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!

[mikeD]

these sites with ads are dmoz listed etc, so I wouldnt call the spammy.

[glengara]

But were the ads added AFTER the listing? ;-)

[reseller]

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.<<

The sites with unique contet could have been dropped for other reasons (than the presence of ads) which are discussed on this thread.

[Janiss]

I'm not so sure about the ads theory - my cat site has practically no ads on most of it - just one small Amazon box and Adsense on most pages. The affilate pages are in a specific section and just a small part of the site. And at the moment, it is getting practically no search results from Google whatsoever, even though it is apparently in the index. My main site, where the aff links are more prevalent, is currently getting some traffic from Google, just not very much.

[mikeD]

i have found adsense doesnt effect my listings, but other types of ads will. I know for certain it's ads because I've tested it. On my main sites all the pages without ads (the majority) are listed and crawled everyday. But the pages for IT products that include original content reviews and specs contain 4 affiliate ads at the bottom. On some of these pages they are not even cached, let alone indexed. So all I have to do is add an affiliate link to a page and it will usually be penalised. This only occured in the past month, before Google loved these pages.

[mikeD]

basically we are not talking about websites being penalized, but sections. And the sections include ads

[pescatore]

Google want to destroy CJ tradedoubler and zanox plus us all the small publishers that make a living out of it(I am sure that will turn back many webmasters to the gambling and PRN industry)well done Google.They just want all the pie of internet marketing for them selfs.Thats all folks.

[almar]

Hi reseller-
As far as real content goes, our site has enough "real content" to fill up a shelf at Barnes & Noble- and it's all original. We use a minimum of PPC per month. The affiliate marketing, by comparison, is maybe less than 20% of our total content pages, which are updated several times a week. We have numerous up-to-date quality press mentions in many top newspapers and national publications, on and offline.

So, how in Google's robotic eyes are we Offensive?

RE reseller's prvious post :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".

[europeforvisitors]

basically we are not talking about websites being penalized, but sections. And the sections include ads

I'm sure that most of us could cite examples of pages that have ads and/or affiliate links but do just fine in Google.

It's always possible that ads or affiliate links could trigger a penalty or filter if the site was already in a "grey zone" for other reasons, but that's only conjecture.

[web_24_7]

I agree with MikeD.

I placed an ad sense add on all my pages and the site dropped within a week.

Def "junk pages" site which has ppc source of income.

Ad sense and affiliates.

Googles Ad sense dep. shot the search engine department with the release of their publisher revenue source.

It gave the word a crapy web full of duplicate junk, and this stuff is only there because of revenue potential for webmasters.

I think the best things for a site to have is a paypal button or a shopping cart of your own and 'a join our affiliate' button, as this shows you offer your own products and people likely copy you.

You just have to think 'what is the ideal web?' and do that to your pages.

Or hide your affiliate link buttons on another site that you feed clients to from your main sites.

[reseller]

web_24_7

>>I agree with MikeD.

I placed an ad sense add on all my pages and the site dropped within a week.<<

But MikeD wrote:
" i have found adsense doesnt effect my listings, but other types of ads will."

So as such, AdSense alone hasnīt affected his site.

>>Or hide your affiliate link buttons on another site that you feed clients to from your main sites.<<

Why should anybody do that. Nothing wrong with affiliate marketing. It is a legit business model, and I personally encourage people to joine reliable affiliate programs.

I understand from GoogleGuy and from "Google Spam Recognition Guide for Raters" that it isnīt the affiliate marketing that they are targetting, but Thin Affiliates.

[reseller]

almar

>>Hi reseller-
As far as real content goes, our site has enough "real content" to fill up a shelf at Barnes & Noble- and it's all original. We use a minimum of PPC per month. The affiliate marketing, by comparison, is maybe less than 20% of our total content pages, which are updated several times a week. We have numerous up-to-date quality press mentions in many top newspapers and national publications, on and offline.<<

Congrats. It sound like you have a great site.

But even great sites drop from the index or lose ranking on the serps. We read also on this and other threads that even some educational non commercial sites dropped. Thats how the new Google operates, unfortunately.

However, and as I mentioned previously, sites might drop for other reasons than the presence of PPC, affiliate links and lack of real contents. Educational sites are a good example of the dark sad side of what has been taking place since Feb. 2005.

A general statement which isnīt related to this particular post.

And NO..NO. Iīm not Anti-Google at all. But when I see decline in Googleīs serps quality, original sites dropped, duplicated sites still there, spam sites still on top of the serps while Mr. Eric Schmidt keeps talking about "large Index" instead of QUALITY serps.. then I feel sad, frustrated and speak my mind.

[coosblues]

Long story short. Nearly 4 year old site ranked in top 10 for the past three years. Now, I've lost rankings on every page except my index page - I have one legit site above me, and the other 3 link to ME. PR and Backlink counts don't matter, nor does it seem content. My homepage survived but I lost everything else (running adsense) - anyone in a similiar position?

[steveb]

&filter=0 has stopped working.

Google goes backwards, again.

[steveb]

Just did a Google site search restricted to my own domain for a unique/technical word that appears on 52 pages... fifty two pages according to Google. There is one page dedicated to the technical word itself, and almost all instances of the word on the other pages link to my page about the word... so clearly that is the page to rank first.

Instead, Google ranks first:
a supplemental result...
that recently reappeared after six months after having the URL removal tool used on it...
that has a cache from three days ago, which does NOT include the search term...
that has ransom note from the page from last year...
that only mentions the word once in the body text

Google folks, this is miserably incompetent search engineering.

