Got hit with a large drop in the SERPs this weekend

My web design and development site has slowly been crawling up the SERPs for the keyword "web design" for the last six months. I've been slowly developing my SEO attack and refining it, while at the same time trying not to over-do. Last Monday (September 3rd), I broke the top 35 and had hit #29 by Thursday. (subject for another day: SEO "professionals" who claim that SERPs don't change on a daily basis).

I took a long weekend, and when I checked my rankings on Monday night (the 10th), I had dropped to #82. Tuesday the 11th I was #88 and today (Wednesday the 12th) I'm at #85. I seem to have been hit with some sort of nasty -50 penalty, even though I've played it pretty straight and jumped through all the Goops (Google hoops).

I'm patiently waiting it out - I have 5 or 6 other great keywords that I rank highly for that haven't dropped in the SERPs so the penalty only seems to be applied to the one keyword: web design. Maybe too many backlinks too quickly?

Or, was there an algo update this weekend that changed the rankings of certain keywords? The keywords I rank highly for have all been strong SERPs for a long period of time. Perhaps an algo change that has something to do with length of backlinks?

A fantastic SERP tool for webmasters

I've said it before, but I will reiterate: Pagerank is nothing compared to your SERP ranking. What's the point of having high Pagerank if your site doesn't rank well for any keywords.

One of the issues I ran into when starting out to learn SEO was finding where I ranked for specific tools. I tried IBP, but it was slow and I'd heard some things about it that I won't repeat here that warned me away from it. I also tried some online tools that were either too clunky to be useful, or required my to jump through a lot of hoops to use.

The tool I ended up using is the Search Engine Ranking tool at www.rankingcheck.com. It allows me to search for top 100 SERPs on all three major search engines. (some webmasters complain that they want a tool to show top 1000 SERPs, but any SERP under 30 is practically useless, so the top 100 is fine with me). Ranking Check also has a free tool to track 10 keywords on your sites, and you can pay for additional keyword tracking. The tool also emails me when my ranking has changed. The only downside I found to the tool was the fact that I'm only emailed once per week on ranking changes. A daily email would be nice.

Overall, I rate the tool an 8 out of 10, and would give it an even higher score if the new ranking emails were sent out on a more frequent basis.

(* note - I wasn't paid, coerced, or otherwise compensated in any way for this post. I don't know who created rankingcheck.com, but I love the tool)