don't buy Votes. It may work once or twice, but it will come back to haunt you eventually. Remember, your reputation is all you have in these communities.
4. Don't break community rules.
5. Don't spam the sites with irrelevant content. Instead, Patel suggested several things that an SEO should do to participate in social media:
Actively use the "friend" mechanism, and friend everyone in sight. If they don't friend you back, dump them, and then try someone else. Be careful how you do this though, so you don't get a bad reputation in the community.
Participate in the community. Build a reputation as a contributor
Write great titles and descriptions. Life and death, this one. Most Diggs occur based on the title and description alone, and many people don't actually look at the article at all. Patel provided an anecdote about a post that he has that made the front page of Digg, at a time when his server was down for reasons other than the "Digg Effect," and the article was not even available to read.
Link out generously (some of these people will link back, and get yet other people to link to you too.
Become a top user. It takes a bit of effort, but there is a big payoff.
Submit you articles at the right time. Patel usually shoots for mid-day on weekdays.
The benefits of marketing with social media are numerous. First off, there's the traffic, but that's not even a primary benefit. In a linkbaiting case study for Network Security Journal, a tech-heavy publication, Hagans noted that his efforts to get links on social networking sites like Digg drove more than 40,000 visitors to the publication's site. However, most of that traffic was useless, as the users were not in the right demographic group that would click on the site's ads, or subscribe to the publication.
The real benefit of the effort was the 3244 back links the client's site added, including several trusted links from authority sites like OReilly.com, LifeHacker.com, and LinixSecurity.com.
Hagans starts a linkbait campaign by focusing on the title and description. As Patel said, those elements can make or break a campaign, since that may be all that many users ever look at. Hagans suggests looking at the "original linkbaiters" for headline inspiration: women's magazines like Cosmo that try to draw readers in with short, interesting titles on the cover. In this case, Hagans used "The fight against phishing: 44 ways to protect yourself."
After the headline and description are done, the next step is to write the article, making sure to fulfill any promises made in the title or description. It also needs to be focused, he said, and it needs to look "pretty," meaning well formatted, easy to read, and professional-looking. It's also helpful to link out generously within the article, so that the referenced bloggers will have a vested interest in driving more traffic to your article, he said.
The top five sites Hagans uses are Digg, Netscape, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Del.icio.us. If he wants to add more sites, he'll consider Yahoo MyWeb and Furl. Besides the social media sites, Hagans suggests sending an e-mail to top blogs in the industry you're in, letting them know you've posted some content they may be interested in.
The additional exposure on those sites can bring in more readers who frequent social media sites, who may then vote for the article on those sites. In addition, many of the visitors will be journalists or bloggers, who may also write about the article and link to it from their own sites.
The return on these efforts can be hard to measure, but there are some tangible benefits that can be pointed to. For instance, the increased traffic from these efforts could be compared to a comparable level of traffic from paid search, SEO, or even e-mail marketing, and compared to the costs of those efforts. For a more formal test, Bhargava suggests setting up separate landing pages for a paid search and social media/linkbait effort and comparing the results.
Fishkin also pointed out that there are less tangible benefits around establishing yourself or your site as an authority on a topic. He once wrote a post about "21 Tactics for Blogging," which was highly ranked on Digg. The exposure from that article led to a speaking engagement on blogging at Stanford University, which in turn led to a magazine article. For the effort it took to create and market that article, the ROI was through the roof, he said.
Condemned To Google Hell. Don't anger the Google gods.
That's the lesson Paul Sanar learned--too late--last year. Up until last fall, the 21-year-old New Yorker depended solely on the search engine to keep traffic flowing to Skyfacet.com, his online diamond business; Sanar says he sold $3 million dollars worth of jewelry a year. Then, he says, Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) turned its back on Skyfacet.com, condemning the site to Internet obscurity.
Beginning in September 2006, Skyfacet no longer showed up on the first few pages of Google's results when users typed in search terms like "diamonds" and "engagement ring." The site's traffic vanished, and Sanar says his sales dropped $500,000 in three months.
