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I posted about his on another thread but it got buried and one of the moderators told me to just start a new thread. So don't beat me up for duplicate posts. :)
Yesterday my site disappeared.
Here are the facts:
site:www.mysite.com shows between 95 & 250 pages depending on when I check. Prior to yesterday I had over 450 pages showing.
Note: Only URL's showing no titles or snippets
allinanchor:www.mysite.com Prior to yesterday #6 for my toughest keyword phrase. Today we don't show up at all. (we have over 1600 backlinks)
Note: when checking www.mysite.com the home page shows
and that's where all the links are pointed to. So why the drop in allinanchor?
Can't find my site for any search term which we previously were ranking for.
Googlebot use to come to my site daily until the last week of May. Since then only one visit, on the 15th of June and just to one page, the home page.
That page shows a cache of June 16th but no other dates on any other pages.
When checking my backward links there are none from within my site. They were there prior to yesterday.
I have sent Google a couple of emails and they did respond quickly but did not give a definitive answer.
They did say that this type of thing is not "necessarily indicative of a penalty."
Only two things have changed recently on my site.
1. I added a Vbulletin forum - Which I noticed added about 200 or so pages. These are the "template" pages of the forum and do not have any "unique" content. I have created about 20 threads and a dozen or so posts.
Note: About 95% of the URL's that are showing using the site: command are the forum pages.
The other 250 pages of my site do not show up.
2. My website designer had added a "absolute position for css" to my homepage which placed some text at the end of the page but had it show up first in the source code. I hope I explained that correctly. (I really don't know what it means)
So, was it the absolute position thing that google does not like?
The forum?
Or just a glitch in the cache that has caused most of my page disappear?
Is it time to start laying off employees and storing for a long winter? (trying to keep some humor about all of this)
Any help all of you pro's can give will be greatly appeciated!
Thanks,
Jim
P.S. If it matters the home page still shows a PR6 and the interior pages still show PR as well.
www1, 2, and 3 are all in flux.
I politely disagree. What is this "free Google traffic" nonsense. Google is a search engine. It is supposed to return relevant results. If you have relevant results that are mysteriously skipped over by google, then yes it is google's fault. It would be similar to someone putting a billboard for your competitor in front of your storefront. You see no problem with that?
Obviously if a site was highly ranked in google and is still highly ranked in all the other search engines, then the site has relevant results and search engines that claim to return relevant results should return that site. To argue that google can return whatever results they please because no one is paying for the results is dishonest. Google claims they return relevant results *for free*. If they claimed they return relevant results *if you pay the right price* then your argument would be more accurate.
>>>>Google is wrecking my business.
>>Nope, sorry but Google is in no way responsible for wrecking or prospering or anything else concerning your business or anyone else's other than their own.
Google most certainly is responsible when they hide certain sites from their search results. The credit card industry cant get away with denying credit to people without an explanation and cannot hide the reasons for bad credit. The same should apply to google. If google is blocking/banning/hiding sites, they should be required to answer why they are doing so and allow sites a method to become un-banned/un-blocked.
If you have relevant results that are mysteriously skipped over by google, then yes it is google's fault.
I totally agree. If you do something wrong, it ought to be possible to find out what, and put it right. To have SEO as such a black art does no-one any good, and certainly does not instill confidence in people wanting to optimise their sites so that they can be found for what the site is promoting. The more trust there is in Google, the more sites will be optimised, the better the information that is available for the consumer.
No, its similar to you putting up your billboard on someone else's privately owned road, then the road owner diverting traffic for whatever reason he chooses one exit before your free billboard.
Except that we dont put our billboards in google, google claims to go out and get the relevant billboards themselves. So the private road owner is claiming he got all the billboards in the area but then for his own reasons makes sure your billboard is not seen.
Which would be fine except for the part about google claiming to show relevant results. Excluding relevant results arbitrarily breaks that claim.
The second site got PR0 with this update but is still ranking as before. Also the link:command show zero backlinks (before:1600). I really can't think of a penalty because the ranks very well. It has indexed 12000 pages, all are fully indexed.
Very weird situation.
BTW: It's been a long, long time I saw GG posting on webmasterworld?!?
If you have unique content, have high PR, and have ranked well for "years", the chances are that many sites have "borrowed" your content. I think some people refer to these sites as cloakers/scrapers/theives... or whatever. Yes, you may have written and developed "unique content" but, if it is good, I doubt is the only copy on the Internet.
