My site has been First Now vanished from Google

My site has been the first of its kind, I drop off Google

[sabine7777]

For the past year I have experienced periodically being completely dropped off Google. My site has been the FIRST of its kind and is in all the natural search results on the first spot. I'm just a small business, but since spet of 2004 I have been vanishing off of Google every 6 weeks or so--recently it has been more often and for longer periods. Does Google discriminate against Older sites? Are they doing it so that we will advertise with them? Any help, advice, comment from a desperate single mother of 4!

[Tinus]

Answers to the questions:
- When using "Site:" command, are counts correct?
(Our answer: It seems to be correct I guess.)

- Have you redirected non-www to www? How long ago?
(Our answer: No, but in the top results of the Serps halve of the sites didn't do. I didn't use a 302 redirect either.

- Are you seeing non-www appears in serps?(site:mysite.com -www)
(Our answer: No, none.

- Are you seeing old pages that are no longer exist reappear in the serps?

(Our answer: Some are a few months old. Others are yust a few days old.

- Are you using Google sitemaps?
(Our answer: No.)

- What is the slant of your site: Content, Images, Affiliate, Other?
(Our answer: content/affiliate)

New question:
- Are pages which disappeared heavily linked intern?
(our answer: yes, some pages still reach the top of the SERPS. They have only a few internal links.

[seoheadche]

Answers to the questions:
- When using "Site:" command, are counts correct?
(Our answer: no we have 25k pages index growing by 20k daily now at 130k.)

- Have you redirected non-www to www? How long ago?
(Our answer: yes about 2 hours ago with a 301 redirect.

- Are you seeing non-www appears in serps?(site:mysite.com -www)
(Our answer: No. )

- Are you seeing old pages that are longer exist reappear in the serps?

(Our answer: Yes pages that have been 404 for ages and also pages blocked by robots.txt

- Are you using Google sitemaps?
(Our answer: Yes.)

- What is the slant of your site: Content, Images, Affiliate, Other?
(Our answer: content)

- Are pages which disappeared heavily linked intern?
(our answer: yes, We have a bank of 50 or so core footer links across all pages in the site. However these are nav links.

[almar]

What about affiliate data feeds and Google?

Thinking about adding some- is it safer to start a new site than have an affiliate data feed on a content site that used to rank high in Google BEFORE last week?

Does Google mess with you if you have affiliate links on a content site?

[reseller]

Tinus

>>Reseller,
When you had to change those 137 pages, did you try to stay out of the sandbox or did you changed everything within a few days?<<

As I mentioned I did it after being hit for the second time, and at that time only around 10% of Google´s referrals left. So there wasn´t much to risk. Therefore I did it in one batch.

Now my pre- 22nd July Google traffic returned back (but not my pre-Allegra traffic), and I would be more careful if I should do the same again. I.e wouldn´t change and upload 137 pages within the same day or few days.

[Tinus]

Hi Reseller,
<I.e wouldn´t change and upload 137 pages within the same day or few days. >

Thanks, maybe you are right. The sandbox is worser then a temporary (?) loss of free traffic after an update.

[glengara]

*Please add other questions you think would be valuable.*

Are you running Ad Sense?

[Fritzms]

Reading this entire thread from start to end, over the last week or so, it strikes me that as an SEO person, and we all know how bad all the search engines are at the moment, and can point out all the bugs in about 10 mins, why waste our time trying to get back in to the one search engine that we all moan about the most (Google), why dont everyone get their heads together, pool resources and expertise and build our own search engine, show all these large companies that are now driven for pure profits how it should be done?
Mind u i would be concerned that if this were to happen then we would all be driven by profits as well and end up in 5-10 years in exactly the same position that the other search engines are in now!
Just my 2 pence worth (i`m in the UK :-) )

[almar]

Once our Adsense revenue started to rise, our Google search positions disappeared.... any thoughts on this strange coincidence?

[thecityofgold2005]

What I reckon the next generation of search engine will have is greater human intervention in the serps.

The product review websites where lots of people rate a product are an idea that works. You would just need to implement it in a search engine.

Another good idea that could be implemented is something like Yahoo's shopping / research beta engine.

Unfortunately, creating a search engine sounds kind of difficult!

