Hello and good afternoon,
Why does googles link:domain name not work for me, link:domain works
on MSN. Also why am I on google page 27 when I was at no 1 on page one
of googles rank for the key phrase 'guest house farnham' until about 4
weeks ago and have been for several months. Google visits me about
once every two days and updates his cache. Does he update the ranking
at the same time or is that done every four weeks or so. Please do not
send me the same standard answer on page
google.co.uk/webmasters/2.html. I have about 8 links coming in and
about 20 links going out. If links coming in is the most important
aspect for me to recover a place in the top ten, how many links coming
in would I need. Finally where can I see my question published. Thank
you very much, I really believe I belong in the top ten and have now
spent many hours trying to recover our position. I will be very very
grateful for some sound advice. Regards Nigel.

---

Request for Question Clarification by robertskelton-ga on 06 Apr 2004 13:38 PDT

Hi there,

respree-ga's comment is correct regarding the link:domain. Your drop
in ranking is probably to do with Google's new filter that especially
affected the travel industry. If you provide the URL of your site, I
can help you understand what has changed, with the caveat that aside
from Google engineers (who you can't ask), all anyone can give you is
an educated guess as to what happened.

robertskelton-ga

---

Clarification of Question by emberson-ga on 07 Apr 2004 03:55 PDT

I have been asked to clarify my question but I do not know what it is
that you want clarified on question number ID: 325917. I have had it
confirmed that googles link:domain does not work. I do have googles
tool bar installed. Please please try to answer my question. Thank you
very much.

I can't be certain that this is your problem, but the
link:www.yourdomain.com command in Google shows sites that are linking
to you.  The caveat is that they only report websites linking to your
homepage that have a PageRank of 4 or greater.

So you could have 10 PR1 sites linking to you and Google will report
nothing.  Perhaps you should visit the sites linking to you and check
their PageRank, which is accessible by downloading the Google toolbar.

Hope that helps.

Hi again,

This is a comment because as an answer it won't help you rise back up
in the rankings.


The Backward Links function shows the web pages that link to your
site, and will typically only show pages with PR4+. By searching for
"clarendonlodge.com" I found these links:


PR2
http://www.easyadverts.co.uk/hotels_page1.htm
http://www.travelaccommodation.co.uk/england/southeng/farnhamhot.htm
http://www.touristnetuk.com/Se/surrey/accommodation/ac-serviced/farnham.htm

PR0
http://www.directory.co.uk/The_Bush_Hotel,_Farnham.htm

Unless you have links from pages with PR4 or higher, they won't usually be listed

It has long been speculated that the reason why it only shows PR4+
pages is because that is the dividing line between links that make a
big difference and links that don't.

Sites that you link to will not affect your PageRank or which Backward
links are displayed.


The most likely reason for why you used to rank well for 'guest house
farnham' is a combination of over-optimisation - keywords repeated in
title, placed in comments, placed in image ALT tags, and the repetiton
in a small font at the bottom of the page (surely just there for
search engines, a tactic Google doesn't like).

The most likely reason for why you no longer rank well is because
Google have improved their algorithm, and are not so easily led by SEO
techniques

The only way to improve rank is to get links from high quality sites.
The more you get, the more you improve. How many you need will depend
on the opposition, and how many they have.

Historically Google visited some sites regularly and updated their
indexing of the site after each visit, but the value of links was only
updated monthly. This could still be the case but is hard to tell.