Anyone else getting bashed by Google?

Anyone else getting hit by this Google update. I spoke with an SEO expert at the convention this weekend and she told me some inside scoop that Google is selecting "areas of focus" one stage at a time for cleaning up listings. Sadly it appears the first area of focus is the travel industry. This started about a week ago.

Have any insight?

If you're getting bashed by Google it's probably because you're engaging in some SEO strategies that are a little questionable, excessive, or spammy.

Right off the bat, your title is too long. And your whole homepage suffers from a lack of focus. Are you a travel site? A gay porn site? A real estate site? A gay video site? When a spider crawls your page, it will "ask" the same questions, "What is this site about?"

Generally speaking, you optimize a page for one or two keywords at a time. But the written content on your site contains information about travel, real estate, gay videos, and more. But there's not enough of any one thing to produce a good ranking. My suggestion would be to break your site into different subject sections and keep one subject to a page. While the real estate text ad might be helping you cross-sell another product, it's not helping the rankings for "travel" let's say on that page.

Spiders are also getting smarting at indexing content. So it's not just good enough to load up a bunch of keywords and get a good ranking. Search engine technology is starting to become very advanced, so a spider will "know" that a good page about George Bush, for example, will also contain words like: Republican, President, Washington DC, Texas, American. And if that kind of language is missing from a page, then it may not get much in the way of consideration.

The keywords in white at the bottom of your page are spammy and you may be raising some red flags.

I don't know if this helps.

Cheers,
Michael

Thanks for the reply! I know - that's why I'm redesigning the site. I just wondered if the Google update was hitting others in general.

When I get the new design up, I look forward to your feedback :)

Sorry, I guess I didn't really answer your question, but gave you a lot of unsolicited advice. :) Essentially what I was saying inbetween the lines is that the Jagger update hasn't affected me at all in a negative way.

Cheers
Michael

Sweet :goofy: Thanks.

In addition to what Michael has said, Jagger also hit hard many who were buying links that had zero relevency to their site or were doing such obvious link trades with non related sites that they simply disappeared from the SERPS... so it isn't just keywords, design, or content but who is linking to you on a reciprocal basis. Google also with Jagger clearly stressed that they are quite able to follow so called three way linking plans and again have come down on some who mis-used the process or tried to scam it.

Ian

Well I haven't bought any links or done blackhat SEO. I think it's very much like what the SEO meeting I had at the InterNext convention said - G is going to target specific areas one at time and the first they hit was travel. It will eventually catch up with all.

That's very interesting. I don't see how this will be done though. The google people were always saying how they don't want to be dealing with this manually, and are always looking for ways to improve their algo. The algo doesn't tell between "niches" or "topics", it's all the same to it.

If you think this google update was bad, just wait now that Microsoft has a hand in it and is taking over the SEO structures.

Only upside of Microsoft stepping in that I can see is the rumored extinction of the sand-box.