Google had a birthday in September 2005, turning 5 with their traditional custom logo post for a week on their home page to mark the celebration. In light of this event I'd like to break out of the usual format to take a look at what's new with Google and its algorithm, since we all have learned by now that it is THE premier place to focus your search engine marketing efforts on for maximum (and free) traffic return.
Stats:
Number of pages indexed: Over 8.3 Billion
Number of ways to search: 25
Number of searches performed per day: 250 Million
Total Search Hours per month: 15.1 Million (8/02)
Estimated Market Share: 48%
Cost of Submission: Free
Indexing Period: 4-6 weeks
Powers Results For: AskJeeves, Netscape, AOL, Earthlink, Netscape, Teoma
Google typically re-indexed's in the last few days of the month. Google's latest update has shown some interesting results. For my own rankings, many of the individual page listings dropped but the home page URL took their place in the rankings. Of course, since Google only lists one home page per ranking results, this means less multiple rankings for certain keyword search results. One thing I noticed is more mainstream site results mixed with what used to be a majority of adult results. I think that they've lowered the relevance of the keyword "adult" in many key phrase search results getting more mainstream results mixed with adult specific. For adult surfer type searches however, many of my rankings went way up which means they are still weighting adult keywords (like xxx, sex, or pics), good news for adult webmasters.
I feel it is also important to note that Google is giving domain names containing keywords very good rankings (for the keywords appearing in the domain). So if you are no Search Engine Guru and want a simple way to help you boost your rankings, invest in a keyword friendly domain name for use in promotions.
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As for the rankings that dropped and seemed to have disappeared, after searching for the domain and page name I could see that the pages were not drop-kicked out of Google. So what do you do with a page that was ranking well for a long period of time and has now dropped out of the picture? Well, since adding a page to Google that is already indexed only tells it to remove it, this
does not seem to be the right solution. I suggest that you make some changes to those pages you want to increase your ranking for, spruce it up a bit by adding new text, links, update the title and meta tags, move around your content a bit. If the page is cached in Google, next indexing it will automatically re-index those changes. If the page is NOT in Google's cache how are you going to tell the spiders to revisit the page without resubmitting it? Try creating some new pages that cross and intra-link with the older revamped pages. Then submit only your new pages. When Google crawls the links of your new pages it will revisit the old ones in the same show.
Another tactic is to increase the overall PR (page rank) of your domain and pages. This can be done by increasing the internal cross links from within your site, using keyword based anchor tags for internal page links, and increasing the overall incoming/outgoing links to and from your site on not just the main page, but the internal pages as well.
Maybe pages drop because there have not been any new links pointing to it in awhile. Maybe it's because the domain has been lying still for too long without any updates, changes, additions, or new links directing towards it. The page itself "expires". With this past indexing we have learned that Google is looking to list sites that appear alive and well to its algorithm. We have learned that Google retains information (logs) on each page, domain, and site pattern it indexes and when sleeping dogs lie for too long they are going to assume that they are dead domains.
It is also important to note that pages with too many affiliate based links can drop the relevance of the domain. You may want to either limit the number of affiliate links on one page or use an ad server to manage and convert typical affiliate links to more internal dynamic link integration.
We have also learned that building up property around the primary traffic targets is very important to maintaining your high rankings and increasing fallen ones. Creating your own "network" of sites can help internalize relevance within your domains. If this Google indexing got you down, don't let it. Remember the saying "Tomorrow's success starts today".