google weird behavior

[jack0fshad0ws]

Hi All, in the last couple of month we've been having plenty of grief with google... website: www.ubd.co.nz, which is a business directory in new zealand, website consists mainly of dynamic pages. last year around october we did some "white hat" optimisation, including converting dynamic url produced by business searches into static ones, see http://www.ubd.co.nz/ regional and industry searches eg. www.ubd.co.nz/all-categories/Accommodation/Holiday-Parks/ and so on. as a result referals from google jumped 5 - 7 times!, ubd.co.nz were usualy on first page for searches like "hi fi equipment auckland nz" or "coffee shop suppliers nz" and were growing every month till jun - july this year. then referals dropped back to before optimisation level and ubd was moved to >10 pages... or not found at all.
we did some analysis and changes in the last month including having more relevant page titles, increased keywords density and proximity etc etc. last week google picked latest changes, on 12th and 13th august referals from google jumped 10 times, ubd.co.nz was on the first page for most searches eg.
graphic design studio auckland nz
hi fi equipment auckland nz
coffee shop suppliers auckland nz

BUT 16th august it's all back to same old... same searches return ubd somewhere >5th page even though google cache shows recent pages... there is no "spam" optimisation...
Anyone has any ideas?! or experienced similar problem?
Thanks
- J.

[sarahk]

How frustrating.

Just did a search for

coffee shop suppliers nz ubd

and your office products page came up, but not your coffee suppliers page!

Having looked at a search page and a profile page I have a couple of comments:

* use styles and avoid the style="" type tags on your page
* get styles and javascript off the page
* use H1...5 tags for the important stuff, on H1 per page, but you can have a few more of the others
* a spider can't index
<a Href='javascript:OpenCompanyDetails("959326","36127103805197513")' class='resultlink'>Cross Promotions</a>
<div id='tradeslist' onClick='document.location.href="/all-categories/Government-and-Local-Bodies/"'>
<a href="/all-categories/Government-and-Local-Bodies/">
<img src='images/Gove.gif' hspace='10' border='0' style='vertical-align: bottom'>
Government / Local Bodies</a></div>despite people saying googlebot now indexes javascript I wouldn't rely on it. This should be a proper link to a proper window. If you don't want the page it goes to indexed then use robots.txt to block that. Don't hinder the indexing of this page.
* links should have titles of your keyword text, images should have alt text - and width and height. This page (http://www.ubd.co.nz/industry_search/industry.asp) comes up badly, even on adsl.
* I'm not sure how relevant it is but - are bad in urls, eg http://www.ubd.co.nz/all-categories/Computing-and-Technology/ perhaps you should use _ instead.
* session ids, or in your case search ids
<a href='Business_search.asp?Action=R&sid=361271038051245760&Keywords=coffee&CP=1&ST=N&page_end=1'>02</a> won't be indexed by Google so it won't go beyond the first page of your search.

Sarah

[jack0fshad0ws]

hi sarah
thanks for your comments.
the problem is, the site was well indexed by google and suddenly it's all gone... i understand that google bot won't follow javascript links or urls with long querystrings, this is why we have "static" urls setup like http://www.ubd.co.nz/all-categories/Arts-and-Entertainment/Conference-Centres/default.asp ... there are about 15,000 of those searches, which worked absolutely fine until recently!
cheers
- j.

[sarahk]

hi sarah
thanks for your comments.
the problem is, the site was well indexed by google and suddenly it's all gone... i understand that google bot won't follow javascript links or urls with long querystrings, this is why we have "static" urls setup like http://www.ubd.co.nz/all-categories/Arts-and-Entertainment/Conference-Centres/default.asp ... there are about 15,000 of those searches, which worked absolutely fine until recently!
cheers
- j.
Thanks Jack

One of my points was concern about the minus rather than the underscore as a separator. I haven't tested it but I understand that google gets confused between when a minus is used in a search string and when it's in a url. Always sounded unlikely to me but ...

Given that you do nifty links like http://www.ubd.co.nz/company-profiles/54251/ on the page you listed above why can't you do it in the search results too?

If it's any comfort the update last week hurt alot of people. Do you use Shawn's Keyword Tracker (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/)? According to that my hobby site looks like
bots.pcpropertymanager.com (http://bots.pcpropertymanager.com/) 0 backlinks, PR5, 12100 pages
botspotter.net (http://botspotter.net/) 4 backlinks PR0 2590 pages

which is so wrong. The first site has got 301 redirects to the second site, a few more backlinks than that and in the last update the first site should have lost it's PR - and the second site should have picked some up.

So, I reckon either Google stuffed up this time as it does occassionally or there is more to come. Personally I reckon some of the changes I've mentioned would be good, white hat, changes anyway.

thanks

Sarah

[Joseph Morin]

Actually Sarahk, I beg to differ with you. Google tends to reads underscores as a character and hyphens as a separator and in his blog in Google (http://www.google.com/googleblog/2004_08_01_archive.html) , GoogleGuy also mentions that hyphens are usually better than underscores.

[sarahk]

thanks for the clarification,

Sarah

[Joseph Morin]

Anytime :) Hope it helps.