It’s interesting how indeterminate search rankings really are…  I’ve been digging into various scenarios on why one particular site of mine has wound up in Google purgatory (interestingly, it still ranks pretty well in Yahoo). The two leading scenarios are incoming links from bad pages or that I’ve somehow run afoul of the Google Caffeine update.

I’m tending to discount the Caffeine update issue because I have used the same optimization techniques on other sites that are no worse for wear.  I’m also not ready to declare the bad incoming links scenario the victor at this point either.  Perhaps a third scenario is that I have not really spent any time generating new content on the site, focusing pretty much exclusively on link building, which can be pretty exhausting.  So I think I’ll add some new hand crafted pages on a fairly regular schedule, perhaps 1 every week or two, as an attempt to see if that makes any difference.

I’ll probably also set up a blog and free associate a bit to bring up the page count.

While I am tearing what little hair I have left out over this issue, it’s not all bad.  I have found a new tool that allows me to REALLY get a good handle on the link architecture of any site I am interested in. This tool uses a proprietary search engine to provide ALL the backlink results to the domain, not the hamstrung details provided by Google or Yahoo.  I’m finding it very handy in gauging how hard it might be to move a client site past the incumbents on page 1 of the SERPs.

Stay tuned for more anon,

Jim