Woke up and checked my rankings in SEO Elite, and to my delight found that my site had vaulted out of the gurgler for three of my main key phrases.  I attribute this, hopefully not fleeting, improvement to my adjusting anchor text on some of the incoming links and to adding some content to the site… although not as much as I had originally planned.  (Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way…)

If this circumstance maintains, I will be happy and more importantly MAY be able to conclude that incoming links from nasty pages aren’t necessarily that bad and that the main reason my site dropped in the rankings was my taking my eye off the ball and modifying anchor text and on page optimization for a juicier keyword prior to achieving a consistent position 1 performance with my original keyword.  On the other hand, the Googster might just be f**king with me because they are evil and have a hate on for SEO practitioners and therefore my site will be back in the sewer in a week’s time.

Time will tell fearless readers, stay tuned…

Oh yeah, on the Goog is evil theme… I ran across a plumbing site up here that has 4 pages of minimalistic content, a small number of low page rank links with non optimized anchor text and is outranking sites with 10 x the content and links. When asked to explain the mystery I theorized that the Gnomes at Google might artificially bump the rankings of random sites to throw off the algo propeller heads and keep SEOs guessing about whether what they think works is actually the best way of optimizing. It’s certainly got me thinking…..

I’m at the stage of slinging mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. I just noticed that I haven’t put many outgoing links on my site which may look weird to a search engine. So I am in the process of adding a few relevant links to useful spots on the web, the first of which is to the Google Keyword tool. I figure that if any of my visitors want to do their own SEO they might as well start at the right spot, which is figuring out if there is any search traffic for the keywords they would be optimizing for.

No traffic, no point in optimizing the site for those keywords AND if they are counting on search revenues as a significant part of their income, they may want to find a different niche.

Where wuz I? Oh yeah, slingin sh..  stuff at the wall…  So I’ll try the outbound links thing on some of the pages and see what happens.  Still haven’t added any content beyond this blog post, gotta get to that today or tomorrow.  My new best friend (link indexing tool) told me that my inbound link map grew by 200 links in January, too bad they seem to be mostly gray barred pages.

While I am not yet ready to abandon the flaming wreckage of my site as plunges into the deep abyss of 50th page rankings, I have scored a couple of new domain names to begin building anew.  One will be a WordPress blog only, the other will be a traditional site that I will eschew automated link building services on. The focus will be on good content and high page rank links that I retain control of. Be interesting to see how many it will take to start ranking where I want it to rank.

Stay tuned, the saga continues!  (anyone else remember Njarl and HIS saga?)