I just got off the phone with an old friend from WAY back in the early Internet days. She was frustrated at how her top ranked website was very noticably yet gradually falling, over the past six to twelve months, at Google for a lot of her targeted keywords.
It's true, I've been watching it.... even telling her she should do something about it. I even tossed her a few "pearls of wisdom" about eight months ago at lunch.
Here's why it's happening and why it might be happening to you.
Six to eight YEARS ago everyone was linking to "good content" and "good websites." It was the thing to do to "help your users have a more pleasureable experience..." at your website.
The idea was better experience leads to "oh, we had such a nice "experience" at that wedding vendor's website that we're going to go back..."
PLEASE SHOOT ME !!
Anyway, back to the story... so years ago other websites linked to this website, or maybe YOUR website, and most of the time you didn't even know it.
Someone found your website, it looked nice, maybe it was top ranked so it was "popular," it had good content.
But things changed.
People got smarter and more stingey about sending their traffic away. Heck, it's hard enough to get it in the first place... better be careful how much of it you send away.
Links AWAY from a website now are mostly seen for what they are: sending potential customers AWAY from your business to someone else's.
AWAY is no way to get a new customer if you're a wedding photographer, wedding videographer, or anyone marketing to brides online.
Don't believe me? How many websites do you know see with banners at the top of them to "Top Wedding Links" and "Look For Us at Best Weddings.COM."
I digress...
So one of the things that has happened as a result of this phenomena is that YOUR site, like hers, has fewer links to it.
This is particularly true if you don't have a link building strategy in place.
It's nothing you've done wrong, other than ignoring how quickly things change on the Internet, but it's a result of the way people "link" or use links at their websites.
It's changed dramatically in the past few years.
Again, these might even be links you DIDN'T KNOW you had. They might have been a link to your website or maybe an entire "links" page was eliminated (where you were just one of the links). This typically took place when a website was "redesigned."
Either way... a link TO your website, which Google views as "vote of confidence," so-to-speak, or "algorithmically" (yikes!), is now gone.
And since Google heavily weighs links that point TO a website as a vote of confidence, they even use it as a factor of Google Page Rank, as my friend lost link after link, very unbeknownst to her, sooner or later Google picked up on it (i.e. fewer links to her website) and it has has a negative impact on her overall rankings at Google.
It gets a little worse...
Add to that that the websites that WERE linking probably were losing THEIR rank for the same reason or because their competition built better websites that were more crawler friendly with better relevancy...
Add to that a million other websites like hers, and yours, that have come on line (i.e.dilution)...
Add to that other search engine optimization variables that weigh equally as important as "links"...
And you have what you have today: losing ground with Google and other search engines.
What should she do?
I said four years ago "the days of free traffic are dwindling fast." There's no such thing as free lunch.
Chris Jaeger
Book More Weddings
http://www.bookmoreweddings.com/
Get the ADVANTAGE for your website. More traffic, more brides, more inquiries, more sales.
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