Thanks for all the replies everyone :)

We have suddenly appeared back at the top again, well, number two, to be exact, which has baffled me completely!

So, was I correct to prune the search engine results from the refbacks, or isn't that what they would call spammy? It was search engines such as comcast, AOL, and some I've never heard of. Is it best to leave this kind of thing out?

P.S. Yep, Dean, it didn't mention anything in the console, but now I know, I will keep an eye on it in future :)

Thanks :)

Because the site in question is one of the top 10 in the world, and very talked about. #8 is very, very, very good considering that, and without any fuss, either. :)

Made my competition madder than hell, especially when I topped them at Technorati, too. hehehe.

It's hard to comment not knowing what content and sites you're referring to. Nonetheless, it doesn't mean careful consideration of specific keywords has no effect on SERPS. :)

So......next time don't assume that because someone's site isn't #1 on some search engine, it's due to it not being SEOed. There's other factors, like breath of content (40 articles vs 40,000) and site age that no SEO can hurry up page rankings.

1 writer vs 2,000,000 writers, #8 is very good!

google changes it's algorithm all the time ;)
this is Very normal.

Chris, I was disputing your original statement that keywords really don't matter with Google. Whether you realise it or not, keywords do play an important role.

It certainly wasn't the refbacks causing it IMO. There's no chance that by removing content, that it would remove any penalty you may have within 24hours. Google doesn't work that fast. What is more likely is the algorithms were being changed, or you were using a different datacenter on your two searches. I was searching for something at work yesterday on a keyword, and found what I wanted. I came home, and searched again and it was giving me different results :)

Btw you shouldn't get search engine results in the refbacks, and if you do it's probably from a non-standard search engine, which you should add to the blacklist :) I will be adding regex support to my mod soon, so that'll make it a lot easier for me to ban every google domain, and any other search engines I can think of :)

Go to any SEO forum, and ask the question yourself.

You'll find that keywords aren't as important, as a good site description, for example.

I didn't even include ANY meta tags. But it did get ranked, purely on subject title (oooooh, it was sweet!) and content. That showed me with evidence, not ideas, Google doesn't take keywords as serious as folks want to claim.

What's ironic, I was critical of one of Google's parent sites. That's true irony it got listed and shot up "above the fold" by Google before even it's rival Yahoo could (MSN was the first to pick it off Technorati, though)!

Thanks Dean!

It is a weird one, I had a couple of other people double check for me and we had definitely gone (at least, to everyone that tried, and the traffic had halfed), however, now, we seem to have come back with a vengeance because we are much higher up the ranking, using less specific search terms.

Yep, I was also seeing my link posted in what appeared to be several German retail sites, in their "be the first to review this product" type area, so probably best to block those in case google see it as spamming?

Anyway, thanks for the help :)

Dave.

Do you honestly believe I would question your argument without any experience or evidence? I think you're misinterpreting what I'm trying to say. I'm not inferring that you should fill your META tags with keywords, one after the other; same with content. But Google will not find any relevance in your site if you don't make any reference to the keywords you want people to find you for. There is no question that there are many factors involved in SERPS, but you are dismissing something of substantial significance. :)