Penguin alert

[Martha]

Windy - something I noticed straight away is that the H1 text : Windermere Lodges

doesn't match the title and URL - Lakeland Holiday Lodges

Also the H1s are the same on every page - I'd make them specific -and the words "Lake District Holiday " don't appear in the title tags of the individual pages.

I think this disconnect might be working against you.

[Windy]

Thanks Martha - the Google Global addon for Firefox does a similar thing as I've just discovered - very useful!

Windy - something I noticed straight away is that the H1 text : Windermere Lodges

doesn't match the title and URL - Lakeland Holiday Lodges

Also the H1s are the same on every page - I'd make them specific -and the words "Lake District Holiday " don't appear in the title tags of the individual pages.

I think this disconnect might be working against you.

That is part of the deSEOing I've been doing - I surmised that Google was seeing me as Keyword stufing on "Lake District Lodges" the H1 text, which is the page heading (and branding) used to say "Lake District Holiday Lodges" but that was before the penguin bit me. The business name is actually Windermeer Lodges anyway.

In the same way the title tags all used to have Lake District Holiday Lodges.

According to Thomas's comment:

I rather like this bit from Vanessa Fox, previous head of Google's Webmaster Centre

“As far as sites that will see a positive from this, I think it will likely be both small sites (B&B in Napa that titles their home page ‘home’ vs. an affiliate site that sells wine gift baskets) and large brands (sites that use a lot of Flash),”

under Penguin rules it should make no difference what you sling into the Title tag or probably in your H tags. According to the new rules it seems content is king. I am sceptical that they have achieved this, but I am making damned sure I am not contravening any rules as a first stage to Google rehabilitation.

[kendalcottages]

I am sceptical, too. It must be pretty difficult to effectively rank a site that doesn't use any keywords or spiderable content.

[Martha]

Hmm I see! Difficult.

[Thomas BC]

My scepticism has been allayed somewhat by comparing the performance of two of my websites since this thread started. One I started a few years ago, and in terms of SEO I followed all the advice (a few threads here in which I contributed to attest to this) we were all told to (incidentally by the 'SEO experts', not Google), the other I started more recently and does not make use of any of these 'tricks' (simply because Google have been making noises for sometime now about how the 'tricks' were negatively affecting research results).

From what I can tell (I do not have a hotline to anyone in Google so I can never be sure), one website has plummeted in search results, the other has rocketed since Penguin. For some (appropriate) pages, my pages now rank above Amazon for certain search terms. Before I would have had to use all the 'tricks of the trade' to get on to page one, now I am number one and number two on page one - because I believe it is has better content than the big sites such as Amazon. My page does what that search term expects better than Amazon does, and now it appears Google 'recognises' that.

Windy, looking at Google's SEO advice on heading tags, etc - I do not think you have done anything they would not suggest. But like Martha, I too did wonder Windy if you did not act too hastily in de-SEOing your website. Google Updates are notorious for upsetting the apple cart and it usually takes up to a week for things to settle. But that is done now, and as frustrating and as soul destroying as it is I would not tinker any more until hearing from Google.

[Windy]

Thanks Thomas

Having come to the same conclusion I am now reSEOing a bit again now

I suppose if Google still values refreshed content that won't do any harm either.

I think overall Google are trying to do the right thing. I am pretty confident that if people are looking for "Lake District Lodges" our web site deserves to be up there from the point of view of content.
It has been an interesting (and time-consuming process) but I'm having to think about some of the SEO stuff a bit more as a result.

[Thomas BC]

Having come to the same conclusion I am now reSEOing a bit again now

I noticed

It must be pretty difficult to effectively rank a site that doesn't use any keywords or spiderable content.

I am not sure what you mean by "spiderable" here - isnt all text (including html) on a page 'spiderable'.

But on keywords, this from Google (2009!):

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... a-tag.html

[Windy]

Hmmm - and what do you mean by "keywords"?

The keywords meta tag has been considered value-free for some time now, but keywords to me are the search phrases you want to feature for which (according to received wisdom over recent time) should form parts of your titles and H1 tags and feature in your body text.

Of course whether this still applies in Google's new world, where a site titled "Home" with great content about Napa Valley is supposed to rank better in a search for "Napa Valley" than a site with a title "Napa Valley" but poor content, is moot.

Especially as the only way for Google to now the content is relevant to Napa Valley is presumably for that phrase to feature in the text, which makes it .... a keyword.

The key (and so far unanswered) question about keywords is should we be removing them from Titles and H1s. One reading of Google's guidelines might indicate that to be the case, but it seems so counter-logical that, after some consideration, I am now replacing them again, but more "sensitively" than before.

[kendalcottages]

By non-spiderable, I was thinking of things like Flash-based sites.

[Thomas BC]

... in Google's new world, where a site titled "Home" with great content about Napa Valley is supposed to rank better in a search for "Napa Valley" than a site with a title "Napa Valley" but poor content,

Google's Fox:

... B&B in Napa that titles their home page ‘home’ vs.

