Why Doesn't Google Rank Me Higher?

Why doesn’t Google rank me higher? Well, not me exactly. A website that I work on. I set up a site for a friend of mine and helped get it groomed to rank well for its search terms in Google.

Here are the basics that my friend and I have going for the site right now.

* It has been online for over 5 years at the same URL.

* The URL is a .com and has some of the keywords in it.

* The title tag has the keywords in it.

* The home page has the correct keyword density and keywords on it.

* Over the years we have been fortunate to get great links back – many with the exact keywords in the link.

So here is what is so frustrating to me:

2 days ago we ranked pretty well for one of our key search terms at Google (top 10 Google ranking). Today I checked, and we have dropped to page 5 for the same term. I could understand if we just didn’t fit the Google algorithm or criteria for the term and we hadn’t reached beyond page 5 yet. But how in the world does it make any sense whatsoever that we rank on page 1 two days ago and page 5 now? This term is simply not that competitive. Here is what I am thinking about regarding this ranking:

Theory #1: Google randomly “bounces sites around” in the rankings once in a while to introduce confusion into the optimization process, thereby discouraging “gaming”. This fits the circumstances, but it would yield poor search results and potentially randomly rank top sites poorly. This doesn’t fit the “relevancy” standard that Google surely has.

Theory #2: The site is being penalized for aggressive optimization techniques. This doesn’t make any sense to me either, as we haven’t done anything at all unusual for this particular website or search term. As I stated, it isn’t that competitive – so we began to rank well for it quite naturally. This was even before we groomed our site content and title tags (as I noted, the keywords are in the domain name).

Theory #3: All of a sudden, the landscape for this search term changed dramatically – with new players entering the rankings and pushing the legacy websites further down the list. Okay, no way. This term is not that competitive. Plus, there aren’t any really new players on the scene for this term.

Theory #4: A very authoritative website that was linking back to us dropped our link, or changed how they linked to us. I guess this could be the case. But we haven’t bought or even traded or asked for links back to this term. Also – I’m not sure that even if a site like that was linking back to us, would just one site, or one link matter that much to drop us like a rock in a couple of days?

Theory #5: Google changed something in how they calculate the rankings for this term in the last 2 days – while everything we offered on the site and all our inbound links remained the same. This is the only explanation I can think of that fits both the circumstances and common sense. We simply haven’t changed anything in the past 2 days. So I think that Google (or more correctly the Google algorithm) has changed somehow for this term – yielding lower search rankings for our site. Some sources are reporting that Google uses over 150 different pieces of data to rank, so even a minor tweak in one or two of these for our category / search term could have pushed us lower.

Whatever the exact reason that we have dropped in the search rankings - I just keep wondering, why doesn’t Google rank me higher?

If you have any ideas, I’d love to see them in the comments below.

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