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I will give the following example that I am having, my theory on what the problem is, and am interested in hearing what the SEO experts have to say.
Our market is rather niche with what I consider low to low-moderate competition. Their is only about 10 major players in our industry, with maybe a 100 or so want to-be's, which pop up year to year and disappear.
Optimizing for the top 10, should not be to difficult, and for the past 5 years, we have ranked #1 or #2 for our popular keywords. After Florida we were still in the top 10 after disappearing for a few weeks.
For the first few years, our site was widget.ca, and then we got a widget.com domain. We got our ISP to enter an AName (or was it a CNAME alias) in the DNS entry, so the same two names pointed at the same IP address.
Google duplicate content filter, always filtered out the widget.com from the search results and always displayed the widget.ca when searching for our popular keywords.
Around mid september, after several years of this behavior, Google now chooses the widget.com instead. The site:widget.ca -something proves the .ca is gone and the widget.com shows up with the site: qualifier.
Both widget.ca and widget.com have a PR of 5 (4 after the last PR update in late september). However the only way to get my widget.com listing to appear in the top 10 is to put the exact worlds of our title text,as the search entry.
The widget.ca site had four times the links of the widget.com, however shouldn't the links be combined when determining PR, when you have two URLs that point to the same IP address.
If the PR was not combined, I should still show up in the first few pages, as the keywords are niche, and not very competitive.
What is interesting, is sites that link to us appear favorably in the listing, but our site is not found unless I type the title of our homepage exactly.
We are not using 301 redirects, as we are running on an IIS server, and puting a 301 redirect will create an infinite loop, of reloading the home page, unless we have two separate sites (and thus pay for the two separate sites), instead of the two domains pointing to the same IP address and directory structure.
Only our home page is indexed, as we run an dynamic site with a complex URL query string. We are working on going static this winter.
Will this problem go way on its own? If it does, how many google update cycles before things return to normal? Is this a strictly a duplicate content penalty, or are their other factors?
Could this also be a sandbox issue, as the widget.com might be consider a new entry despite being an alias for widget.ca?
I sure wish Google was a lot more stable.
What we did to counter it was instead of having them point to the main domain, we painted them to a page that essentially reads "Were you looking for [oursite.com]"? Click Here....etc. with a "noindex" meta tag.
Took about 3 weeks for google to sort it out from there. We immediately jumped about 5 pages ;-)
I pointed the DNS "A" records of the other domains I had to a different server, stuck a .htaccess file on board that pointed back to the actual site. Seems to have fixed my problem, while not having to toss my other domains.
Dave
The key may be where is your server?
If google sees two domains and same content/hosting - .ca and .com, it will have to decide on ranking one and not both. If the site is hosted in the US then it will take the .com as the main site.
Penalties is a word I have a problem with. I think it is relatively rare that google gives a 'penalty', although anybody with a number of sites and big traffic will have inevitably had a site disappear. Instead, usually a site will drop because tactics that worked in the past are now being ignored. Likewise, new algo's will effect a site dramatically, but this is not a penalty. An example of this is the recent attention google has made to duplicate content. Sites with duplicate content are experiencing their content being ignored, and thus no longer ranking well. This is not a penalty, but a filter.
both my friend and I have experienced this problem
both websites ranked high on google for the same keyword - I was usually no 1 (lots of inbound links - been around a lot longer) she was about no 5.
suddenly both pages dived - hers to page 50'ish mine to page 5/6. (I was also hit by the google dance 25 Aug which didn't help) - but still ranked high on most other search engines.
I have spent weeks and weeks trying to discover the problem and learnt a heck of a lot in the process (clouds and silver linings).
Suddenly realised I was getting a lot of visitos from an old domain that no longer existed as a site, just simply pointed at the current one - basically divided the site years ago - didn't work as expected so amalgamated them again. Discovered that I had submitted the old domain to Yahoo, way back, and this had lain dormant untill recently. I figured that Yahoo has discovered it and is crawling and indexing my site and all the new pages and using the old domain - 2 sites with exactly the same content in Google. This must be a recent phenomenam - never noticed it before.
Telling my mate all about it this morning she realises she's done exactly the same thing - moved from frontpage to dreamweaver and slightly changed here url (gone frome widgetwidgetwidget to widget-widget-widget)- 2 sites with the same content in google!
We've taken steps to correct this - hopefully will see some results soon.
Moral - if your sites dived - check there's not an old domain in Yahoo causing the problem.
Im prepared to live with google filtering out either the .ca or .com domain, provided it has no impact on my ranking, for the site google does decide to list.
It looks like I need to go with 301 directs, however since my ISP is running IIS. I will need to get 4 separate IP addresses and do a redirect to the one I wish to keep.
I have been told that PR follows a 301 redirect, except that it takes 12 weeks to take effect. Is this correct?
We are not using 301 redirects, as we are running on an IIS server, and puting a 301 redirect will create an infinite loop, of reloading the home page, unless we have two separate sites (and thus pay for the two separate sites), instead of the two domains pointing to the same IP address and directory structure.
All you need to do is create an additional IIS entry for additional domains on 301 redirect.
I have been told that PR follows a 301 redirect, except that it takes 12 weeks to take effect. Is this correct?
It is very difficult to tell what is going on. We did a 301 to a new domain about 8 weeks ago, the toolbar PR seems to be showing up OK for the most part but rankings have not returned to anything like what they were.
Many pages that used to be 1st on certain SERPS are now appearing quite regularly in 11th, 21st or 31st. It kind of reminds me of a few years ago when there was that +20 penalty that Google were applying.
I am wondering if perhaps Google takes a while to clear the old versions of pages out of it's index properly and applies some sort of penalty to the new pages. Having said that I have tried some experiments to test that theory and none of them yet support it.
It appears that Google has run amock with changes. They need to focus on what they really want out of their search results and work on that vision. Looking at the search results, it appears that their vision changes on a daily basis.
My game plan is now to develop a multitude of sites selling different product lines. That way, at least a few eggs will fall in the google basket at any given time.
I think Brett's concept of developing content needs to be changed. You need to develop content yes, but you must diversify your content across several differnt website projects.
My website traffic has dropped from 7000 views/day to just over 4000, and it has really hurt my e-commerce business.
Time to start a good PPC campaign
You know, I don't have a clue where to start or how much to pay for this sort of thing. I've been reading about it, and see a lot of mised results/feedback. Being a small company (and needing to keep as much money as possible in motorcycle construction as possible), I'm afraid of how much I'd obligate myself to and if it would actually turn real profits.
Do any of you have PPC under the belt with positive results?
Dave
In my opinion, PPC should nearly always be in the mix of you web strategy. You can spend hundreds to thousand learning about PPC (just like I did) or you can learn from others (and save some money).
I gave it up because I do this part time. PPC needs attention. I'm giving all my extra time to writing content instead of managing PPC advertising. I don't know if there are any good resources here, but one of these days I am going to write a tutorial.
Whats that all about anyone know?
