Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I would like to see if we can break down the reasons why we dropped out of the SERPS, and offer ways to protect our domains in the future. I want to see how many of us have something in common: (more statements can be added)
1. Are you in a competitive money area? (yeah but keywords are not too bad)
2. Are you an adsense publisher? (yes, but really, really doubt this has anything to do with it)
3. Did you make alot of money from Google traffic? (nah, not yet..but was growing enough where it would stink if I lost it...I lost it)
4. Dedicated or Shared IP? Do you think switching to a dedicated IP from shared will improve rankings? (shared)
5. Do you believe you were penalized? If you put in keywords that only you should show up as, are other sites outranking you? (definitely believe I was penalized)
6. Did you forget the 301 redirect, to redirect non-www to www vice versa? (I did!) Are there any other htaccess codes to put in by the way?
7. For those of you in the sandbox before Allegra, did Allegra take you out of the sandbox, then did it dump you back in the sandbox in the Bourbon update? (Yes, I was out of the sanbox due to the allegra update, now im even worse than I was 9 months ago...cant even rank for a phrase with 1000 results. Its to the point where I can only rank if NO website contains the keyword.)
8. How many keywords per webpage do you use when optimizing? How many words per page on average? (about 6-10 keywords...about 180 words per page, keyword density is 10/180 = about 5% max most of the time...sometimes maybe 10% if I have a short writeup)
9. Proximity of keywords? Are they too close? (My headers are always [h1]keyword[/h1], and the keyword also starts at the beginning of my first sentence usually...so the header keyword, and regular keyword are adjacent. Other than that, keywords for me are naturally spaced apart for the most part...about 9-15+ words in between the keywords.)
10. How old is your site? (10 months)
11. How did you obtain links when you first started out? How often do you get new quality links? Did you stop obtaining links, thinking you would continue to get them naturally? (I politely asked other music site webmasters if they would like to exchange links. I stopped doing this after I ranked in G, because I realized I needed more content.)
12. Do spammy sites outrank you? (yes!)
13. Do you do well in Yahoo, MSN, etc? (yes!)
14. Do you hate Google. (no I think their search engine is great, despite my horrible rankings)
Well, maybe we can all communicate to each other what went wrong. If we find out that there is enough similarities between certain things, maybe that could be one cause of our dropped rankings. Perhaps everyone has number 4 and 6 in common. This may mean there is a relationship between 301 redirects, and dedicated ip's. Please, set your anger aside for the moment and lets just talk about the possibilities. Be nice too. No bashing Google, it will defeat the purpose of this thread. Thank you.
Keyword density, proximity, age of site. Many people have site age between 1 year to 5 years. This seems to have no effect. Strange, I would have thought older sites would not be effected.
We all have adsense in common, but I still don't think that has anything to do with it.
The competitive field may have alot to do with this. For example, I can't rank for my name in quotes anymore, and I was able to after I got out of the sandbox 3 months ago. Maybe 3 months ago Google did not see my site as competitive music site before I added alot of content to it, but now it sees it as a themed competitive music site. As a result, Google refuses to let me rank for any keyphrase again. It seems that I am back in the sandbox after waiting 7 months to get out. Can anyone contradict this theory? For example, in my case, I was born, discovered and did well for 3 months, and shot down after I added more stuff. Anyone in a similar situation as me? Or are there people who have been born (with an obvious competitive themed site), thrived for a long time, then been shot down? I am trying to see if Google takes a few months to see if a site is competitive or not.
One interesting thing I discovered. Even though I lost all of my keyphrases, every single one of them can be found between results 200-1000. Even for a really competitive keyphrase, like "piano" I can be found on like the 40th page of Google. So its not like my keyprhases were wiped out...they still exist, just pushed way back, but not far enough to not be found at all. Just found it interesting, because I still can be found within the 1000 results for a few extremely competitive keyphrases. When I was in the sandbox, I couldn't be found in the top 1000 for anything that had at least 80,000 or more results. Although it feels like I am in the sandbox again, I can at least be found within the 1000 pages for everything.
I was just thinking about something. Do you think it is possible Google takes into consideration how long your visitors stay at your website, and how many pageviews you have per day? Can someone contradict this or help verify its credibility?
