Search Engine Journal has a good post on What To Do When Your Established Site Drops in Rankings and gives this advice:

‘All I can say is that many have suggested the same advice in the WebmasterWorld thread. Brett Tabke, the founder of WebmasterWorld, suggested to do “NOTHING”. He said, “The worst thing you could do, would be to go make a bunch of changes. Just let the algo work itself out.” A senior member said that he “made the mistake of making many changes after taking the hit, many months later no where to be found.” ‘

I totally agree with this advice out of my own experience of disappearing from Google late last year. The temptation was to make some major changes at that time but I decided to stick it out and just keep working on some of the basics including writing good content, making the coding of my site validate, building relationships with other sites in the hope that I’d get a few extra incoming links.

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A month back I wrote a tip about Getting Yahoo Traffic for your Blog that simply involves a technique where you add your blog’s RSS feed to the customizable MyYahoo headlines feature. I wrote in that post that after one day that I noticed a small increase in Yahoo referrals to my blogs.

I thought I’d give you another update on my Yahoo traffic.

It varies from blog to blog but I am pleased to report that Yahoo referrals have continued to rise since implementing this strategy.

On the majority of my blogs the rise has been reasonably small but with the most recent Yahoo index update in the past few days I’ve noticed a substantial increase in traffic to three of my blogs (blogs that until the last month rarely,if ever got any Yahoo traffic).

These blogs still rely on Google for most of their traffic but the new Yahoo visitors have increased overall blog traffic on these blogs by at least 20% (in one case traffic rose by 70%).

So if you haven’t implemented this simple technique to increase your Yahoo referrals I’d consider doing it today. No promises that the traffic will come flodding in – but it all helps.

I hadn’t noticed this post over at Wayne’s on the Google Sandbox which I’m linking to here not only because I think many of you will find it valuable but because I am always getting asked about the Sandbox and this will be a great article to send people to in future to explain it.

‘What is the Google Sandbox?

The Google Sandbox is an alleged filter placed on new websites. The result is a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. Even with good content, abundant incoming links and strong Google PageRank, a site is still adversely affected by the Sandbox effect. The Sandbox acts as a de facto probation for sites, possibly to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process.

How would you describe the Google Sandbox in one sentence?

The Google Sandbox is very similar to a new website being placed on probation, and kept lower than expected in searches, prior to being given full value for its incoming links and content.’

Read more at Google sandbox theory validated by search engine giant

A couple of days ago I mentioned the new Google patent that reveals a lot about the ways Google is now indexing sites. The patent is long and if you don’t know the ins and outs of the technical stuff can be a bit overwhelming – so I’ve been checking out what it all means from a few bloggers and webmasters who have the gift of translating it for dummies like me.

What they are saying is fascinating stuff (I’m shocked more people are not talking about it in the blogging community) – let me give you a few snippets.

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Paul at Work Boxers asks Is PR Still Relevant?

‘However, it definitely isn’t as important as it used to be, since so many people have learned to game the system. PR is good for long term success in the search engines, but is not something that can be measured very well short term.’

I agree with Paul – Google’s Page Rank isn’t anywhere near as important as it has been previously – however I don’t completely write it off. I suspect that it still plays a part in how Google ranks sites in its results – but another important factor is that page rank can still be an important factor in working out how much to sell ads on your blog for.

I am regularly asked by people to sell them text links on my blogs and Page Rank remains one of the main factors that they ask about. The higher my page rank the higher amounts I’m able to charge for a link – so I’d answer Paul’s question by saying – in terms of Search Engine Rankings I’m not sure Page Rank is as relevant as it previously has but in terms of grading the value of a blog for other purposes it remains one of the few tools people use and therefore is helpful.

If you’re into Search Engine Optimization you might be interested in checking out this article and the comments at this Threadwatch post titled Google’s War on SEO. It refers to a recent patent by Google that could shed some light on where they’re going with their algorithm.

It is pretty heavy stuff – but sheds a bit of light on the legendary and often speculated about Google Sandbox. I’m yet to go right through it all – but one of the initial take home comments seems to be that if you want to grow in Google you need to work on ‘natural’ growth and not the sudden appearance of a large site with loads of backlinks to it (which has been an approach of many SEO experts perviously.

This makes sense and is probably good news to bloggers who in most cases grow their blogs pretty slowly over time with a steady growth in backlinks. Anyway – if you’re into this stuff have a read and let us know what it all means to you in comments below.

There is also a good discussion on the same topic at Search Engine Watch.

If you want to spend some time this week optimizing your blog for Google then you might want to check out some of these articles on SEO for Google that came up in my RSS feeds this morning. They are good solid tips for people wanting to learn some SEO basics:

- Google Optimization Secrets From The Trenches
- How to get top placement on Google
- How Image Links Can Help Build a Better User and Search Experience

Antone over at SEO SEO Secrets of the PageRank Masters has finally updated his blog with a post on determining what Google displays under your page title in search results which a few people have asked me about recently. I hope it helps.

‘So how do you control what text appears in Google’s search results? Make sure the search terms you are optimizing for appear close together early in your meta description tag or close together early in your page. If your site navigation appears above your content, put it at the end of the document, and use CSS to position in higher in the page instead of putting it at the beginning of the document. Then, hope that people use the search terms you’re optimizing for!’

Wayne over at SEO Chat has a good article on Links – Links: Frequently Asked Questions. It might be of some use to those of you interested in optimizing your blogs for Search Engines. Don’t be put off by the basics at the start (ie first question is – ‘what are links?’) – it gets deeper than that (I guess you’ve got to take account for all stages of knowledge when writing these pieces). Here’s a snippet:

‘While quantity of links is important, quality is even more important. Some inbound links are simply given more value than others by the search engine algorithms. Links from pages deemed to be more relevant, in terms of topic and theme, are given more weight. Also given more value are links that are labeled with more keyword rich anchor text, links from pages with higher Google PageRank, and links that originate within content pages rather than from the ubiquitous “links pages.” There is even some evidence that linking out to other Web pages provides some benefit to the link sending page.’

Read more at Links: Frequently Asked Questions