[Fritzms]

thecityofgold2005 yes difficult IS the right word, but so was learning to build your own web sites in the beginning, that did not stop you!, yes it could be done, however there would have to a collective will to do so in the first place, now thats the difficult part of the process

[europeforvisitors]

Does Google mess with you if you have affiliate links on a content site?

No. (Which I'll qualify by saying that there can be exceptions to every rule.)

[Calculus]

I think the poster who first stated it might have something to do with heavy same keyword internal links might be onto somthing.

I've got 2 main sites, one with heavy same kw internal linking, traffic down at least 20-25% over the last week.

Another site with not alot of same kw linking - no change in traffic at all.

Both are content sites, no seo tricks, just plain and simple. So if content sites seem to have been hit the most you'd expect many of them to have same ky internal links.

[Tinus]

The filter could be some kind of clumpsy over-correction on to much keyword density caused of internal linking. Or maybe the filter is working on keyword density and the people of Google forgot that internal links might cause that high keyword density.

[Lorel]

Very few people are reporting in this thread. This algo thingy doesn't seem to affect many sites at the moment. The 50 sites and 250 terms I monitor closely have but minor tweaks in top ten sites - nothing to talk about.

Agreed. I manage 32 sites and while those that were summer seasonal have steadily gone down the winter seasonal sites are steadily going up. I see no drastic changes in any of them that would be attributed to using techniques google is penalizing.

Very few of the above sites have the same focus either--widely varied and mostly all businesses.

[edited by: Lorel at 4:37 pm (utc) on Sep. 30, 2005]

[reseller]

glengara

>>*Please add other questions you think would be valuable.*

Are you running Ad Sense? <<

Better, I guess:

Are you running any PPC spots (including AdSense).

[stargeek]

" I think the poster who first stated it might have something to do with heavy same keyword internal links might be onto somthing.

I've got 2 main sites, one with heavy same kw internal linking, traffic down at least 20-25% over the last week.

Another site with not alot of same kw linking - no change in traffic at all.

Both are content sites, no seo tricks, just plain and simple. So if content sites seem to have been hit the most you'd expect many of them to have same ky internal links."

I think they are trying to determine the "organic-ness" of incoming links.

[reseller]

Calculus

>>I think the poster who first stated it might have something to do with heavy same keyword internal links might be onto somthing.
I've got 2 main sites, one with heavy same kw internal linking, traffic down at least 20-25% over the last week.
Another site with not alot of same kw linking - no change in traffic at all.
Both are content sites, no seo tricks, just plain and simple. So if content sites seem to have been hit the most you'd expect many of them to have same ky internal links. <<

As I mentioned previously, the keywords rich internal linking might cause excessive keyword density on a page. And that might have been triggering a red flag.

[almar]

We do have heavy internal KW links, and Adsense, affiliate linking, and content, and updated daily, and in the Google toilet for the past week.

Odd note: in our main category, one of the top positions is a site that has not updated content since 2000, no ads, no affiliates- just old news.

[FattyB]

Almar, we do a lot of internal keyword linking as well, on just about every article. But I don't see this being the problem...everyone does it, only makes sense for users.

I think it must be something else, personally I just think it is a gaff.

What I do note is that very old articles are the mot popualr on the site at the moment. News stories from months ago, which makes me think Google is somehow working partly off old info. Likewise the results page for our site name is very similar to what it was 6-9 months ago.

I guess we will have to wait till someone in the know speaks up.

[reseller]

almar

>>Odd note: in our main category, one of the top positions is a site that has not updated content since 2000, no ads, no affiliates- just old news.<<

I have posted this one several time. One time more wouldn´t hurt though, I guess ;-)

Its the combination of these 3 things which might results in a site being marked as Offensive:

- Presence of PPC spots

- Presence of affiliate links either as such or with a short snippet (ending sometimes with something like: learn more..)

- Lack of real content

I.e we are talking about Thin Affiliate

Something in the same direction as per "Google Spam Recognition Guide for Raters".

[dkr20]

Ok, this is getting ridiculous. Today I went in and checked the SERPS on some of my keywords. They've not changed too much, I'm actually seeing a slight increase in traffic overall, but on some searches their now showing MORE "duplicate" content above what I would consider the best results.

