GOOGLE'S RECENT SEARCH RESULTS SPOIL CHRISTMAS
FOR MIVA MERCHANT STORE OWNERS
Miva Merchant store owners were recently horrified when checking search results in Google for the key phrases that previously brought them traffic. Their rankings were mysteriously gone or had dropped considerably.
This may have been yet another typical waltz in the famous Google Dance, but a bit of research has revealed something much worse. Completely relevant sites with proper search engine optimization without spamming techniques have vanished or appeared where they will likely not be found. Irrelevant sites or sites using spamming techniques have replaced them. Is the sky falling? Not entirely, but it is pretty close for many store owners. If you would like to compare the current results versus the previous results, search for your key phrase as normal and then search for it with -grinch.
There are many theories and opinions being thrown around the web right now.
Some of them include the following. We have also given each theory a pass or fail based on our humble opinion of whether it is true and/or working.
Google is Targeting Spammers - I have read instances from others where this actually seems to be the case, but we have personally seen a large amount of instances where spammers are actually being rewarded. FAIL (Too Many Non-Spammers are Being Affected)
Way of Forcing More People to Adwords - Whether this is true or not, the result is the same. PASS (People will have to start using Adwords if they were previously relying solely on proper search engine optimization)
Google's Update to Its Algorithm Possibly Hasn't Finished - GoogleGuy, a Google employee who posts over at the WebmasterWorld forums even stated as such on Nov 15. FAIL(Statements like these were around mid-November. Search results from Google are still horrible in many cases two weeks later rather than days. Looks like it is finished for now.)
Too Optimized - Some resources are theorizing that having the exact key phrase that is being searched in either the title tag (<title>Key Phrase</title>) or links on the page (<a href="">Key Phrase</a>) could be the problem. PASS( Although not 100% of the time, we have noticed that a majority of the pathetic and not-as-relevant results seems to have the key phrase in one form or another but only in the body of the document.)
So what can you do if the grinch (Google) stole your Christmas?
Sit tight and hope Google realizes the horrible mistake it has made and makes another update to correct its huge problem of poor relevancy.
Increase your adwords budget for December or try it out for the first time.
Take secondary pages and try to optimize them in a less-aggressive manner than your main pages with mainly body text. You can retain the key phrase in your title but with the words mixed up. Do not just abandon your main pages that have been properly optimized. If Google updates again, you may be ready for some good results.
Start creating content for your site even if all you do is sell products! JMH had the most traffic of 2003 in November. Our client with over 1000 pages of content also had the most traffic as well. Look for the next issue to cover creating content in greater detail.
