Florida theories are wrong?

[PhilC]

and if you'll take a look, the links go to the exact page that the particular category is on.. not the front of the site

I was mistaken about this.. the listings links DO go to the front of the site

[WilliamC]

Tia I see yer trying to learn more and more dear

[PhilC]

Originally Posted by WilliamC

Tia I see yer trying to learn more and more dear

always

[Real Estate Lady]

Dear Phil,

I'm new to the forum and have been reading with interest articles from a lot of different sources about what happened recently on Google. Most seem to think that some kind of SEO filter has been applied (which I'm not so sure about), so I read your analysis with great interest.

I am a real estate agent, not a web designer or SEO expert, but I would like to propose a completely different theory for discussion and research by those who do know about these things.

When the change happened, I did some limited checking to see if I could figure out where my website went in the search results. I used to be within the first 5 results for the search terms "Fayetteville Arkansas Real Estate" and/or "Northwest Arkansas Real Estate". When the change happened, my site, like those of almost all other local realtors, disappeared completely from the results.

My initial take on the change was completely different than most other analyses have indicated. I noticed that the new results after the change were almost all of low relevance for people searching for real estate information. They were all what you term "expert" sites with some limited relationship to Fayetteville or Arkansas or real estate (on page 3 of the results we find California Real Estate).

However, that first day, on about page 3 of the results was an item dealing with Google Regional Searches (last evening this appeared on about page 5 of the results). When I went to that site and did a regional search for Fayetteville Arkansas Real Estate (it took about 6 clicks on different things to get there), all of the really relevant sites which used to be in the top Google ratings were there, and my site was still in the top 5 according to page rank. (For some reason the Yahoo regional results are different and my site does not appear, but that could be because I don't pay Yahoo to be in their searches).


Anyhow, this fits in with what you say about a different way of getting to the results rather than filtering them. My website, www.judyluna.com is clearly a commercial site, but I think it qualifies as what you call an authority site. It has a lot of informational content, which I have written over the past several years. I have good links with other realtors and with aggregator-type sites (expert sites).

As I mentioned earlier, I'm not an SEO expert, but I follow SEO discussions and try to implement some of the principles as best I can. I maintain my own site, and although it could be optimized better, until recently I didn't do so because being in the first 5 results on Google was fine with me, and I didn't want to rock the boat.

Now, however, my website traffic has declined precipitously, and I'm wondering what to do. Thus far I haven't done anything to my website, because of the wide disagreement of what's going on, and I still get pretty good results on other search engines.

Admittedly, this analysis concerns only search terms which affect me directly. And if regional searches are "IT" for Google's future, I wish they would put their regional search as a result higher than page 3 (as on Northwest Arkansas Real Estate) or page 6 (Fayetteville Arkansas Real estate) so that people can still find relevant results and thus my website.

I would be interested in comments on my theory that Google's recent changes could have to do with their efforts to develop highly relevant regional searches.

Thanks,
Real Estate Lady