Meaning they're showing some of what I was seeing before, when it's part of the same site, now grouped together with more results. Sometimes this is legitimate dups and other times it's just a different page with a similar title on the same site.

Either way, in essence they've now gone and added more innacurate results without changing the way they rank at all. This has pushed some of my own pages up, but it doesn't increase the relevancy of the SERPS one bit. In most cases it makes it even worse.

What gives?

[glengara]

*Its the combination of these 3 things which might results in a site being marked as Offensive*

TBH Reseller, I see so little PPC stuff in comparison to AS I'm not sure I'd see it as a necessary factor, I'm just visiting so don't want to quibble too much ;-)

[AndyA]

Answers to the questions:

- When using "Site:" command, are counts correct?
(Our answer: Yes.)

- Have you redirected non-www to www? How long ago?
(Our answer: We did a 301 redirect, www. to non-www, since that is how most of the pages were indexed. This was done about 9 months ago.)

- Are you seeing non-www appears in serps? (site:mysite.com -www)
(Our answer: Yes - maybe. When doing a site search, the count is the same for www and non-www. When doing keyword searches, there are no www results returned.)

- Are you seeing old pages that are longer exist reappear in the serps?
(Our answer: Sometimes - but they seem to be very few.)

- Are you using Google sitemaps?
(Our answer: No.)

- What is the slant of your site: Content, Images, Affiliate, Other?
(Our answer: 95% content, 5% affiliate)

- Are pages which disappeared heavily linked intern?
(Our answer: No, I normally link to a main contents and updates page, my forum, and then to perhaps 3 or 4 other pages that would be of interest, so no heavy linking internally.)

PPC ads?
(Answer: Very light on AdSense, less than 2-3% of total pages in the site running AdSense.)

[mikeD]

Its the combination of these 3 things which might results in a site being marked as Offensive:

- Presence of PPC spots

- Presence of affiliate links either as such or with a short snippet (ending sometimes with something like: learn more..)

- Lack of real content

I agree, but I wish Google would tell us how to keep professional websites going without affiliate/ad revenue. It's what the web and Google are built on.

[reseller]

glengara

>>TBH Reseller, I see so little PPC stuff in comparison to AS I'm not sure I'd see it as a necessary factor, I'm just visiting so don't want to quibble too much ;-)<<

You are right. I too see little PPC spots compared to the case in "the good old days"

As such one might say;

PPC = AS ;-)

[reseller]

mikeD

>>I agree, but I wish Google would tell us how to keep professional websites going without affiliate/ad revenue. It's what the web and Google are built on. <<

IMHO, the best solution at present is to combine affiliate programs /ads together with contents such as ; articles, reviews, news, prise comparison, resource pages etc..

[europeforvisitors]

I agree, but I wish Google would tell us how to keep professional websites going without affiliate/ad revenue. It's what the web and Google are built on.

Google doesn't have a problem with affiliate links or ads.

Google may have (and should have) a problem with "lack of real content."

[dibbern2]

reseller: Thanks for repeating your point about Thin Affiliates. My own experience supports your point: affiliate pages missing from 3 sites, non-affiliate pages (and the sites in general) holding their ranks just fine.

In looking at the Google Spam Recognition Guide for Raters, my missing pages qualify as THIN, even though I've given them added content and design.

I'm suspecting that beyond your 3 points, there's something to the overstuffed text links theory. Many of us tend to really fill those affiliate marketing pages with interlinks - more so than on strict content pages- or, at least I have.

The Google spam guide is pretty reasonable IMHO. Complaining about G's attitude/responsibilty to webmasters will not not help solve any of this problem.

If correct, this could establish a "rule" for a subset of sites that have gone south: those with PPC and affiliate links. Sites without such content -but still hurting- are perhaps an entirely different issue. We probably have several problems combined here into one big tangled knot.

[mikeD]

Google doesn't have a problem with affiliate links or ads.

Google may have (and should have) a problem with "lack of real content."

true, but I think google just has problems with aff links or ads period.

[mikeD]

i have sites with hardly any content on them, but because they have no ads, they are craled and indexed perfectly. I have sites with tons of unique content, but have ads. Which have been effected badly.