What happened? Sanar isn't completely sure. But he does know that his site has been condemned to the supplemental index, a dreaded backwater region of Google search results that goes by another name in online marketing circles: Google Hell.
Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site's pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible--because site operators often don't know what they did to get placed there.
Google's programmers appear to have created the supplemental index with the best intentions. It's designed to lighten the workload of Google's "spider," the algorithm that constantly combs and categorizes the Web's pages. Google uses the index as a holding pen for pages it deems to be of low quality or designed to appear artificially high in search results.
Those pages are scanned far less frequently than those in the main index, meaning that once a page is marked for Google Hell, it can languish there for as long as a year before Google even deigns it worthy of a reappraisal. And as Google tries to manage an explosively growing Web, more and more sites are finding themselves thrown into the search engine's digital dungeon.
If that makes the world's leading Web-crawler sound judgmental, consider Google's difficult position. The search juggernaut is faced with the endless task of reading and ranking the ever-expanding Web's billions of pages, the equivalent of putting the Earth's population in order from tallest to shortest every few minutes. Meanwhile there are growing numbers of pages filled only with junk text and advertising, designed solely to fool the engine. It's Google's task to sort out the trash from the worthwhile, and to do it better and faster than competitors like Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), or InterActiveCorp's (nasdaq: IACI - news - people ) Ask.com.
So how does Google decide what kind of pages get punished? That's where things get tricky. Google keeps the details of its decision-making a secret, since the company is trying to prevent sites from gaming the search engine. But it also means that site operators like Paul Sanar can offend Google and not know what they've done until its too late.
In retrospect, Sanar thinks he can trace his problem to a search marketing consultant he had paid $35,000 to improve Skyfacet's Google rankings. He now believes the consultant mistakenly replicated content on many of the site's pages, making them look like duplicate--that is, spam--content. But even after he reversed the consultant's changes, he couldn't get Skyfacet's pages out of Google Hell, where they remain today.
Other online businesses have similar stories. MySolitaire.com, another online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the site's vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business $250,000 in sales, and he says he still doesn't know why the site's pages got Google's thumbs-down.
"So many of the rules are vague," Jhalani says. But he admits that he tried gray-area tactics like buying links from more established sites to juice his traffic. "For a small site like ours, you have to stay right on the edge to compete with sites with bigger budgets," he confesses.
Jhalani says he removed the links that may have offended Google, but the site remained in Google's gulag. Jhalani wrote Google asking the search engine to reappraise MySolitaire; nothing happened. Since Google ranks sites partially by the quality of sites that link to them, he painstakingly contacted every site that seemed to be of low quality and linked to MySolitaire, asking them to remove their links, sometimes even sending cease-and-desist letters. Finally the site returned to Google's main index last June, though Jhalani has no way of knowing just what finally caused Google's algorithm to forgive him.
Chris Bartow is a search marketing consultant for Revenco.com, a real estate site that also saw the majority of its pages sent to Google Hell for six months of 2006. Bartow believes that some identical content on 90 of his site's property listing pages caused Google to mistake them for plagiarized spam sites. "I know they're trying to get rid of sites with no practical purpose," he says. " But when your pages get dumped, you lose half your traffic and a lot of money."
Bartow thinks his misfortune stemmed from a temporary glitch in Google's algorithm. But other search engine marketers say that Google Hell is only increasing in size and severity. "The supplemental index has been on the upswing for quite a while," says Aaron Wall, a search engine consultant and Google-watcher. "They've gotten much more aggressive about throwing pages in there."
Search marketer Michael Gray says he's seen the standards "tighten and loosen and tighten and loosen," but the last six months have been particularly brutal. "There has been a lot of collateral damage with some of these decisions," Gray says. He cites the growing sophistication of spam pages as one source of trouble. "Google's trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but it's kind of impossible. A spammer can very easily create something that resembles a legitimate site if he knows the right tricks," he says.
