steve1 Posted August 27, 2004 Share Posted August 27, 2004 I am very confused. my site http://www.reiki-seichim-masters-australia.com used to have a top rating under REIKI AUSTRALIA in yahoo. Two things happened. My site was off line for a week (Due to problems with renewing hosting) and I removed a lot off the index page to try and get a quicker load up time. My site has now dropped down to 21st spot. Which one of these would be the most likely reason for thia massive drop. I have reverted back to my original index page now. What is the most important in regards to listing? metatags, content (text on page) or loading speed? Very confused Steve Rock Sign Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deverill Posted August 27, 2004 Share Posted August 27, 2004 Different engines use different criteria to decide how our pages rank. With Yahoo, they put more weight on what's called on-page elements: title, heading content, alt attributes, etc. With Google, for example, they put more value on normal content and how many folks link to you than Yahoo does. The most likely cause of the drop is being offline. If a spider hits a dead end it may reduce your rank or remove you entirely. Another common cause is that the search engine changed the way they count things in the algorithm that ranks stuff. Maybe they think "Hey, the title tag is being abused, let's make it less important." It is normal for sites to fluxuate daily even within the search engines - some more so than others. It may even be that 20 other pages did something right to get them placed above you in the results. (Let's hope not. ) Finally, depending on what you removed it could be that. If you removed what Yahoo considers important then they may lower your rank. If you only removed some big photos or something like that then it's not as likely to be the problem. With search engines you have to look at averages over large periods of time rather than "I reworded my title and 3 days later I dropped 5 places" because of the nature of how the engines work and the hundreds of things they look at. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve1 Posted August 28, 2004 Author Share Posted August 28, 2004 Thank you Jim, Can you also tell me how important load speed is. If say, I have a good rating in yahoo, but my load speed is around 17sec should I still try and reduce it. steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deverill Posted August 28, 2004 Share Posted August 28, 2004 The numbers I have heard for the front page is about 10-15 seconds. This changes if your page is written such that the visitor can start reading before all the pictures download for example. If they don't get something useful in the first 10 seconds they usually start peeling off for other sites. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve1 Posted August 28, 2004 Author Share Posted August 28, 2004 thank you Jim Steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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