"2) Google's founders and its Ph.D.'s come from university backgrounds where citations are an integral part of academic writing."
Of course, in college, if you quote TOO many sources they call you dirty names like "plagiarist"
Google has a toolbar, tracking links in the serps, adwords, and adsense. Do you think they really need to buy an Amazon property?
1. Are you in a competitive money area?
Only moderately competitive for most keywords/ topics. There are other topics waaay more competitive than my area of interest. One part of my site is in a competitive area, but only constitutes a tiny fraction of my site. My smaller site that was also badly hit is not really in a particularly competitive money area. Can be lucrative, but not really big money.
2. Are you an adsense publisher?
Yes, for both my sites.
3. Did you make alot of money from Google traffic?
Do you mean Adsense or just in general (like people who came from Google shopped at my site)? As far as Adsense goes, it was about one-quarter to a third of my monthly revenue. My other revenue has dropped significantly, so I'd say that Google's traffic was responsible for a lot of money I was making, both from Adsense and shoppers.
4. Dedicated or Shared IP? Do you think switching to a dedicated IP from shared will improve rankings?
Shared IP. I don't know if switching to a dedicated server will do much.
5. Do you believe you were penalized? If you put in keywords that only you should show up as, are other sites outranking you?
I dunno - this does describe my sites both, so perhaps I have been.
6. Did you forget the 301 redirect, to redirect non-www to www vice versa?
Yes, but they are in now. I have a couple other .htaccess items regarding my newsfeed and something else I forget now - but those have been there for months.
7. For those of you in the sandbox before Allegra, did Allegra take you out of the sandbox, then did it dump you back in the sandbox in the Bourbon update?
Was not sandboxed.
8. How many keywords per webpage do you use when optimizing? How many words per page on average?
When I work at it, it winds up being about 3-something percent. My articles run from 150 to 1200 words. I know the rule of thumb is to break up articles over 500 words into two pages, but people rarely get around to the second page, so I stopped bothering!
9. Proximity of keywords? Are they too close?
I try to keep things natural - my writing style is very conversational, so I can't really answer that. I write for the reader, not for the search engines.
10. How old is your site?
Three and a half years old. The smaller site is almost two and a half
11. How did you obtain links when you first started out? How often do you get new quality links? Did you stop obtaining links, thinking you would continue to get them naturally?
I asked for them initially, and although I stopped actively pursuing them, people still link to many of my internal pages when they find them informative.
12. Do spammy sites outrank you?
Very much so.
13. Do you do well in Yahoo, MSN, etc?
I seem to do all right, although compared to what I was getting from Google, it seems rather miniscule.
14. Do you hate Google.
I am frustrated right now, but I think it's a waste of energy to direct negativity towards an inanimate entity that only exists electronically. ;-)
They DID buy Alexa which tracks all this. ;-)
Where I was when this happen? Is this true?
2. Are you an adsense publisher?
Yes heavily
3. Did you make alot of money from Google traffic?
Relatively (noway near enough to live off)
4. Dedicated or Shared IP? Do you think switching to a dedicated IP from shared will improve rankings?
Shared but I own all the sites off the IP and the other sites rank ok. Not a factor IMO.
5. Do you believe you were penalized? If you put in keywords that only you should show up as, are other sites outranking you?
Penalized from page one to like page 80th on many pages.
6. Did you forget the 301 redirect, to redirect non-www to www vice versa? Are there any other htaccess codes to put in by the way?
No. I did have 404 redirect from a 404 (don’t ask!)
7. For those of you in the sandbox before Allegra, did Allegra take you out of the sandbox, then did it dump you back in the sandbox in the Bourbon update?
Not effected.
8. How many keywords per webpage do you use when optimizing? How many words per page on average?
6 or 7 times on a page with about 700 words + Page title + Meta
9. Proximity of keywords? Are they too close?
Nope all natural provided by journalists (apart from db generated titles).
10. How old is your site?
3.5 years old.
11. How did you obtain links when you first started out? How often do you get new quality links? Did you stop obtaining links, thinking you would continue to get them naturally?
Links with only quality sites. Never stopped obtaining quality links. Even public/government funded authority sites link to me including the BBC!
