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After investigation I found this.
- PR is still on the pages (PR 6)
- the backlinks still are showing up in google searches.
- when typing out the url into google, only the url (such as www.widgets-widgets.com) comes up, without a title/descriptionthe same happens when you type the url into google.
Has anyone seen this problem before, or was I just temporarily delisted?
Thank you for your time,
- Jason
I almost hesitate to post this as it makes little sense, but I'm just calling it as I see it. Treat this a nothing more than a preliminary observation.
I would say you can be confident that your site will re-appear soon.
If you've been deep crawled - then Google definitely likes your site!
Forget for a minute what the reasons are for the ban (although it is curious) but I am interested in why Google would choose the "slow death" route as opposed to complete removal now?
Upon re-reading my post I see that I mispoke slightly, meaning I did not mean same IP *plus* some other conncection. I meant *any* connection, if affiliate marketing is involved. More specifically, I have a friend who just lost a site - Site A. Site A was, with some effort, identifiable as being from the same owner as Site B (the WHOIS info of the two sites shared some common info). About 60% of the outbound links (affiliates) were common to both sites; the other 40% unique to each site. Other than those 60% of links being common, there are no similarities between the sites that I or he can see.
No other changes recently either.
Because I'm so paranoid, I can't escape the feeling that the noose around affiliates' necks is slowly tightening.
My sites haven't been hit by this yet, perhaps because we run only a few sites making money from affiliate marketing, but it all seems scary to me, and has ever since Florida.
We are experiencing something similar with all the sites we manage. Googbot visits like crazy, PR's and backlinks are all good, content is unique, no link farming going on, etc... By all G standards we are doing everything right. Yet we have virtually no rankings in G for any good terms. The domains are all in their DB.
Positioning has been steadily decreasing for the last 6 mths to the point it is at now.
If it weren't for Y! and MSN we'd be dead in the water.
We have since taken steps:
Split all sites into unique class c ip pools.
Made sure no sites link to sites on the same class c ip.
Revised content accross the board.
Made sure all sites have validated html.
Still nothing. Although the new class c ips has been done a little less than a month ago so not all are reflecting this in backlinks.
Anyone care to speculate?
Don't get me wrong, if there was a hand check by an actual human it would have around a 25% chance of getting banned for some mildly aggressive inbound links, but there is virtually no way that linking could have caused the problem via the algo as there are such a wide range of links all from entirely unaffiliated sites and over 1000 unsolicited links. I have many sites ranking well that are infinitely worse than this one.
I generally don't post in the "penalty" threads but this is different than usual because of the fact that some pages are still in the index and some are in without ranking or title. Also, I have had many sites banned before and there was no question in my mind that they deserved it, but this one and the ones I see are pretty nice sites - definitely top 5-10% on the web - you know the kind that even we wouldn't mind visiting without laughing :)
:)
Given your comment:
>> It's not the server or IP as we have other sites doing fine on the same ip...
...can you think of any other elements that would connect the site that was hit with any of you other sites that are on the same IP?
One thing I did notice is that when checking backlinks (not on Google but an accurate count), there are TONS of these pseudo search directories linking to us with our titles and dexscriptions. Apparently they scrape content from high ranking sites and link to them? Doubt that it matters but I haven't seen this to such an extent yet
Many but all of my about 1000s will not rank for anything. The problem started at the end of May and persists today. For example the index page which is still a PR 5 and is showing over 100 back links will not rank for anything, included long quotes from the page. A search for the domain (minus the .com) will not rank our Web site anywhere, whereas it has ranked number 1 for four years.
This is causing us considerable harm and I can find no reason for it. The only idea I have is that it might be related to duplicate content. We had an affliate duplicating some of our pages, as of today these duplicate pages are off the Web. Also, since our site is a Yahoo! store we haev mutiple domains that resovle to teh same pages. For example we have our store.yahoo address, shop.store.yahoo URL, vanitydomain.com URL and vanitydomain.com/ystorename URL.
