Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
How to check -->
search "yourdomain.com" from google with the double quote wrappping your domain name.
If your website is not ranking #1 then your website is somehow penalised by google.
Conditions of my tested websites.
i) Having PR4~5
ii) All more than 2 years old.
iii) No traffic from google at all.
iv) Was ranking high on google.
Does this method works for you?
I tried that and it worked for me. I have 5 sites that dropped PR from 5 and 6 to PR0. I'm redesigning my sites now without all the interlinking...
Admanbb, so did this help you any, and just what is considered "excessive" interlinking? By "interlinking" do you mean sites with the same IP address linking to each other?
Clint
I honestly don't know, but I had over 9000 web pages with hidden links on almost every page. I guess that would be considered to be spam. (It worked well for a while...:0}
So, the "interlinking", is that links to your other websites on the same IP address?
Janethuggard:1. Webmaster World has higher traffic than your site. Higher traffic means more popular, and therefore more worthy of the higher ranking.
2. Webmaster World gets more page views, and therefore is more 'popular'
3. Webmaster World has more longevity than you. Because it has been on the web longer, it has more 'credibility' than you do.
You have in effect been out seo'd on your domain name.
fearlessrick, I would agree with last sentence, but not #1 and 2 - you have been out-SEO'd on your domain by a big site. That has a very high probability - I am guessing for a "keyword.tld" search, as for any other search, the other parameters in formula can outweigh the KW in domain itself.
As far as traffic - traffic can have very little or a lot to do with a particular search, I would guess it is KW-dependent. What I think is more important is whether G$$gle likes your site vs. the other site. WebmasterWorld+G$$gle=Love.
fearlessrick, want to ask moderators to remove your domain from WebmasterWorld and see if this improves SERPs?
After about 6 months we are back and doing well.
Scott
to Clint,
Only one of my web sites shares a IP address, the others each have a different IP. I think that it was just the quantity of the links and the fact they were hidden (with just a period) at the bottom of almost every page. Plus I have some overstuffed alt tags that are obvously spam. I'm getting rid of all that now (this is an ongoing process since I have over 9000 web pages spread over 12 web sites)
Anyway, the site is built similar to the standard affiliate sites out there and made it back after being penalized.
Another quick note: I live in the bay area and have connections in google. If you try hard enough you can get a hold of an engineer and get them to get your site back. No matter what anyone else tells you this can happen! I know!
Another thing I noticed is that title and description will display for some days and some days only URL will be displayed.
Googlebot cache my Home page on an average once a month.
Am I penalised? Please suggest.
If you try hard enough you can make the site come back. If I could do it so can you!
Scott
Before I get plastered with the "what did you do" thing (because we did a TON of things for 2 months which I couldn't even begin to list from cleaning up G's db with URL console to sitemaps, to keyword reoptimizing our home page), I'll tell what I observed and THINK helped. First and foremost the period from when we first dropped on May 23 till today is EXACTLY 60 DAYS (depending on how you calculate it) and almost nothing SEO has been done to the site in nearly 2 wks. So I'm definitely assuming it was some sort of temporary timed penalty which we could not do much about. I believe it had to do with duplication resulting from either antiquated indexed pages (we did non-www--301->www in March, but we had non-www pages cached Nov 2004! which only showed up when Bourbon started and which we couldn't seem to shake) or a couple odd URLs which G had indexed for our home page which I mentioned some time ago on here: example.com/?sdkhjsd.htm. We also continued to make updates to many of the key pages on a nearly daily basis as previously, and the ranks for a couple dozen top search terms were monitored daily. The ranks on some of the pages bounced around a lot but really started to rise consistantly yesterday or the day before by about 50% (which suggested to me they were ready to pop up). A couple weeks ago we still had about 50 non-www supplemental pages indexed on one domain, but 2 days ago this dropped to 12. The other has remained constant at 3: 2 supplemental and 1 URL only.
Our 2 primary domains reappeared, but two minor ones which still have example.com/ indexed without description are still penalized. We're not complaining.
I'll do my best to answer any questions, but it's still mostly a mystery to me.
Oh yeah, my old boss called and said if it sticks through the weekend the two of us who were laid off can start again on Monday (hmm, he didn't mention if I get a raise or...).
I can confirm that my site (took the bourbon dive on June 16th) is also back on a few datacenters. Still not all of them, but it's back up to it's previous levels on a few of them... pleeeease stick.
Kurt
Are you asking what the email addresses are for these? I can give them to you if this is what you are asking
When you undertake the domain search as described earlier in the post, the site is listed on page 3.
I would describe this site as a good site, with lots of unique content and not in anyway spammy or likely to suffer some form of duplicate content penalty. The site has been prominent for as long as I can remember 2 years plus.
Even though the site is a competitor I do realise it is by far the most detailed and comprehensive resource available, I can't compete with it as I'm just a one man operation, until now that is....
It this uniform drop likely to be a penalty? The PR of the site has increased yet its rankings have suffered a cross the board drop.
That's interesting. A friend of mine suffered a very similar situation last Tuesday. What's the cache date on that site? My friends site usually gets indexed every day with a fresh cache date every day. Now the last time google visited her was July 15.
They were top placed for keywords for the past few years, and I did no major changes. I follow the "good guy" rules, but haven't seen anyone else with this problem.
It happened with the Bourban Update, and those sub-directories contained truly unique content that was 60% of my traffic.
Does Google sometimes sandbox or penalize 3rd level directories on some sites? Its odd given I had fairly significant presence for several years with these pages.
I was reaching over 1,000,000 hits monthly prior to May 21. Now, I'm at about a third of that.
Any thoughts?
I suspect it's a side effect of all that Google is doing with canonicalization, and that the current situation will not be permanent. Some very good results (and not just mine) got hurt, or in some cases the user is given a page that is a click away from the real content that answers the query.
