Is Google Effing with Me ?

I own a photoshop site called phatbrush.com - I haven't made any severe changes seo wise to the site and I was always hovering between position 80-120 in the serps for the term photoshop brushes.

It's been a week now and I can't find myself anywhere on the serps for that term when I google myself.

I dont think I've been penalized or slapped by google because my position has been the same for almost 1.5 years without serious change to the way I do my seo. Plus I'm still indexed when you google the site name.

Any ideas ? I would say yea maybe its a g-wave or the dance but it's been over 7 days now really crazy stuff.

(Kinda off topic but I also thought about purchasing Scrapebox but decided against it after reading quite a few number of negative reviews , plus the fact that google can just make backlinks from comments non-relevant all together.)

That G dance lasts longer than 7 days many times now. It seems to do for a day at first and then switches up and can go on for a couple weeks at a time. Just keep doing what you're doing and you'll see it settle back in.

I was experimenting with a really high competitive keyword for the past couple months and my site went though a lot of g-dance, but every time it settled, it kept ranking up higher so usually it's all good, and if you're building links and stuff, just keep on doing as you were since that shows google there's nothing wonky going on with your site.

gooma2 said:

I was experimenting with a really high competitive keyword for the past couple months and my site went though a lot of g-dance, but every time it settled, it kept ranking up higher so usually it's all good

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I know what you mean it's so annoying , You change your h1 tag , your position moves up 4-8 spots up in Serps , next day you're actually in a worse position than before you made the h1 tag changes.

I tried that too , to make my site more relevant by editing meta data and h1 tags and optimizing the speed of my site , I've seen changes as dramatic as going from position 105 > 58 , within a few hours. Then afterwards usually 6 hours later I get bitch slapped back to 114+.

It seems like such a idiotic zero-sum-game if all you can do is get more backlinks. The thought of buying or paying for links itself is really spammy and kinda scummy I hate the idea of having to trudge through that.

Most SEO experts agree that ranking #1 for a kw phrase will get you about 40% off the traffic searching for that phrase. Ranking #2 about 12% and by the time you get to the bottom of page 1 you'll see 1% of the traffic searching for that kw phrase. Now you're disappointed that you fell off page 8 - 12? Those pages wouldn't see more than a small fraction under 1% (like 0.000001%) of search traffic for that kw phrase.

I think your time is better spent trying how to dominate some long tail kw phrases that will bring you some traffic than sweating a kw phrase that fell off page 8. JMHO.

Good luck

So instead of focusing on photoshop brushes ,

Would you suggest something along the lines of "free photoshop brushes" ? (then making the changes needed in h1 tags , meta etc that include that phrase)

Also it still comes down to who has the biggest backlinks to their site correct ?

I would do some keyword research with Google Adwords tool and search for [exact] searches for the keyword a month. Maybe you want to define what kind of photoshop brushes they are. A brand, a style, color even? gather that information from the keywork searching and youll find out what to go for.

that shows google there's nothing wonky going on with your site

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Hahaha Gooma.... "wonky" Im stealing that.