Like others mentioned in addition to not ranking our pages are appear to be just showing URL and title and not description (partial inclusion).
James
Just a data point.
We also have had this problem. We look after around 70 sites, competely unrelated and different products/services. There is some subtle linking, but nothing unusual. They are all on the same server. Ratings have sunk to nothing.
Querying for specific off the page text blocks does not display our main site, only directory sites that have stolen the text blocks - which we wrote.
Furthermore, some of these sites link to other sites on other servers, and they also seem to have been
affected.
GoogleGuy help. This cannot be justified. All of these sites are above board and high quality. We are talking about peoples livelihoods. Please comment.
If it is the duplicate content - and so other sites that steal our content get rated, and not our sites, that needs correction.
If the penalty is because many sites are on the same IP, that also needs correcting. It is normal for a web design company to host sites on the same server.
Comments welcome - especially from GoogleGuy.
So I think this "thing" is related to content. Websites with zero content are penalised.
But I am sure that here are some people who have also been penalised whose sites are very content rich, eh?
But maybe it is one factor.
greg
I noticed that too. That's pretty weak if you can get your cointent ripped by a bunch of adsense spammers and have it take down your sites...
<<Comments welcome - especially from GoogleGuy. >>
Pretty sure he doesn't post here anymore.
My Scenario:
-------------
Dedicated IP (only one site on this IP)
Established site (2 years old)
No unsavory practices.
Purely original content.
Never penalized.
Horrible downhill slide began June 1.
"No title, no description" syndrome spreading throughout the site more each day.
I think Google is having trouble spidering and indexing. Not too concerned.
But if your pages are gone, as mfishy and others (incl me) have described, I have yet to see anyone report that everything is back and well now.
I am not "not too concerned". On the contrary :)
I do agree that Googlebot is having crawling troubles but i don't understand why it has only affected a small % of sites out there.
The pages that are hurting show no title and no description (just the URL).
Since the last update googlebot has dropped from visiting every day to one visit the other day to my home page only.
When checking site:my url I have dropped from 456 pages to 207 pages and only shows url's, no titles or snippets.
There are still a couple of data centers that have the old cache and everything is fine on those.
My site is gone from the rest that show the current cache. (from the day when googlebot only came to my home page)
The only way I now that my site is still in the index is by checking www.mysite.com
By the way my home page still shows a PR6 with most interior pages being 4's & 5's.
Any ideas Ladies and Gents?
Thanks,
Jim
If it is true that 'Google is having trouble spidering and indexing' then there is hope.
Our sites also only show up when you search for the url, or when you browse through all the site:mysite.com results. They also show no title and no description (just the URL).'
I'm wondering if Google simply missed a whole IP range, as quite a few of our sites are affected. We had no real downtime.
How are you all getting on trying to explain these problems to your clients? At present it all seems guesswork.
What seems really strange is that a number of first page results were affected.
On one of his sites he added a sitewide link to a page on my site (6,000 links)
On another of his sites he added a sitewide link to a page on my site (8,000 links)
I wouldn't worry too much about this.
Google tends to concentrate on giving less credit to multiple links from the same site - as opposed to penalising a site for having such a large # of links from one particular site.
Speak up GoogleGuy, this is affecting alot of people who arent spamming.
I'm increasingly convinced that this is just a glitch that google will eventually fix.
1) Googlebot visited yesterday and all of the pages it visited are now in the SERPs (reasonably positioned), but without summery (url only). This is the first time we have seen this; up until now we have never seen pages listed in "site:www.mysite.com" that had no summary show up in SERPs, and even many that did were not showing up. There were a small number that returned from the dead and they still seem to be back.
2) Our PR (according to the meter) went from 8 to 0. The other thread on PR updates shows most people getting PR improvements, and several getting what appears to be 0. Whether this means anything is open for debate; clearly we're in the midst of change.
James