12. Do spammy sites outrank you?
Just the one site but only if you consider them "spammy".
13. Do you do well in Yahoo, MSN, etc?
Very good ranks at top level of my site though no at all well at deeper pages.
14. Do you hate Google.
No it does a good job. But wished it had penalised the pages considered spam only and not the whole site – biatch!
OTHER FACTORS!
Added 6000% more pages (internal Sandbox?)
Duplicated content via a text only version! (competitor does it well and ranks)
Duplicated content via a affiliate shop!(competitor does it well and ranks)
Added: Like above I also have a text only version of the whole site. I put no index and no follow in the headers, and put the directory in robots.txt, but Google still lists the urls of the text only pages in SERPs. Could this be the problem?
Maybe they created a list of the various charactistics of spammy pages.
Looking at my totally wiped out site:
A little too much keyword density
A little too much keyword proximity
A little too little content on some pages with Adsense
Filename matching page title
Too many sites linking in.
Are you folks (oldpro and clint) advertising other stuff?
Anyone else here that has been hit very badly and is NOT an adsense publisher? Or No adverts at all?
(2) Most sites created to display Adsense are of extremely low value to surfers;If Google thought this, wouldn't they ban the adsense account instead of keeping the account active and penalizing the site from their SE? I still make money from Yahoo and MSN traffic and my adsense account is not banned. If Google had a problem with their adsense being on my site, they would have either notified me, or banned my account.
Well, I think Google is cleaning their SERP, not their bank accounts. ;)
If a manual revision come in play and they just rate if the page is or not relevant to the query, that's has nothing to do with the way the site earns money.
Adsense is not just money for the publisher, Google wins money, too!, so why ban it?
So, on the contrary, it seems perfectly reasonable to me, as a share holder of GOOG, to make money from others' search engine results!
Skimming the posts I see only oldpro and clint are not adsense publishers and have been hit.
Maybe I was not clear...
I haven't been hit by this update. Well... bouncing between 6 and 12 with my primary kw phrase (which I have always done anyway). All secondary 3 kw phrases, still holding #1.
No...I don't do any adsense or other advertising of other company's (websites) of any kind. My site is totally devoted to my products. I do have a short blurb like "bestseller on AmaXXX.com". Have my product on that bigbox site also, but no click-thru url to go there.
More adsense publishers in the top 20...whereas before bourbon, there were not very many.
Another thing I am seeing is Amazon affilates advertising my product with the feed showing up. Before bourbon, one had to type in the brand name of the product for that to show up in the serps. Now it is showing for the product keyword.
ie; widgets vs. ACME widgets
Before bourbon the product keyword "widgets" would result in the amazon adwords ad to show-up, but none of its affilates in the organic serps.
I am sure amazon is a huge source of income for google...so this would make sense to give a boost to it's affilates.
The questions in this thread are not enough. We need duplicate content info, amount of pages on site, Quality and amount of inbound links, even footer links to external sites, Banned or penalised?!...
I bet GoogleGuy has a massive grin on his face as he if he reads all thist! :P
[edited by: Johan007 at 5:56 pm (utc) on June 6, 2005]
Right now I am too afraid to mess with anything during this update while I am still holding position. Who knows, tommorrow google might decide to penalize amazon affilates then I would go down the tubes with them.
Heck, we can't say adsense or any adwords affilates are given and advantage or disadvantage right now. To risky to test any theories out right now.
HomePage benefits (or used to benefit) from sitewide footer links from another site I control. Total of only 10 pages in that site.
Anyone else who was hurt by this update seeing seeing inbound sitewide links being devalued or penalized?
I have Amazon ads on 60% of my pages (2 ads each).
I have one links page with about 20 outbounds (recipricol) to other's in the industry and a few client sites.
And, a few outbounds to about.com (recipricol) and microsoft.com for additional reading.
And, just got word that japanese has info for me on why site got killed....
1. Are you in a competitive money area? not really
2. Are you an adsense publisher?
Yes but both sites use adsense and the bigger site is doing as well as ever.
3. Did you make alot of money from Google traffic?
no, just some nice spending money
4. Dedicated or Shared IP? Do you think switching to a dedicated IP from shared will improve rankings?
Shared IP. Have been thinking about it.
