Wow…After years of study in the ART of Search Engine Optimization it still gives me a major headache on a day to day basis.  I mean seriously, after working at Cisco Systems, Google, Nortel and many other major Silicon Valley billion dollar start ups you would think this little bastard of a math algorithm would be no surprise.     

Yeah yeah I know.  You’re probably thinking if you worked at Cisco and all those other companies you would know that SEO and the sinister math behind it is well known to be impossible to completely figure out, even by the best brains on the planet. (I would not qualify as a ‘best brain on the planet” dude obviously.)

Let me get to my point.  In the last 24 hours Google slapped our corporate website with a page rank reduction!  We had a page rank of 5 and now it is a 4!  Trust me that is a big deal and to drop from a 5 to a 4 is like a 4x reduction in power. Google’s page ranking system is an exponential algorithm from hell by the way.

So why did this happen is your next question. First let me explain we are a Pure White Hat online marketing firm and SEO practices are always done the “correct” way without bending the rules in any way. Soooo, with that in mind we thought we were safe. Wrong answer!

I dont want to get too technical on this post but we have a pretty good idea of why Google got bent out of shape on their last little Crawl of our Site.

Here are some of our thoughts:

1. We recently did a renaming of our URL from www.empoweredbrandbuilders.com to www.ebbinteractive.com. That was a serious project that requires a LOT of pages to be individually 301 redirected in an exact order to the new url. WOW what a pain but we did it by the book.

2. Considering we are an Atlanta Web Design company we link all of our clients websites and blogs back to our site.  Of course we do…everyone in our line of work does this. That is about 411 sites times however many pages each site has.

3.  Without boring you to death and giving you about 12 more bullet points…this is when it gets interesting.  Google has not crawled our site in many days…and since their last indexing of our data we have added a lot of websites, blogs, articles, press releases , etc.  HOWEVER…since we own all the URLs and they are all under the same open IP address NOT our own custom Class-C block of addresses…we got screwed.

What does all this mean in English.  One of the variables that Google give a substantial amount of weight to when it comes to Page Rank is how many inbound LINKS are going to your site. We have many.  HOWEVER they give VERY little weight to inbound links that are owned by you.  Now this is not new information but Google must have added MORE weight to this weighted algorithm or we would not have been slapped by them.??????  That is one of our theories anyway.

The moral of the story is get SEO HOSTING and put an end to this madness.  That is not a very nice way to help people who are playing by the rules. Google is not perfect but this is a serious large flaw in the system. ( in my humble opinion!)

Your is less SEO headaches,

Scott Jay Ringle

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