Google -> Visit crash today

[Armi]

Hello,

I am the Webmaster of one of the most renowned consumer and shopping portals in Germany.

We help our visitors to make informed buying decisions by providing product data sheets, price comparisons, trusted consumer reviews and more to hundreds of thousands of products. Strong partnerships with large and wellknown portals emphasize our reliability.

Until 26th of May our products sites have been respectively ranked well within the Google.de search result lists. Unfortunately, since today (28th of May 2004) we notice a dramatic decrease in the search result positions of our sites. Having been found within the top ten positions for many many frequently requested search terms (for products), since today we may be found within position 300 to 500 at all our product sites.

Our aim is to provide high quality information on all the products and services, that we have sites listed in the Google.de index. We never intend to do any search engine spamming like actions, and have never
done so.

As our competitors have not been affected in any comparable way, we suppose, that our pages have been
devaluated wrongly. Our relevance within German speaking websites has been approved by a stable and constant page rank 7 since months.

I´m searching for reasons/unknowingly mistakes, that our pages have been devaluated so massively.

Thank you in advance for your efforts.

Armi

[edited by: Marcia at 11:17 pm (utc) on May 28, 2004]

[tedster]

First, you may appreciate this post, which is active and on our Home Page right now:
Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com]

Do you have outbound links? If so, have you checked the destination sites lately? I've had a similar issue and it turned out that several of the once excellent linked sites had been purchased by someone else, and turned into what Google sees as "bad neighborhoods" while we weren't paying attention.

[shrirch]

Is it me or is the frequency of sites disappearing out of the index increasing?

[AjiNIMC]

Dropped Site Checklist thread was another thread to be in my favorites, thanks for the link

[Armi]

> First, you may appreciate this post, which is active > and on our Home Page right now:
> Dropped Site Checklist

Ok, thanks.

> Do you have outbound links?

Yes, a few.

> Google sees as "bad neighborhoods" while we weren't > paying attention.

I think,I have 2 links to sites which Google perhaps could accept something like this.

Should I remove this external links?

Would I have good chances to be "unfiltered"?

Or "Once, filtered = filtered always?"?

[conroy]

Removing the links to bad sites is a very good idea. There are no guarantees, but if you aren't ranking well now it is worth a shot. Many people have brought their sites back by removing links to bad sites.

[shrirch]

Here's the deal.

If the site is important to you, its your lifeline and your prestige (either that or ... "most renowned" is a delusion) why would you even dream of linking to something dodgy?

[SEOPTI]

If your sites is so well known in Germany why do you need Google? Hint: branding?

[Freedom]

Perhaps the Hilltop Algo has finally been introduced to the German Language.

That's my guess without enough information.

Do A Google Search on: "Analysis and Implications of Hilltop Algo" by Atul Gupta

[walkman]

"If your sites is so well known in Germany why do you need Google? Hint: branding? "

Devil's advocate: who can afford to turn down traffic? Brand or brand it doesn't matter, free traffic rules.

[ThomasB]

Ok, my guess on that, though I'm not 100% confident what the site is:
Some of your "PR providers" stopped working and that causes an decrease of rankings across the board. We see the opposite effect mainly when adding high-quality, related links that sometimes have a high PR. My suggestion is checking the PR providers if they still have their PR and if not, look for new PR providers or contact somebody who can help you out.

[asinah]

I had a chance to look at the website and I think it is very much the same that many users have experienced for a long time on this forum.

G is removing shopping sites (the website in question has around 400,000 links in Google and around 98,000 with Yahoo)

They use Overture and not Adsense and the content is identical with the ebay products and they are in fact an ebay affiliate and a overture publisher.

I send a robot last night over the site to fetch 50 url's by random deep in to the site and all links returned a PR0 and only the mainpage and the 2nd level pages have a high PR (I don't care about PR ranking in general)

As the site has no real content besides the member profiles and everything else comes from a database of another provider and in addition around 8 links per page point to overture and the rest to ebay, amazon and another German shoppingmall, I believe G just put a filter in.

Anyone that visits this website would notice that the SEO's did a good job as long the traffic comes in. I would say that the website was optimized to much. (KEYWORD SPAMMING on thosuands of pages)

I had 45000 pages in our german shoppingmall and over the last one month 41,000 pages were wiped out. We have now around 4000 pages left of which 400 are in the top10 results.

I advise however the Webmaster to get more incoming links directly to the Level 3 product pages and not to the mainpage.

Lately I notice as well that Yahoo removed a lot of Adsense publishers websites so I wouldn't be surprised if G does the same and removed sites that are overture publishers.

Only time will tell....

[Armi]

I think that the thesis that Google kick out sites only because they are Overture partners and not making Google Adsense advertising very daring.

We offer very good Content and because of the observation to the products and corresponding keywords I cannot confirm that our competitors were also devalued.

Google has downgrades us because we have to many affiliate links. (only in the ranking, all sites are still in Google, there were always little fluctuations, the Bot is still *very* active).
We have exaggerated it a little with the affiliate integration.

Because of this we change the sites since the last 2 days.

Regarding this I have a concrete question:

Our Affiliate links have the structure (concealed as internal links)

[domain.de...] Merchant = xyz & & destination position = marketplace & shop_id = 36 & offer_cat_id = 634 & prod_master_id = 36321 & prod_id_shop = 490535?http % = 3 A % 2 F % 2 Fxyz.com % 2 Fclick % 3 Fp % 3D 8166% 26 are % 3D 184777% 26 URL % 3D http % 3 A % 2 F % 2 Fwww.xyz.de % 2 Fservlets % 2 FTKRelEnter % 2 FROL_PARTNER_ID % 2 FARIGHT % 2 Fservlets % 2 FRMJump % 2 F % 3 FPROD % 3D 490535

We have the entry in the robots.txt

Disallow: /tracking.php

Is this so ok or are there better methods?

Many thanks first of all for your help!

[ownerrim]

Yahoo removed a lot of adsense publishers? How many have you noticed? From a relevancy standpoint, I think that would not be in Yahoo's best interests to manipulate their search results for that kind of reason. What would be the motivation? They wouldn't even consider dealing with 99% of the sites that host adsense. Too small for them. Now, adsense penalizing sites that carry ad sonar and adsense on separate pages would make more sense. Squash a competitor before it can really get going. The way microsoft does. Anyone have any thoughts on carrying adsense and sonar on separate pages within the same site?

[asinah]

Yahoo removed two shopping sites (one in Singapore and Hong Kong and my website)

All use different frontends but all are Amazon feeds.

I have a contact to Yahoo in Singapore so I called the team from the Marketing Department to dig around what's going on with my links (We run an educational website in Singapore and receive a large number of users from Singapore)

The marketing team visited my page while I talked to them and the first they noticed was that I am an adsense publisher and also have a Google searchbox on around 650,000 pages. I had a very nice discussion and talked to them in Mandarin. They don't know what is wrong with the website.

I don't believe Yahoo kicks everyone from the system that is an Adsense Publisher but a small number may get hit.

I noted the Hilltop Algorithm article and this too could make sense. It would certainly make sense to my old content as I run an Amazon XML feed.

The original poster did mention to me in a sticky mail that he was kicked out of Yahoo a couple of weeks ago due to spamming but after they emailed them the pages were back in the Yahoo index.

It should be noted that it could have been also a reason that if you get a filter or removal from Yahoo that this data could be shared with Google.

We still don't do that well with our shopping products but we are amazed that many of our products are well listed with Froogle and we do get some traffic.

I wish the website in question good luck to get that problem resolved.