Big drop in main keywords

My Little Pony , those are the main keyword phrase, and what dropped....

The CSS in the VBAdvanced is from VBulletin itself......

That old home page is no longer used, it was replaced with the VBAdvanced one...

Thanks for helping

You can make the vBulletin CSS as an external file.

Remember to run the validator.

Put the large "Welcome" text into a H1 tag, and also add "Welcome to the My Little Pony Trading Post".

Note: Your old page will get indexed since it is listed here as a link. You might want to move it to a new location, or take it offline unless you need to refer to it later.

Maybe you can include the "My Little Pony Trading Post" as a link to the homepage, as the first link in your navigation, so you have that Anchor text always pointing back to the homepage throughout the site.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

You can make the vBulletin CSS as an external file.

Remember to run the validator.

Put the large "Welcome" text into a H1 tag, and also add "Welcome to the My Little Pony Trading Post".

Note: Your old page will get indexed since it is listed here as a link. You might want to move it to a new location, or take it offline unless you need to refer to it later.

Maybe you can include the "My Little Pony Trading Post" as a link to the homepage, as the first link in your navigation, so you have that Anchor text always pointing back to the homepage throughout the site.

Thanks Joe for all those suggestions,

I removed that old link from the thread here.. ( so it doesnt get indexed)...

Far as putting the CSS into an external file, Ill have to look up on VBulletin forum how to do that...

where you were saying:

Maybe you can include the "My Little Pony Trading Post" as a link to the homepage, as the first link in your navigation, so you have that Anchor text always pointing back to the homepage throughout the site

Do you mean the link in my footer there? Thats on every page in the footer.. I notice too that the footer link there is what VBAdvanced picks up as the Home Page Title....

I meant up top in the left column navigation.

I think there is an issue with your page code. Run the validator to see if anything comes up.

ahh thanks Joe for the clarification,

yes Im getting alot of errors too, but alot of those seem to be coming from the VB Advanced news module......

H1 tag was too huge....... would it be ok to use a H2?

Also Im finding it hard to find out how to link the CSS to an external file, since "CSS" isnt searchable on the VBulletin forum, since its under 3 letters....LOL..... do you have a link I could go to that would tell me how to do that?

Just one other little question Joe, But my main competitors home page contains over 300 validation errors, and they have been on Page 1 of Google for 3 years +....... so does validation really matter?

You should use CSS to make the text of the H1 the same and style that you want. Don't use the H2.

Check out:
vBulletin.org Forum - View Single Post - Hiding CSS Style Code?

Many SEOs promote validation. But it's not the biggest SEO factor. All else being equal, shoot for 100% validation. HOWEVER: I believe there might be a structural problem with your site. You have to watch out for that. It's not so much that it does not validate as having a non-terminated tag or broken tag, etc, might make search engines have a hard time figuring out the content of your page.

Thanks for the link Joe....

When you say a "Structural Problem" what do you mean..... and how can I fix that..

My site consists of...

The VBA Home page

VBulletin Forums

About 6 standard HTML pages.... ( forum rules, some tutorials etc)

Can you elaborate on what you mean by a structure problem?

Thanks so much for your help

A simple example would be missing a </head> tag, having a parameter non-terminated, etc. Anything that happened by mistake and broke your code.

Seems like there might be issues with the table tags, and that is a very common source of code problems.
[Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.mlptp.net/ - W3C Markup Validator

Without the table tags, and just using Div...... VB Advanced wouldnt work for the sidebar....

I had it as

<td class="alt2">

<div class="menu1">


I took out the <td class="alt2">

and the Sidebar went everywhere...

The errors do seem to point to those table tags though Im having difficulty getting the sidebar to work without them in there.

EDIT: When I turned the news module back on, I have even more errors, The News is directly from VBAdvanced, its nothing I have done with HTML.... Its full of XML parsing errors....... should I ask over at VBAdvanced what to do about this?

I don't think the problem was that you have tables, but it looks like some of the tables might not have been closed properly, i.e. missing some closing td tags, etc.

Just thought Id give an update.

My site moved back to hovering between 15 and 20 on google.com..... took a few weeks to recover.

Today I had a look and went to page 2 of google... and couldnt find it all...... My first thought was that noooooooo it had gone way down again....

What I didnt realise is that my keywords had moved to PAGE ONE and not only page one, but 3rd from the top.......

I couldnt believe what I was seeing, in fact I had to close google and open it again and search 3 times for the same thing.... LOL..... and there it was...... my site right up there 3rd from the top out of over 6 million results........

YAY for VBSeo

I also wonder if a site contest has helped, as our number of posts per day have doubled since the contest started 3 days ago , as has our member activity.... would that help us move up in google also?