(my emphasis)

She is talking about a website where the homepage is titled 'home', not the site itself.

This illustrates the point very effectively. Many people (myself included), because we were told by the so-called experts (not Google) to do this, instead of going for www.bedandbreakfastnapavalley.com/home/
we replaced home with a 'keyword'.
I don't think I ever did it on the home page, but I did do it on the booking, availability, contact or prices pages, etc., for example.

[Windy]

I read

B&B in Napa that titles their home page ‘home’

as meaning they had a tag <title>Home</title> rather than naming the actual page www.site.com/home.htm

Just goes to show how slippery this all is and how two people can read the same well-meant advice from the Googledroids totally differently.

I have no idea which of our interpretations is right by the way

Fox also says

“I don’t think it’s about just mom and pop vs. big brands,” Fox says. “Lots of big brands don’t know the first thing about SEO. I think (total guess on my part) the sites that will be negatively impacted are those that focus on algorithms and build content/sites based on the things what they think the algorithms are looking for. The kind of sites where someone didn’t say ‘I want this page to rank for query X. How can this page best answer what the searcher is asking about X’ but instead said ‘I want this page to rank for query X. How many times should I repeat X in my title, heading, content on the page, internal links…”

but do we take that as meaning "if you do the latter you WILL be negatively penalized, or does she just mean that by doing the latter to the exclusion of good content creation you will see others who do create compelling content get better rankings ? I's ****ing impossible to know isn't it

Even she says it's a total guess on her part!!!

[kendalcottages]

I interpreted the reference to 'Home' in the same way that you did, Windy.

By 'keywords' (sorry, wasn't ignoring you... we just posted at the same time), I wasn't referring to the META tag - I was referring to any relevant words on the page, be that in the URL, title tag, main content or whatever.

If Google is telling us that they can accurately rank a site even if it is Flash-based (ie. has no spiderable text/keywords) and just has a title tag that reads 'Home', then I'm intrigued to know how.

[Thomas BC]

LOL Now I am becoming sceptical again

FWIW On the last point my reading is the second of your two readings.

Even she says it's a total guess on her part!!!

In fairness, I think on 'total guess' she did not want to be drawn, and although she created Webmaster Central while at Google - I think she has now left Google. So I am not sure her 'total guess' is 'sinister' (apologies Helen, I could not resist )

I find this a more instructive article:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... ality.html

I sign up to this, fully - even if Google is not yet 100% effective

We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.

If only because it will be one thing less I have to worry about! Right, I still have a website to sort out!

[gam]

The key (and so far unanswered) question about keywords is should we be removing them from Titles and H1s. One reading of Google's guidelines might indicate that to be the case, but it seems so counter-logical that, after some consideration, I am now replacing them again, but more "sensitively" than before.

It seems that every time Google updates its algorithm, SEO "experts" run around for a week or two pronouncing on what it all means and offering often conflicting advice. Then it all settles down. As mentioned previously in the thread, it also often seems to happen that sites take a sudden overnight dive only to come back again quite quickly unless some sort of black hat SEO has been used and found out.

I'm certainly not an SEO expert and I'm not trying to offer any advice - but I can offer some anecdotal evidence: A few months ago I did the SEO for two businesses, both in competitive markets with searches in the high hundreds/low thousands per month for their chosen (geographic) search phrases. For both sites I used the recommended keyword densities in the body plus H1,2&3 tags, alt image tags and page titles. One site has keywords in the page urls, the other doesn't. Both are reasonably content rich but not ridiculous.

Pre Penguin I was very happy with the results with both sites being on page 1 or 2 for the majority of keywords/phrases.

Post Penguin they are in the top 5 places for page 1 for just about everything (logged out of Google, search history cleared and only UK set as the geographic selector - though setting my location as the same as theirs makes negligible difference in any event).

I wish I knew why exactly there has been this jump but it would seem that Penguin is perfectly happy with how keywords/phrases are used on those sites.

[Normandy Cow]

Coming in late to this discussion, and having not spent much time on SEOing our site www.LeGaillon.com I was really very unclear about what to do, so I just left it. I don't know where I stand in the searches, and indeed I haven't updated my site AT ALL for the past two years. This is mainly because I was having problems logging in to wordpress.com and didn't have time to investigate...

So, two years on, with my website still displaying 2010 prices , I decided to create a new one: http://legaillon.weebly.com/index.html
This is still under construction and not "live". I started it at the beginning of the year, but I got sidetracked into dealing with enquiries and bookings and as we are now booked up for the summer, I've once again let it drift to the back burner

A couple of years ago I purchased the URL Normandy-holiday-cottage.com but never used it! (lazy)

I was going to link my new website to this domain name - but is there any point any more?
Also, is it wise to completely ditch my wordpress site for a completely new weebly one?

EDIT: I didn't bother too much with SEO as I was doing so well on OwnersDirect, but given recent amendments to that listing site I think I may need to rely on my website more for next year...