I've been offline for the past week or so in Paris, and while I've been gone, a few things have happened in the world of SEO. One of the less favourable things was the failure of the Fasthosts shared hosting service that this site is currently running on. That meant a couple of days where the site was inaccessible.

Generally shorty periods of downtime don't make much difference to SEO, however being offline for days at a time has a serious negative impact. I've already seen some drops in rankings, for example, cleethorpes web design has gone down from number 2 to number 3. And for 'web design cleethorpes' it's dropped down to position 7.

I'm thinking of moving the site to a dedicated server, however I'm going to wait until I've got the time to rebuilt the site in asp.net 4, which will make it run much faster and enable me to take advantage of the more powerful features of .net.

A week is a long time in SEO. While I was on holiday last week, Geocities has been killed off, the google toolbar page rank database has been updated, and the rankings for some of our monitored sites have been up an down like a kangaroo on Fanta. Indeed, this site dropped from page rank 5 to rank 3 for no apparent reason. (maybe google is systematically downgrading page rank to the point where all sites eventually have page rank 1, then no one will bother with it.

Normally, the pace of change is not as noticable if you keep up with SEO on a daily basis, but just like watching the hour hand of a clock, if you take your eyes away for a time to do something else, when you next look back, everything changes.

This serves to reinforce the importance of keeping up to date with the latest changes in the SEO landscape. What was successful practice a year ago, may no longer be the case. Some examples of outdated SEO practice are:
 

1. monoitoring page rank (google says you shouldnt worry about page rank any more),
2. using myspace for social marketing - facebook and twitter are the way to go now
3. publishing your articles in several places - concerns about duplicate pages are now more important
4. two way link exchanges - excessive link exchanging is frowned upon now (but still a useful tool if done in moderation)
5. google adwords spending - when first launched, adwords could turn over a tidy profit, now the market place is so saturated, its very difficult to get a return on your investment for one time purchases via adwords. Exceptions to this rule are when repeated custom is involved such as magazine subscriptions, or when the purchase is quite valuable such as cosmetic surgery or legal services