The criteria for which pages are targeted for the supplemental index remains a subject of guesswork. But Web designers have found that pages with duplicate content, few words or pictures, and a lack of links to other quality sites are the most likely to be pulled in. Most agree that newly created sites are especially vulnerable.
As for Google's own take on its supplemental index, the company is typically tight-lipped. Google's official page for Webmasters cryptically notes that Google is "able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index," a phrase that puzzles most search marketers.
In an e-mail, Google product manager Prashanth Koppula offers little more in the way of an explanation. Asked if the supplemental index is getting bigger, he responds that "new pages are constantly being added," but that the "algorithmic nature" of Google's spider makes it hard to measure the index's size or how fast it's growing. That's not a problem, Koppula says, because supplemental results are no less legitimate than normal results, and pages in the supplemental index aren't checked any less frequently by Google's spider.
But Jim Boykin, another search marketing consultant and blogger, doesn't buy it. "If your page is in the supplementals, it won't rank for any competitive search, and it can be really hard to get it out," he says. "That's why we call it Google Hell."
Source: Forbes Andy Greenberg
http://ontheavenues-diy-seo.blogspot.com/
http://www.ontheavenues.com/
What to Do if You Suddenly Lose All Your Google Rankings This is a great article. We at OnTheAvenues are also always receiving the questions about Google loss in rankings, can we fix that and so on. Below puts it all in a nut shell, and we concur!
A few days ago I received a request from one of my former clients: to find out why exactly the Google rankings for his site so drastically dropped and didn't come back even a month later.
I said I couldn't help, because nobody except a few people in GooglePlex knows exactly what happens to the ranking algorithm when the rankings drastically change. We SEOs can spot certain patterns and come to conclusions (which are probably, but not necessarily, true), but we can't give a site owner an accurate list of reasons for ranking drops in each particular case and say, "Just do this and the rankings will be back".
But I'm naturally curious, so I retrieved the old keyword lists from my archives (I haven't touched the site in question in months), along with the saved results of the manual rank checks I do from time to time while working on websites. A brief check showed at once that though rankings in most groups of keywords had dropped dramatically indeed, other keyword groups, on the contrary, had improved over the months. This led me to the following conclusion: the ex-client's site is not being penalised or permanently filtered out, but is suffering from yet another Florida-like update.
The "Florida" Google update (Google updates receive names according to a system very similar to the system of naming Atlantic hurricanes) struck in November 2003 (about the time I entered search engine optimisation). It dropped to the nowhere millions of sites that used to comfortably sit on the first positions for their favourite search terms. SEOs who had never seen anything of the sort before started making thousands of desperate postings on various SEO forums and blogs, and nobody knew what to do at first. Then people slowly calmed down and decided not to do anything rash, but wait and see what happens.
In January 2004, another update named Austin dropped still more sites. It looked like the second wave of Florida, but at the same time it brought certain victims of Florida back to where they used to be. A month later, the Brandy update released even more Florida-struck sites.
This happened more than three years ago. We've had more updates of a similar kind (supposedly applying new filters developed by Google engineers, testing them and then rolling back those that have proven ineffective). In October-November 2005, we had the Jagger update that went in three stages, but even more updates remained unnamed. Right now, in March-April 2007, we are having another one. It is also noticed that every update affects different niches and SERPs, in turn. So, the first advice: if your site got hit by a major Google update, don't panic or turn your site upside down.
I'm not saying don't do anything
If your site suddenly loses all the rankings, it's a good time to check how clean it is. Check and double-check your code. Even such a small thing as a questionable alt attribute or a misplaced tag can trigger a filter. Check your linking patterns and if you are heavily cross-linking 20 or 30 sites belonging to you, remove the unnecessary links and merge the sites themselves where possible. Check your outbound links for bad neighbourhoods.
If you are sure your site is clean in terms of SEO, consider moving to higher website building standards. For example, if you have been considering switching from table-based design to a table-free one, there is no reason not to do so now. You can also add more content or revise your navigation. But be careful and don't make your site wors
