Ask Marketing Experts search engine marketing forum

[clubturfer]

Hi there everyone!

I'm quite new to this forum thing, but i have been reading through quite a few posts and have found the information exchanged very helpful.

My company websites have been up for over 3 years now. We run around 20 portal sites as well. Google's ranking system is constantly changing, and recently our websites have been penalised for some reason and therefore our ranking on Google has gone down. Does anyone know what criteria Google currently ranks websites on? And what can be done for website ranking to be improved?

What is treated as spam by Google? What is Google's level of differentiation and where does Google draw the line on this issue?

If a website has been blocked by Google, is this for life? If not, how can a website get out of this situation?

Any information or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[admin]

welcome to the forums clubturfer :D

You seem to have a lot of questions. Yes, its true Googles algorithm changes frequently (it has a half life of approximately 6 months) but the shifts are mostly small tweaks.

Having pages with good content that are not stuffed with keywords is the only way to go. Dont include any hidden text or mislabled alt tags in images and there is no reason you would get a penalty.

[clubturfer]

Thanks for your suggestions admin.

[7thDsites]

Hi Clubturfer - welcome to the forum!

I doubt your sites have been penalised.. you may have lost positioning - you and about 10000+ people since the update titled 'Florida' and the couple subsequent minor/medium ('brandy,' etc...)* updates since that upheaval last fall/winter...
*( The updates usually get a name; like hurricanes due to their sometimes destructive natures)

If you've lost PageRank it's probably because some of the sites linking to your sites have now been discounted as a good link, they might come back, but it's hard to say as Google's been really out of whack for a while now.

Google does state that it's better to have one huge good site than a bunch of sites; though many, many people do have lots of sites - I do, for a few reasons; but if they're related to each other try and avoid linking them to each other.
I would guess that you have all of your sites linking to all of your other sites... you should probably re-think this move and not link them all to each other - get some good inbound links to those sites from external sites.
Ultimately if Google sees that you are interlinking all of your sites, or a competitor turns you in for doing this, they tend to look at it like you've done it to artificially boost your link popularity to the sites; regardless of your intentions.

hope that helps...

best,
john