Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Does anyone know if there's been an algorithmic update for google.co.uk in the last couple of days?

My site has dropped 15 places or more for all of it's terms and I'm trying to work out the cause!!!

Thanks.

Yes, that seems a fair point.

I'll go ahead with the ticker and hope for the best!

Thanks for your help on this one.

Dr. Pete

Good to see your face in here

Thanks for confirming my worst suspicions! I'll be staying clear of that method then.

It's use was essentially just to flash up a short text decription and a link to new site content (to fit in a fairly small space), like a news ticker.

Do you think a javascript style news ticker, like the one at the top here would be better?

http://sandbox.scriptiny.com/contentslider/slider.html

It removes the need to set style="display: none;" however, some text starts off outside of the "news ticker" limits and so is technically invisible to begin with.

Thanks again.

Anyone?

Rob,

You're right, it's rubbish for navigation, but it's what is required in this instance.

There's 'real' navigation as well, this is just a feed to catch the visitor's eye and throw up new pages or content that might be of interest.

Thanks

Ah, Hello Mozzers, it's been a while since I was here.

Wanted to run something by you...

I'm looking to incorporate some fading text using Javascript onto a site homepage using the method described here;

http://blog.thomascsherman.com/2009/08/text-slideshow-or-any-content-with-fades/

so, my question is; does anyone think that Google might see this text as a possible dark hat SEO anchor text manipulation (similar to hidden links)?

The text will contain various links (4 or 5) that will cycle through one another, fading in and out, but to a bot the text may appear initially invisible, like so;

style="display: none;"><a href="">Link Here</a>

All links will be internal.

My gut instinct is that I'm just being stupid here, but I wanted to stay on the side of caution with this one!

Thanks for your time

http://blog.thomascsherman.com/2009/08/text-slideshow-or-any-content-with-fades

Gyi - the fear has subsided for the time being!

Thanks for the response

Thanks Keri. Well put

I've taken it on board

Yes, that's a fair point.

My caution is because in the past, the blog didn't link out to other sites at all. Now I've just started creating posts with external links in them.

As long as this won't be detrimental in anyway, I'll carry on

I know that google's traditional stance on this is that any paid links should be nofollowed, so I just don't want google to think that these might be paid links which haven't been nofollowed... and therefore impose a penalty for this.

I need my memory refreshed here!

Say, I've got a blog and some of the posts have links to recommended external sites and content. Should these be nofollowed?

They're not paid links or anything like that, simply things relevant to the post.

Just you

If you're competing on a local basis and not looking to rise up the serps for a general keyword then you may see some traffic from people searching the Yahoo directory for a local listing, so therefore, probably go regional.

If you're targetting specfic keywords and hoping this will boost your ranking, then I would probably opt for the generic category.

You can also request for the site to be placed in up to 2 categories after submission here;

http://add.yahoo.com/fast/change/

So, once you're in, submit the request to the category you didn't pick as well

I would see no reason why that would be a problem for Yahoo.

It's worth bearing in mind that you typically want your listing to be as shallow as you can get it in the directory as possible. Deep links don't have as much link juice passed to them and are also less likely to be crawled on a frequent basis.

Is there a more shallow generic law category you can put the site in rather than deep in the regional listings? (This is assuming you're seeking the seo benefit of the link rather than people actually searching the Yahoo! directory?)