Combatting Update Allegra's Symptoms

One of my sites felt the pinch of the Allegra Update.

It went from #3 to #6-11, depending on the datacenter.

The site template is 3 1/2 years old, and has a few design flaws - namely the main navigation are images instead of text. When the site was designed, ALT tags still were given the same weight as text, so it didn't seem like a problem at the time.

However, the site is losing out on one of the most powerful weapons in the SEO arsenal: internal anchor text links.

Just as an experiment, I added an anchor Guide To $Widgets linking to home page at the footer of all the pages on the site (about 470 pages).

That was about 8 days ago. Google has been recrawling all these pages and caching them with the new link to the home page.

Results? This morning the site bumped up to #5, the highest it has been since the Allegra update began.

Your mileage may vary, but it's food for thought.