After researching, I found many other sites had copied entire blocks of text. Sometimes these are scraper directories, other times they are full websites who's owners couldn't be bothered to write their own text.
So, both sites are re-writing text. How long before they are copied again? It makes the whole thing into a game of cat and mouse.
It does seem that Google is, instead of outright banning sites, pushing them way down in the rankings and assigning a zero, 1 or 2 PR. In our cases, these are innocent sites. Emails with Google Help deny that they are banned or penalised, but rather this is a result of the regular algorithm changes.
The wierd thing is...it is cached June 27, 2004 but the title that Google displays is an old title that I had over 6 months ago!
Strange, really! same thing with my site: homepage shown in the list is really old: is the one of the 21st of feb (2004), is not cached, but can know that because of the tittle.
Then have three pages with fully description, and the others only with url.
Patricio
If you have relevant results that are mysteriously skipped over by google, then yes it is google's fault. It would be similar to someone putting a billboard for your competitor in front of your storefront.
No, it wouldn't. It would be similar to a journalist writing a newspaper article about your industry and mentioning a lot of companies in that industry, thus giving them free exposure but for unknown reasons not mentioning your own company.
To argue that google can return whatever results they please because no one is paying for the results is dishonest.
We are a few who have written it several times before, but I will happily do it again: Google can return whatever results they please because no one is paying for the results.
If google is blocking/banning/hiding sites, they should be required to answer why they are doing so and allow sites a method to become un-banned/un-blocked.
Sure. All the spammers will agree with you.
If google is blocking/banning/hiding sites, they should be required to answer why they are doing so and allow sites a method to become un-banned/un-blocked.
Sure. All the spammers will agree with you.
You have missed the point, and Google have missed the point - if the method to become unblocked is to stop the spam aspect of the spam, then surely providing the method and people following it is helping us all. If clear guidelines, and even very technical guidelines are issued, then the black art of seo comes out into the light and we can change discussion on these forums to more interpretation of the rules than guessing games.
Unfortunately we are stuck with guessing and the seo black art.
My webmaster and I have both sent several letters to Google all of which have been answered by form responses.
My site is included in the index. (home page and five others, three of which do not exist)
Before this problem google showed over 400 pages in my site.
I can find my site for a couple of non-competitive keywords.
I have returned to #10 for allinanchor for my primary keyword. However I am nowhere to be found in the serps for that term.
Still no visits from googlebot, which seems strange for a PR7 that use to get visited every day.
I am getting real close to taking the website down from that URL and putting it up at a new one. I really hate starting over with a new URL but I am not sure how much time I should waste waiting to see if the current one will get straightened out.
Thanks,
Jim
Google seems to be aggressively hunting down sites that offer paid links. If it finds such a site, especially if a quantity of links are over multiple pages, one by one it is penalising them. Whether Google is in cognito at link***age and other such sites (easy enough to do) buying a few links and gaining a map of (a) sites offering large scale links and (b) those buying such links to inflate PR (they will have links on those sites), or whether it is doing this with its algorithm, it is happening. I'm seeing sites offering multi-page links fall one by one. Its like a forest being mown down.
Here's the disturbing part though, based on a pattern of our sites being affected - the sites that buy the links are also being affected. I have had very clean sites, for which I purchased multi-page links from a few sites, being thrown down the ratings. A theory is that if Google sees a site with several of its 'marked' multi-link selling sites pointing in (so not just from one site), the link buying site is also penalised. In each case, Google says they are not banned as such, but rather: as a natural effect of the algorithm ...
Strong stuff, but I felt I had to report my findings over a range of sites. If this is the case, a site cannot be harmed by some incomings from a single site, but if from a few 'marked' sites ...
Any other forum users finding this? I must admit, if I was Google (on hindsight) I would take this path.
I think a better explanation is simply that those sites that had purcaased links from other sites simply lost the benefit of the incoming link(s), and had not taken the time to develop a borad linking campaign as opposed to focusing solely on paid links.
IF it ever can be proven that google can/will penalize a site for factors that are completely beyond it's control (i.e. incoming links), then be prepared for all hell to break loose, as a number of top sites will quickly become targets for "link hitmen".