5. Do you believe you were penalized? If you put in keywords that only you should show up as, are other sites outranking you?
I'm still in the serps but lost terribly in terms of serps. On one name (first, middle & last) that is a very unusual name one site with a link to my article shows up and two scraper sites that have taken sippits from my site.
6. Did you forget the 301 redirect, to redirect non-www to www vice versa? I need to learn how to do this. The info on this site is overwhelming. Is there simple instructions somewhere?
7. For those of you in the sandbox before Allegra, did Allegra take you out of the sandbox, then did it dump you back in the sandbox in the Bourbon update?
The site is over 5 years old and never been sandboxed.
8. How many keywords per webpage do you use when optimizing? How many words per page on average?
I don't count, just make sure the key words or phrase are on there a few times.
9. Proximity of keywords? Are they too close?
It varies a lot..
10. How old is your site?
more than 5 years old
11. How did you obtain links when you first started out? How often do you get new quality links? Did you stop obtaining links, thinking you would continue to get them naturally?
I wrote to a lot of sites and directories not really trading, just announcing my site. I haven't been doing that lately as I'd asked most related sites and was doing fine in the serps.
12. Do spammy sites outrank you?
yes some do. All the work and research in order to write the articles and scraper sites with a link to me comes out ahead.
13. Do you do well in Yahoo, MSN, etc?
I do well in them, especially Yahoo but people don't use them much, most of my searches are through Google.
14. Do you hate Google.
No, just discouraged. I hope they will readjust back in the favor of true content sites once they see what this update has done.
"Skimming the posts I see ONLY CLINT is not an adsense publisher and has been hit."
Thus I would say it is pretty DARN CONCLUSIVE by the factual evidence so far that being an Adsense publisher IS ONE FACTOR of being in the largest group hit in this update. What more evidence is needed? If 99% of the population at large ARE Adsense publishers it would be suspected, nay EXPECTED statistically, that such a large proportion were in the hit group. But I believe that is not the case overall. This does NOT claim it is the ONLY factor, or that there aren't other sets of reasons for being hit. Each set needs to be handled separately. But, we don't need people saying, "well I AM an Adsense advertisier and I DIDN'T get hit so it CAN'T be a factor". That logic is flawed. That's not the point! Just because you're a female doesn't mean you're going to get pregnant! And we are still looking for more people who WERE hit and NOT Adsense publishers (i.e. pregnant, but not female :-)
Now we simply need to determine the ADDITIONAL factors that impact the hit, since indeed ALL Adsense advertisers were NOT hit. In fact in our case, only one domain out of about 5 which are closely integrated and all display Adsense was hit. But that ONE was definitely singled out and hit hard, as in a surgical strike, compared to competitors in the same keyword.
Is the domain of yours which was hit, by any chance, the primary one you signed up to Adsense under?
[edited by: MikeNoLastName at 7:35 pm (utc) on June 6, 2005]
I'd be curious to know what percentage of WebmasterWorld posters are Adsense publishers, though. If it's 90%, then the results in here are pretty much what you'd expect, right?
I mean, how many people DON'T have SOME kind of advertising on their website these days? I even have an ad on my silly little hobby site. Heck, even the people with free Geocities or Angelfire sites have Adsense on their pages because the host puts them there.
Not saying it's not a factor, just wondering.
>If it's 90%, then the results in here are pretty much what you'd expect, right?
Correct
>I mean, how many people DON'T have SOME kind of advertising on their website these days?
SOME kind is NOT Adsense (i.e. monitored by Google), so let's not confuse SOME kinds of advertising with Adsense specifically.
Heh, I just thought of something really ironically funny... I know most people claim Googlebot doesn't index Adsense I frames, although they DO seem to cache them... But what if G WERE indexing the Ads on our pages and penalizing the pages because the Ads (within our own pages, served by Google themselves) were identical enough to trip a duplicate content penalty...
I don't really believe this, just tossing it out for a giggle.
