On the other hand the competition is weak. Doing allintitle or allinurl searches indicates that there are only a couple of competitors.

I’m going to focus on better quality of links based on our discussion vis a vis a certain website that had a super onemap and the findings I saw, and change and add pages to strengthen titles and urls to reflect necessary phrases.

Dave

At Seo refugee there is a thread in the seo tools section about some link analysis tools including something called Link diagnostics. If you look at how that tool evaluates these aforementioned weak links, it gives an idea why DROP could be a big element of pop and drop.

10 days after last checking rankings on 16 geo oriented phrases, primarily using this methodology I’m seeing the following: (using mcdar tool)

3 phrases dropped in rankings by 1 position. 8 increased in rankings of various degrees. We are currently ranked 2&3 for the busiest relevant prhase from 3&4. We have maintained the #1 ranking for what is probably the 2nd most important phrase. In one of the phrases where we dropped we now have an authoritative onebox. On one phrase, which has been exclusively on first page we jumped from 5-2.

We had some phrases that reflect the business with state names and jumped significantly from 2nd page rankings of 17 and 18 to 7 and 10 respectively. The phrases with state abbreviations on which I’m working moved upward from 5 and 10 respectively to 5 and 4.

You have more history tracking this, but my sense is if each phrase isn’t getting links it might go from the “pop” category to the “drop” category.

Dave

I’m seeing pop and drop if I don’t keep adding links of this ilk.

To date the phenomena is very attached to specific anchor text. If I’m shooting for 20-30 phrases just using the above referenced methodology it tends to become more difficult to do.

Dave

I don’t know about Mr. Mihm, but if I have any kind of budget I’m paying Yahoo! I figure if Google tells me to do it it must be worth it.

And, for real I’ve seen big moves in the search engine results pages in the days and weeks after Yahoo acceptance. Could be coincidence but I’m not the kind of gambler to stop when I’m ahead.

Will

at a forum, one person asked if I monitored this stuff. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t monitor this stuff if I don’t have to. I just zip through as many as possible, hoping some will stick. I don’t review the pages, look to see if the pages are cached, check PR, etc. I just throw as much sh!t against the wall and hope some of it sticks. lol.

on the other hand, I was looking at some bls from years ago that include the directory links that were devalued. Of course these are old rather than the new stuff I’m primarily adding now.

Of interest the deep pages that had anchor text links had fairly recent cache dates in google and some had PR.

I suspect most of those directories were new when I added them.

I guess they’ve aged fairly well…even if they were devalued. heheh.

and @David….(if you are reading this)

I read at your blog how you reccomended Yahoo directory…and here you are questioning it.

Cripes make up your mind.

Does anyone have a REAL feel if those things work at $300 or $200.

Dave

I’d love to have a guest post with your case study any time!

Dave….

ps…so far no pop and drop