SEO Google Help Needed

By dcowan on 1 Nov 2007 at 00:20 UTC

I truly appreciate any help or ideas with this. Thanks in advance.

I have operated several websites on the topic of ADHD since 1997. My main site: http://newideas.net was listed under the keyword "adhd" between 8th and 10th for several years. Last year it dropped to about 20th as several large organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies, began seriously working on their websites. When it dropped to 22nd I made the change-over to Drupal. That was about four months ago.

Since the change to Drupal I have continued to drop, and am now in 58th place, really the lowest ranking since 1997.

Here are changes that I know I've made, and a list of things that I am using:

1. Drupal 5.x with fixed width Aberdeen template, slightly modified
2. I have a "control panel" on my site that I used 301 permanent redirects from my old pages to my new pages, ie "/something.htm" to "/something" , but the 301 redirect seems worthless, as none of the PR has transferred over to the new pages (so I'm beginning to resurrect the old pages, including the old names)
3. I have about 230 pages of content (without the soon to be resurrected old pages)
4. I have "silo-ed" the site, putting the new pages under the file "adhd", as in newideas.net/adhd/something_interesting

I don't know what else to list.

Please, any suggestions, criticisms, ideas, wisdom, or even wit at this point, would be greatly appreciated. I like Drupal. I can add new content quickly. It looks pretty good (though I'd like it to look even better if I knew how). But there's something wrong that I just cannot figure out. By the way I'm a "retired" family therapist and ADHD researcher, but a full time pastor now, so web stuff is a very part-time hobby, but still important to me.

I am ranked #3 and #4 for keywords "add adhd" and "add diet" and #2 for keywords "adhd diet" so all is not lost, and I'm doing something right with those words. But the drop for the most important keyword "adhd" has been stunning, and disappointing.

Again, any help (or even just a good joke) would be really appreciated. Thanks to you all.

Doug Cowan

Comments

I found a Drupal site just

rszrama commented 1 November 2007 at 01:32

I found a Drupal site just the other day at http://www.seobook.com that has plenty of pointers for folks like you and me. There's plenty of free content to help you out. I'm assuming you've already using the gsitemap and nodewords modules (looking at your site it seems like you have)?

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Drupal by Wombats | Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org

Thanks

dcowan commented 5 November 2007 at 22:34

Thanks for taking the time to give some suggestions. I did get the SEO Book, but its not really what I'm looking for in terms of Drupal, and specifically my site.

Any more ideas would also be appreciated!

Doug

SEO module

michelle

she/her

English

Wisconsin, USA

commented 5 November 2007 at 23:01

Try this? http://groups.drupal.org/node/6840

Michelle

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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

new ideas

misiu9 commented 5 November 2007 at 23:47

i would do

title starting with adhd
shorter description of the main page
adhd alt tag for the banner
alt tags (with keyword) for the pictures on the main page

wikipedia link

open a google webmaster account and use webmaster tools to remove old pages

make sure that sitemaps are ok

send google a letter with reindexing request

best

Mike

Will Do - Thanks!

dcowan commented 15 November 2007 at 21:24

Thanks for taking the time to give me these suggestions. I will get to them right away!

In the meantime, the site has bounced back - at least back to #23 on google for the keyword "adhd". Now, if I can just get back on the first page...

Thanks again

Doug Cowan
http://newideas.net

Check this topic Drupal seo

toma commented 15 November 2007 at 21:30

Check this topic
Drupal seo mistakes
http://drupal.org/node/67767

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Biladi US Morocco
http://www.biladi.us

Seems like you are doing all the right things....

Thomasr976 commented 15 November 2007 at 22:20

maybe its time to look at what your users are really doing on your website using just one or two metrics and start experimenting. The metrics are easily available from Google Analytics and based on an article by author Jim Novo. You can read it at http://www.millennialliving.com/weblog/archives/2007/04/who_cares_what_w....

I used the Bounce Rate to measure the stickness of my website http://www.millennialliving.com and it helps. Here's an example, I shortened the home page drastically as suggested by many usability pros and my bounce rate soared immediately (not good news). After a week, I went back to a long list of articles and in a day my bounce rates came down were headed lower. Go figure.

Also J Nielesen recently put out a nice piece on short and long articles as a content strategy. Take a look at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/content-strategy.html.

Hope this helps. Good luck.