Hi, does anyone know how to retreive lost rankings without paying out sums of money to hire spiders and suchlike.

I had a ranking of the first three pages when browsing under the heading of 'overclocking'. One day i updated my site, but forgot to add the meta tags.

The next thing i knew i was down to about page 23. Upon realization, i immediatly set about updating the meta tags.

That was 2 months ago, ive now crawled up to page 16 in the space of eight weeks, which is basically rubbish.

Does anyone know of any free tips to get me back in the high rankings. Ive tried 'net mechanics' free site submission, and submit to google every two weeks, but to no avail.

the OC shrink

I don't have meta tags but some of my pages are really highly ranked for certain terms. So I'm not sure the meta tags are the problem.

Submiting to google every two weeks is probably not going to help either from what I read. The more links going to your site from other pages, the better ranking you get. And content plays a big part too.

The whole point of Google is to discourage what you are trying to achieve. You really need multiple domain names and a few auto-generation techniques for manipulating the index.

Thanks guys, but it still leaves me wondering how i come to have high rankings in the first place?

It probably has more to do with the sites which are similarly ranked by keywords on your site. Google has recently (last 6 months) been altering their index ranking system. It's not explained, but the effect has been dramatic for some.

Regardless, "overclocking" and related words seem to be popular spam with in the index. If a host of sites which had little relevance to overclocking (or were for some reason dropped from a higher ranking - perhaps added as news or shopping sites and thus bumped down by default) ruled the top rankings (in your keywords), your site could easily jump in ranking in a reversal. Just a theory.

I would guess that user selection also plays a role in the process. Regardless, your site's jump to the top could also have been a result of an update to the index. I haven't been keeping track, but historically the "Google Dance" happens regularly.

Interesting if not confusing. Seems like there's a few different elements which combine to create or cause fluctuation in the ranking system.I do sometimes notice a kind of wave effect when monitoring the positions of certain sites.

I could do with finding some literature on the subject.

Thanks once again to all for contributing.

Kind Regards: tosh