Troubleshooting

When WebPosition Gold reports that your web site has dropped in rankings, you'll want to research the probable causes. The following are good places to start:

• Search Engines' Web Sites - A lot of times if your site drops on one particular engine, a visit to that engine's site will show that either the site is having 'temporary (hopefully) difficulties' or will state that it is not accepting any submissions at this time (which stands for temporary difficulties. Usually this means to run your report a day or so after the notification is removed from the site.
• Search Engine Forums - These forums are terrific and can be extremely helpful in troubleshooting search engine visibility problems. Each engine has its own forum and most are moderated by Search Engine Visibility professionals.
• Search Engine Watch - I highly recommend subscribing to this site. Any time there is a change in the engines and directories, this site seems to be right there reporting it to its members. Worth the money spent.
• WebPosition Gold Detail Report - Go through the detail report of your WebPosition Gold to see who's in the top spots. If someone's jumped ahead of you, you'll want to verify:
  1. That the new site did not grab your metatags, page code, etc... (There's been many lawsuits because someone has stolen metatags, page code, etc...)
  2. What's made their site more optimized than yours
• Check pages for Spamdexing techniques which include, but are not limited to:
  1. Hidden text - Keywords used repetitively hidden by the font color and the background color being the same (or a shade lighter/darker) and/or extremely small font size.
  2. Misleading doorway pages - Creating doorway pages that are irrelevant to your web site's content.
  3. Grabbing someone else's code and using it.
  4. Using your competitors' names and/or trademarks in metatags.

Fixes would be as easy as re-submitting your pages to optimizing your pages for a higher count of keyword usage.

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Want to know more about search engine optimization? The Magic Keywords Strategic Linking for Success Reference Section / Search Engine Visibility