My website http://www.maureenmegowan.com is an Advanced Access site with a huge amount of unique original content, and I have been enjoying great placement in Google searchs for a large amount of key words. In the last week, however, my placement, which had been page one on search results, often the first listing, has dropped significantly, often to page 4 and below.I have a large number of reciprocal links to my site. My site has a Google Page Rank of 4, and has been in existence for a year. I can't figure out why Google has suddenly changed my search results so dramatically. I am constantly adding and changing content, so I don't think that is the problem. Any other Advanced Access sites see a similar problem recently?

Google results do fluctuate like that for a lot of people. They use many different data centers to serve up results to people each time they search and these centers can vary in who ranks where. This is about to change, though, because they're going to switch to a more centralized system for more consistent results.

Anyone interested can read more about the changes Google will be making here:
http://directmag.com/searchline/1-25-06-Google-BigDaddy/

I just went to your Advanced Access Website to look at it. I am currently looking to change my website and I am exploring different web design companies. I did call AA and liked them. I have to say I was not impressed by their design, I do however really like yours. Did you have a lot of input on that design. I also wanted to ask you did they do most of your SEO or did you and has working with this company been more expensive or less than you thought?

www.lucidorealestate.com

Google is currently doing a "big daddy" update......

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1916406,00.asp


I hear that it is phasing in over the data centers.

I used one of Advanced Access's template designs and have significantly added content and pages. The Advanced Access yearly fee is about $495 and they have an initial set up fee. Their technical support has been great and I get answers from a well trained technician live immediately, The thing I like about Advanced Access is that I can easily add pages and edit the content of all my pages with no real technical knowledge or HRML training. It is as easy as working with a word document. The people at Advanced Access, however don't have a lot of suggestions or apparent expertise in helping you with SEOm so I have done most of it with suggestions from various people at this and other real estate forums. All Advanced Access suggests is reciprocal linking and creating good content, which although are certainly important, it would be nice if they had a little more insight as to what someone can do to improve their placement with Google. The disadvantage to Advanced Access is that linking with other Advanced Access sites does not seem to have much effect with Google, but these links do seem to get recognized by MSN.com. The Google spyder search engine does not seem to readily index the State Directory pages for Advanced Access sites, which have the reciprocal links. I have had many other non Advanced Access sites refuse to link with me because of this. Otherwise, I would recommend them if you want to do most of the work maintaining your website. As I mentioned above, until the last week or so I had been getting great placement in Google searchs since about last October, which was about 9 months after I created the site with Advanced Access, and got out of the "Google sand box". I am hoping that once this new "Big Daddy" update settles down that I will once again achieve good search results. What is frustrating is that I have much more relevant original content than any other realtor website that I have seen, including those that now are achieving higher Google search results in my marketplace.

No flaming... this is just my opinion.



I'm not surprised that your rankings have dropped. AA sites heavily rely on the Index page and the NOFRAMES tag, both of which have dropped in importance. How your pages relate to each other is becoming more important as search engines "theme" your website.

Example:
If I click on a link from your index page (PR4) onto Property Search, this is the URL.
http://www.maureenmegowan.com/Nav.aspx/Page=%2fIDX%2fDefault.aspx%2fMID%3d5318%26LinkID%3d1387

YIKES! I doubt any search engine will give this much value and it also has NO PageRank. ALL your pages are called Nav.aspx. That doesn't give the search engines much hint about what that page is about. Search engines are evolving... but AA sites seem to be stuck in the 90's with their frames and dynamically called content.

Thank you for your comments. Advanced Access does enable you to provide a title for each page for a descriptive title, and when Google selects that page in their search results, that title does come up for that page. Although the URL address does not have the title in it, Each Advanced Access page has a meta tag title that can be input. Doesn't this help the search engines to understand the relevance of the page?

Greg,

AA will be coming out with their new 4.0 version in a couple of months that will solve both issues that you've talked about. I for one can't wait!

They are a little behind the times, but I think they're catching up.

.

My ranks are still fl actuating weekly. Good luck to all on your SE ranks('',)

I have been following one particular AA site for a few years now (a client's) and it is usually ranked in the top 10 for very competitive keywords but frequently will disappear for several months at a time - only to reappear again with a new Google update.

With AA sites it may be that sometimes you are the dog and other times you are the hydrant. If you do nothing your ranks may come back

One theory that I did develop over the years of monitoring the aforementioned AA site has to do with - links.

My theory... any large scale change in the number of links leaving your site causes Google to - for the want of a better word - "sandbox" your site. So, playing with the option to have your Favorite Links open in a frame is one of those events that can cause your site to disappear. That does not appear to be a problem in your case but what may have happened is that Google has "dropped" your Favorite Links page from the index and if it were listed before that would have cause a sudden, huge drop in the links leaving your site - and a trip to the "sandbox".

Since AA sites are designed in such a way that makes spidering difficult - having pages dropped is a common occurance as is being dropped from Google.

You will find the the bulk (if not all) of those who talk about how great AA sites are and how wonderful they perform in search engines have sites that do not suffer from this problem either because they do not have standard AA sites (they use AA hosting etc)or because their Favorite Links page has always been set to open sites in frames which means they have no links that leave their site - ergo that count can't change.

The formulation of this theory began a couple of years ago after a Google tech revealed that it is far more important to watch out who you link to than to worry about who links to you. Who you link to helps determine the value of your site and any sudden large scale change in those links raises a possible spam flag.

...and to piggy-back on Doug's theory, ALL THE MORE reason to have multiple websites. Let websites B, C, and D, link to other websites while those websites like TO your website "A".

Now website A has ONLY incoming links, and websites B, C, and D have all the outgoing links.

(the trick here is to get websites B, C, and D of "value" for the other webmasters to want their incoming link coming from it)

When I started doing this a little over a year ago, I saw huge jumps in Search Engine Results (and of course traffic to website A)

Bruce, I'm sorry to hear about your problems with Google. If you can give me some examples of your search phrases, I can do some research for you.

Off the top of my head, one potential issues I can think of is the reciprocal links. I have been hearing rumours that Google has been planning to reduce the importance of the reciprocal links.

Good luck with your site.

I would suggest you try google dance to see if all the google datacenters are supplying the same result:

http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php