"Of course, had the result been a page on the Open Directory itself, it would have to be rated on the merits to the query. As you see, pages with the same content may be assigned vastly different ratings based on the absence or presence of a ppc program"
In our case we were just enticed, by Google themselves, to add Adsense in November, and now BECAUSE of IT we've been penalized. Thanks a lot G! I've already tried removing Adsense from the affected pages. Apparently once penalized, always penalized. I see big lawsuits brewing over this one.
IMO if adsense is a factor, then it would only be from the perspective of a site's (adsense publisher's) conversion ratio. That is a downgrade or upgrade would be contingent on performance.
A publisher may earn 10,000 USD a day from click-thrus, but ultimately not convert to actual sales for adwords advertisers. On the other hand, a publisher may earn 100 USD a day and those click-thru's have a high conversion. If google is taking this into account, maybe the former's rank is being penalized and the latter's rewarded.
I am sure google has a way of gauging an adsense publisher's performance based on conversion, but we have no way of analysing whether my assumption holds water as we don't have the info...or I don't think this info is available for public consumption. Does anybody know if it is?
I'm not an adsense publisher, so cut me slack if I am off base here. Just trying to help.
I'm having a hard time believing that, if Google was using Adsense data to determine that certain sites were probably scrapers or spammers, that their response would be to apply a strange penalty to them in the SERPs. You'd think they'd handle that at the other end, by canceling the offending Adsense accounts. But perhaps that would be harder for them to justify or create worse public relations for them, or cost more, or something else. You never know.
I think what we have is an unintentional side product of trying to get rid of spam sites but somehow we got caught in the net too.
I can only think of two differences between my two sites.
1) The larger site that is doing well has the domain for 5 years at a time while the small site is just paid for yearly.
2) The larger site has much better internal linking because it is set up for easy navigation. Each page links back to the homepage and to 5 to 10 related pages.
On my smaller site that is doing poorly each page just links back to the home page and sometimes a contents page for that specific category.
2. Are you an adsense publisher?
Yes, but not on my site that got hit.
3. Did you make alot of money from Google traffic?
Yes.
4. Dedicated or Shared IP?
Shared. I've never seen any IP based issues with Google SERPs except when comes to national Googles. Google seems very focussed on the URL. I have other sites on the same server doing just fine.
5. Do you believe you were penalized?
Oh yes. A simple search for domain-name + keyword shows sites with snippets first over mine. Not as bad as a PR0 penalty, but definitely a penalty. Even before the "rater lab" thing cropped up, I was thinking that something was damping down my results. In terms of the SERPs, it looks like a massive drop in PageRank and yet PR has remained stable.
6. Did you forget the 301 redirect, to redirect non-www to www vice versa?
I am not convinced that this is necessary at all.
7. For those of you in the sandbox..
Not sandboxed.
8. How many keywords per webpage do you use when optimizing?
Around 8% keyword density.
9. Proximity of keywords? Are they too close?
The top and tail tend to have VERY high keyword densities, and this is my #2 suspect after a manual penalty. Probably over two thirds of the keyword density is clustered at the top and bottom of the page.
10. How old is your site?
2 years.
11. How did you obtain links when you first started out?
Ahh... now that's another prime suspect. This site started off with some high-PR links from the beginning, probably the sort of thing that would get a sandbox penalty these days. Sites that grew more organically fared better. ODP listed sites fared very well, non-ODP sites suffered. However, my worst hit site accrued a very large number of natural inbound links by the time it was hit.
12. Do spammy sites outrank you?
Spam = Sites Positioned Above Mine. A few spammy sites outrank me.
13. Do you do well in Yahoo, MSN, etc?
No.
14. Do you hate Google.
I'm pissed off at being penalised.
Here's another couple of observations - the site that was hit has had a lot of original content copied off it. It's not ODP listed. It was scoring #1 for very competitive keywords and was extremely sales orientated. I have been extremely assertive in protecting the intellectual property of this site, including filing several DMCA complaints.
I have another site in the same topic area which *is* ODP listed, also has a great deal of content copied from it but is an informational site, not a sales site. That's currently doing rather well. I haven't chased content copiers so much on that as the text is more "neutral" than the sales site.
I think there are *several* factors at work here, which is clouding the analysis. We've seen this before, but I guess that we have a manual tweak + rebalancing of link authority + a damping of on-page optimisation.