Neither "penalty" nor "glitch" is an apropos word for the secondary effects of this activity. Perhaps the providers of paid links could be said to be penalized; people who bought links from them are merely affected.
Nice report Somerset. I would not be surprise if Google would be able to penalize those sites that buy links and it is not necessary for these sites to link back to the selling sites at all.
Imagine yourself to be Google - if you want to shake the industry of link selling and buying...what will you do?
To limit the collateral damage, first you have to compile a list of known websites that sell links and have a special algo for this specific mission. One of the bad habits of these buying/selling links is that it often comes as a "Package". Pay X dollars and get links from X number of sites or X number of pages...
Then you have the spider crawls each site in the list and then those sites that it links to. For those destined sites that fit into the "special algo" criteria of the "Package", then you can assume that these sites buy links for the purpose of boosting their PR.
So here is the most important part:-
With this assumption in hand, you will "STRIKE FIRST" by penalizing those sites that buy links, because you know that your precision would be very high with 99% accuracy. You also know that at this time, no one has paid a buck to buy links for his competitors.
Later on when there are signs that evil doers begin to purchase links for their competitors in the hope to get them penalized, then you will not impose penalty but only not to count those links in your next round. As an end result, people in this business will get confused. The evil doers may even lose twice, i.e. getting their sites penalized for buying links in the first round and losing money in vain for buying links for its competitor in the 2nd round.
The above is only a portrayal of what Google can do and it is not necessary to carry the same scenario.
To conclude, don't underestimate Google...and you'll see it is possible.
> don't underestimate Google
Never ever underestimate Google.
If you consciously and systematically try to game Google's algo you should not be surprised to see Google hit back if they can.
amaruca, you misinterpret the message entirely...it is meant for those who intend to buy links to their competitors for a sole purpose of getting them penalized by Google.
BTW, this is "NO OFFENSE" to anyone, because the incident has not occurred...
If you TRY to cheat Google and get kicked out you got what you deserved! You can't tell me you didn't know this couldn't happen!
If you run a decent directory/website you have to charge for your listings/advertising if you don't want to be "submission spammed" to death and/or want paid for your time. If dmoz charged $299 for every submission to be returned if the submission was accepted - do you think people would submit every page of their site? Nope, if that was done you would see the unreviewed backlog dry up. I opened a site to free submissions once that usually charges, and within a 3-day period you could see the crap and multiple submissions (deeplinks to pages of their site). Needless to say that stopped real quick and very few of the submissions were accepted.
They (search engines) will hit reciprocal links much sooner then they will ever go after paid advertising/listings. It would be easy to see when 90%+ of links going out from a site gets links back from the same sites. I don't believe they will penalize sites with lots of reciprocal links - they just won't count them.
These thoughts/opinions do not apply to those that are advertising/selling PR.
Loss of pages in the index and dramatic reduction in googlebot visits. This started around 5/25 and then PR went to 0 at the last update.
I was buying and selling links on 3 sites, so far only the one site has been affected this way. I do know that two of the sites I was buying links from for this site got PR0'd during the last update too.
This site had a PR4 long before I ever started buying links and still has enough back links that it should have at least some PR without the purchased links so I don't think that it can all be blamed on the loss of PR from those links.
The pages I do still have indexed with a description are all either dated very recently (6/20-7/08). These are just a few pages from when googlebot does occasionaly visit right now. Most of the pages in the index that still have a snippet are from december of 2003, mainly 12/9/03 to 12/11/03. I have checked my logs and these same pages have been indexed literally hundreds of times since then but it is the old version that is still in the index. It is like google is ignoring all the indexing from the first half of the year. Just to clarify I am getting these dates from a date stamp on my pages that shows up in the snippets.
Any thoughts on google displaying these old versions?
Harwich
I'm now convinced it was not a penalty (I couldn't imagine why, by the way). Last week of june, the site was down almost all the time because of problems with the hosting provider. It seems googlebot is coming for a kind of deep crawl at the beginning and the end of every month, then comes daily but only two-five times. And, by the end of june, it couldn't access the site. Few days from that it disappeared from searchs.
Finally, three days ago googlebot came to this kind of deep crawl (no exactly a deep crawl as it was time ago) of the beginning of the month and since yesterday night is behaving as it used to with the most common searchs.
So I'm thinking this google's "penalty or glitch", in my case, was caused by a temporaly impossibility to access to the site.
Patricio
