Support & Assistance: Google Ranking

Some web site owners have reported changes in their rankings over the past few months. This is not something related to the hosting of the web site itself, but rather that Google has been radically changing the way in which it ranks web site's positioning in it's search results over the past 6 months which has had similar effects across the Internet.

In effect what happens is that as Google changes it's systems, the weighting it gives certain web sites changes. Before, Google may have considered your web site the most authoritative source for a particular set of keywords/phrases, but as it changes it's algorithms, your ranking may or may not be affected.

What Can Be Done?
The first rule is not to panic.
Think about what keywords you would like/think visitors might find your web site under and run a search on Google. Make a note not only of where your web site appears, but also what sites appear before yours. The next thing to do is to monitor the results over a number of weeks. It is often reported that rankings make sudden changes with no explanation, so sometimes just watching and waiting is the best course of action.

If your ranking is still poor after a number of weeks/months, you may need to re-examine your site content and the sites appearing before yours on the ranking order.
1) Does your site have plenty of content for Google to index into it's search system and is it machine readable (not made up of images or flash)? If Google does not know what your site is about, you can't expect it to rank it properly.

2) Is Google visiting? Check your visitor logs to see when the Google spider last visited. Our standard statistics package, Awstats, has a section on search engines that have visited your site.

3) What are the web sites appearing ahead of yours? If you are a small Nissan dealership in West Cork, you can't expect to be near the top of the results if you only search for "Nissan". This is because Google will consider other web sites as being more authoritative on the subject than yours, for example the main Nissan motors site would be on or about the first listing.

If you search for "Nissan Ireland", then it would be natural for the main Nissan Motors website in Ireland to be first, but you might hope to be in the top 20 or so listings if you have worked on optimising your web site for search engines.
If you search for "Nissan Ireland Cork", then you would expect to be in the listings, maybe even in the first few if there are no other Nissan dealers in Cork with a web site, but you need to be aware that you don't "own" this search term. A news website might have an article that happen to contain this search term and be ranked ahead of you, a car website might have a list of Nissan dealers in cork and appear ahead of you. Why? Google probably considers a News website and a car website as being a better source of information as they would be more popular and more heavily linked to, than your own website.

Once you have carried out the above 3 steps, you already have a good idea of what your site might need to work on.

For further info, see:
The Google Ranking Panic Attacks!
Forbes - Change to Google ranking system irks merchants

Author: Ronan Quirke, Managing Director