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We, to our detriment, employed a SEO consultant to help with our ranking. Well it was a bad choice - a very bad choice indeed, as this person was not policed as well as she should have been.
Page cloaking was employed and two days later ALL of our listed ranking have dropped (I can't find any) other than typing in the direct domain name.
What I have personally done so far:
1. Fired the consultant!
2. Removed all the cloaking garbage.
3. Submitted the site to be re-spidered.
4. Install the Google toolbar. :)
5.?
6.?
7.?
What should I/we do next? I can visit our site and the google toolbar shows a PR of 6/10. The site is (see my profile) - so getting a new domain name is out of the question. :) Besides, we have had the domain name since '93 (content up only since ~'95) and there are alot of people who link to us.
This whole SEO thing was in part to showcase our new SEO services (ironic, eh?). Atleast now, we know what NOT to do and WHO not to use! I think now we're bringing everything inhouse, versus partnering/outsourcing.
Any comments (other than "Doh!") and suggestions would be great.
[edited by: noslzzp at 2:22 am (utc) on Dec. 24, 2002]
Your site has a PR6 and I see nothing to indicate a penalty of any sort.
Second wait a full Google cycle with your changes in place and see how you get indexed.
Third edit your post because posting URL's is not allowed.
Fourth learn from the knowledge in this forum and either optimise your own site or entrust it to an SEO with integrity who passes vigourous vetting including testimony from satisfied clients that you can check.
Good luck.
That suggests to me that there is no penalty.
The reason that I believe we are being penalized is because the following search terms ranked highly (first page) as of 2-3 days ago but do not show up now.
[keywords removed] Sorry again, i'm new and apparently can't read. :)
These are fairly unique, every single one of our key personnel showed up and now they don't show up at all.
--
Ok.. what constitutes a full cycle for Google?
Piskie, what search term(s) did you try? I want to see if the results show up for me (testing my theory below).
The only theory that I can come up with is that Google is not showing results to search requests coming from our IP address (which is NAT'd behind a firewall).
Or, maybe our PR was actually higher than 6 before all this happened and now our penalized rank actually lower (down *to* 6)? As I've said, I have only installed the Google toolbar tonight, so I have no idea what our PR was before 2-3 days ago. Are there any services that track histories of PR? If not, anyone want to start one!? :)
[edited by: noslzzp at 4:06 am (utc) on Dec. 24, 2002]
You came up #1 behind two sponsored (paid) listings.
Then, using the same two words for your business type again, and in lieu of the words in the trademarked phrase I used only the very very very generic (for your business) term 'level'.
You came up number 2, again excluding the two paid sponsored listings and one SERp which rated higher.
You're apparently at the top of the heap on highly generic terms, but those terms are far more likely to be what a consumer uses as contrasted to an employee name.
I'm really at a loss to see where on earth you have any form of problem with PR, SERP or anything else.
If you don't want to be behind sponsored listings, I think you'll actually need to pony up the highest bid to hike to the top of Sponsor Mountain.
On the other hand, I suspect there's an awful lot of folks who'd rather enjoy coming up #1 or 2 on generic industry terms and also have a PR6 in their pocket to blow their nose on.
Oh well, happy holidays all the same.
Kevin from Norman, America
It was noted that any dropping of url's or search terms that are particular, and not of interest to the concensus of webmasterworld is against the TOS.
Please read this, its pretty clear. Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com]
The regular monthly cycle is, in brief, update at the end of the month, some time during the last ten days, with the major monthly crawl starting right after or thereabouts. Google does crawl a good number of sites in between, with minor fluctuations, but PR is only calculated for the "big" update.
A full cycle for you right now would be being crawled within a few days after the coming update, which is any day now, with the results of that being evident at the next update, which will be at the end of January.
You're on your way if you've already got the toolbar and started reading. You'll find the site search handy, as well as the glossary - both are linked to at the top of the page. You'll enjoy going through the Google KnowledgeBase [webmasterworld.com], which is as comprehensive a guide to Google as you'll find.
Penalties just don't happen that quickly, and what you've been told already is very sound. People will use generic phrases when they're searching, not company or personal names. So it really sounds like you're OK right now.
Indeed.. KevinPate told me to hold tight and see what happens over the next few days. I'll do just that and keep up with the other happenings here.
Thanks!
There is NO WAY that even totally dodgy SEO techniques would cause problems that fast. Something else is going on, probably normal fluctuations, and I wonder if you've been fair to the SEO person.
To me it makes little sense to dismiss someone because of rank fluctuations for terms that few normal searchers would use, when your rankings are so strong for search terms that well-targeted prospects would be likely to use.
Before you hire anyone for anything else, give careful thought to:
1) making your expectations clear
2) establishing clear supervision/reporting relationships, and
3) setting clear, fair benchmarks for assessing results.
Pay special attention to the last one ... not knowing what your PR was "before" is an odd omission if you're assessing someone's SEO work.
A fairer benchmark for measuring results would be an increase in the total traffic received from the free search engines or something like that, not normal ups and downs for any term in particular.
Run the page through the density checker and see what it shows. Sometimes we can find that a page is "accidentally" optimized for something other than what we intended.
[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 6:25 pm (utc) on Dec. 24, 2002]
[edit reason] No Specific URLS! [/edit]
Google would never have a problem with cloaking in two days time - it's far outside the realm of possiblity.
Two days is nothing but the freshbot finding the new content and changes to the old ones. This is a good sign that the there was something done to the pages and normal.
Now, the problem is how to undue the followup damage you probably caused trying to clean up the nonexistent problem.
Any major web site changes will initially have a "somewhat" negative effect - unless the entire site was crawl by minty - and this is very unlikely. Since the update hasn't occurred, this is the probable cause of some results declining.
As previous members have suggested a penalty will not occur immediately after posting - Minty will not make rash decisions about your site.
I assume the SEO was already paid, as such, you may want to re-visit your previous decisions. Pulling the plug too early, without qualified unbiased consultation does not help you - especially if the SEO didn't do anything unethical.
Enough about that.. We have moved on.. So from looking at the other threads it seems that Google is playing "science project" and we have yet to figure out the new monster that it is creating. We are in a holding pattern just as many others are over this..
