SEO Problem

[Graham]

For a long while my site was ranking quite well for the term: "Top Online Poker Sites" and several other similar terms. Now, I can't even find it on the first 20+ pages. Any idea why this might have happened? Is this some kind of a penalty being applied to my homepage? I also noticed that if I search for my site by "bankroll boost" the blog ranks higher than the homepage. I have been trying to figure this out for the longest time now and can't figure it out. I am almost at the point of joining SEO book just to figure this out.

URL: http://www.bankrollboost.com

[Prenut]

I'm at home on my laptop (piece of shit), but BRB is taking infinitely longer to load than any other site that I bring up. How long have you noticed this sharp rankings drop?

[Prenut]

And how many pages have you added since this rankings drop?

Do any of the newer pages have similar titles such as Top 10 Poker Sites | 10 Best Online Poker Rooms ?

Have you changed your internal linking structure? Any new sitewide links on BRB either in the side or top navs or in the footer?

Have you recently changed page title of the home page or any other pages?

[Graham]

Hey Prenut, thanks for the help. The rankings drop has been around for many months if not almost a year now. It happened around the same time I changed the design to the new one, but I kept most things exactly the same. The linking structure has changed on a couple of pages, but nothing that should affect this. There are some new links for pages that I have added over time, but these were changed after. I haven't recently changed the title, but did a while back to try and fix it... though it didn't seem to do anything.

Essentially I can't get the homepage to rank for anything other than the whole word bankrollboost

[Prenut]

It appears that you have 96 internal links on the homepage, how does that compare with your interior pages?

You have 3 outgoings, all in the footer. (all of which are sitewide outgoings)

Have you tried reducing internal links on the homepage and possibly adding an outgoing link(s) within the content of the homepage?

Are you linking back to the homepage within the text on interior pages with varied anchor, or are you just linking to the homepage via the navs?

[Prenut]

You seem to want to rank for "top online poker sites" on your homepage, yet you have a link on your homepage with anchor "top online poker sites" that points to this page Top 10 Poker Sites | 10 Best Online Poker Rooms.

I haven't looked at every page, but it is possible that you are doing this frequently which makes it appear that you just havent made your mind up what keywords you want to drive to what location.

[Graham]

You seem to want to rank for "top online poker sites" on your homepage, yet you have a link on your homepage with anchor "top online poker sites" that points to this page Top 10 Poker Sites | 10 Best Online Poker Rooms.

I haven't looked at every page, but it is possible that you are doing this frequently which makes it appear that you just havent made your mind up what keywords you want to drive to what location.

Yea, that is what I am thinking after talking to someone else also... I am gonna try and change the 2 pages so they go for different keywords and cut down on the number of links within the pages... you think that should correct it?

[Prenut]

I don't think anyone can say for sure if it will help, or if it won't. But if I were a search engine and I went to your index page, I would be confused. If I were a search engine I would be thinking something along the lines of "This page talks about this stuff, but then links out to very similar (title and keyword wise) internal pages with the anchor text that I thought this page was about. It seems like a fair amount of people have voted for this page, but this page seems to think that other pages on the site are a better fit".

Map out what pages you want to target for what, and set up your internal linking structure and page titles accordingly.

[Sebastian]

That's some great advice Prenut.

I think Graham isn't trying to optimize though, he is just trying to figure out why his homepage isn't ranking well anymore.

If I had to guess, I think you received a penalty Graham. I think this happened a little bit after Cardschat. I have a sick memory and remember you were saying your site actually shot up in the rankings when Cardschat and others when down under. If I recall well your site dropped a couple of weeks after that, indicating it was likely a penalty.

Your homepage has an incredible amount of in-links too. I think maybe it doesn't enough variety in anchors, but this is just a wild guess. I'm not sure this could have triggered a penalty. As a whole though, all these links made Bankrollboost the powerhouse it is today so it's not that bad.

I'll PM you something very sick I noticed related to anchors and SEO. Keep it to yourself.

I hope the penalties will expire for you, or that Prenut is right and you're just flip flopping like John Kerry.

Seb

[kingcobra]

For a long while my site was ranking quite well for the term: "Top Online Poker Sites" and several other similar terms. Now, I can't even find it on the first 20+ pages. Any idea why this might have happened? Is this some kind of a penalty being applied to my homepage? I also noticed that if I search for my site by "bankroll boost" the blog ranks higher than the homepage. I have been trying to figure this out for the longest time now and can't figure it out. I am almost at the point of joining SEO book just to figure this out.

URL: Top Online Poker Sites | Free Poker Money Bankroll | Best Online Poker

When you find that a sub page outranks your home page where it shouldn't then your home page has been dinged a bit. This isn't a penalty per se but in almost all cases you've done something to your home page that the bot doesn't like. I've had this happen a half dozen times for this and that. The main cause for me is adding too much stuff to the page causing it to load too slow. One time, after some guy asked me why there were no banners on my site, I added a bunch and my home page got completely turfed by Google until I got rid of them and went back to around where I was load wise. This is actually something that not a lot of people know about or focus on and they never figure it out because they never get nimble enough to be ranked well in the first place and thus never discover the reason.

Anyway it could be this, it could be a lot of things really. Retrace your steps and go back and remove any changes you've made since the last crawl and then you can re-add them if needed to see what caused the problem.

Update: After reading some of the other posts, which seem to be on to the same thing, I checked your load time and it's around 85. That's way too high man, try to cut down on all the graphics and other extraneous stuff on there. It's a gorgeous page by the way and you're talking to a guy who loves the bandwidth hogging stuff even more than you do, but the home page isn't the place for too much of this stuff. If your server is slower than normal that will put you even more in the tank. Now you can overcome this stuff with massive amounts of juice, a la pokerlistings and other large homepages, but you're not in this league so your slow home page won't be overlooked so much and the prettiest of pages won't help you if Googlebot disapproves which it's clearly doing here.

By the way I spent over 2 years in jail not even being listed by google for this very reason, although my home page back then was sick slow, way slower than yours, and now I've paid very close attention to this and don't mind sharing because I sure as hell was frustrated over it then