As of a few days ago I have put up a new page on the URL of this supplemental result, which for a site: search shows a fresh date with the proper ransom note of a single link to my sitemap. Still, Google ignores the currently cached content of the page, and instead ranks it based on what was there over a year ago.

I put a page back up on this URL so I could get it crawled and 301 it somewhere so that it would no longer show up. Now it seems I am going to have to do whatever it takes to make every Supplemental listing disappear, otherwise Google will insist on ranking that first for any search for words on those pages.

[aff_dan]

Don't try to rank higher on MSN and Yahoo! if you have Adsense script on your sites!

MSN and Yahoo! BAN SITES that have this kind of adsense.

Don't put all your eggs in the same box.

You can easy rank on Yahoo and MSN without using Adsense pasted in your pages. Think create separate sites for them.

Keep talking

[coosblues]

Don't try to rank higher on MSN and Yahoo! if you have Adsense script on your sites!
MSN and Yahoo! BAN SITES that have this kind of adsense.

Totally false. I run adsense and rank number 1 on both.

[reseller]

coosblues

>>Now, I've lost rankings on every page except my index page - I have one legit site above me, and the other 3 link to ME<<

Did that happen on 22nd Sept. or later?

Thanks.

[Dayo_UK]

>>>>Just did a Google site search restricted to my own domain for a unique/technical word that appears on 52 pages... fifty two pages according to Google. There is one page dedicated to the technical word itself, and almost all instances of the word on the other pages link to my page about the word... so clearly that is the page to rank first.

Yes Steveb

I am seeing this also - which takes me back to my post to see if the homepage seems to have a problem.

But yes I am seeing this with internal pages too - A freshly crawled product data page being beaten by a supplemental page that links to the product page from November 2004 which is now a 404.

[Dayo_UK]

Google you are in a mess

Whoever, made these decisions - I hope you are not to arrogant to correct them.

The calculation of Canonical URLs still does not work - whether this was broken when the 302 thing was patched I dont know - but why oh why have you let this continue!

Supplementals Index - are you having a laugh? - Pages cached a year ago out ranking pages cached days ago? Pages that have long been deleted on the site still appearing.

Please Google dont be to arrogant to fix your problems.

Cheers

Dayo :)

[zafile]

"Please Google dont be to arrogant to fix your problems."

I don't know your niche.

However, the niche I constantly monitor seems to get better every hour.

Number of total results are increasing and the relevance improving.

Yesterday, one particular phrase returned about 13,300,000 results. I just checked and the number is 14,900,000.

This increase has caused an interesting shift in the ranking of certain Web sites. I've seen some spammers with duplicate sites go down in SERPs.

Nevertheless, I'm still waiting for a major shake up in the Top 20 - Top 30.

Things are looking pretty good.

Congratulations Google on your 7th anniversary!

And thanks for bringing hope after many months of wait.

[edited by: zafile at 9:14 am (utc) on Oct. 1, 2005]

[Dayo_UK]

zafile

It effects every niche.

OK the serps might be good for the terms you are watching - but think about all the quality sites that arent there because of the Google Canonical url bug.

Dayo

[coosblues]

>>Now, I've lost rankings on every page except my index page - I have one legit site above me, and the other 3 link to ME<<

Yes, it very unhappily happened the night of my birthday of all days. I just for fun even googled myself a bit ago and have a hard time finding myself (a rather unusual name) when even it was number 1 before or near Sept 22. Traffic from Google has dropped nearly 2/3, but I really don't know why the index page was only mildly knoced down 3 places.

Search: 3,127,123 results (just up over 1 million results within the past 48 hours)
Number 1: Deserves to be there (authority)
Number 2: Links to me, has 4 backlinks 2 directories deep.
Number 3: Links to me, has 8 backlinks 3 directories deep.
Number 4: Deserves the spot (authority)
Number 5: My site (99 backlinks on this page)

All inner pages which consist of nearly 800 pages just vanished. I quit looking. Happy Birthday Google.

I'll plug on - too early to change a thing.

[mikeD]

I understand from GoogleGuy and from "Google Spam Recognition Guide for Raters" that it isnīt the affiliate marketing that they are targetting, but Thin Affiliates.

I can see the reason behind this, but they seem to be hitting everyone just incase. I dont think Google or anyone has the technical know how to just delete thin affiliate sites without effecting anyone who has an affiliate link.

[pescatore]

what is a thin affiliate site?

[mikeD]

i assume its a site with mainly affiliate content.

at a guess

[diddlydazz]

Yesterday, one particular phrase returned about 13,300,000 results. I just checked and the number is 14,900,000

this is just that you are hitting different data centers

google balances the load by splitting its users between their different DCs

to be able to see if anything is *really* happening you should be checking the data centers and comparing the data.

here are some DCs

216.239.37.104
216.239.37.105
216.239.37.106
216.239.37.107
216.239.37.147
216.239.37.99
216.239.39.104
216.239.39.106
216.239.39.107
216.239.39.99
216.239.53.104
216.239.53.106
216.239.53.107
216.239.53.99
216.239.57.104
216.239.57.105
216.239.57.106
216.239.57.107
216.239.57.147
216.239.57.98
216.239.57.99
216.239.59.104
216.239.53.99
216.239.59.99
216.239.59.105
216.239.59.106
216.239.59.107
216.239.59.147
216.239.63.104
64.233.161.99
64.233.161.104
64.233.161.105
64.233.161.107
64.233.161.147
64.233.167.99
64.233.167.104
64.233.171.99
64.233.171.104
64.233.171.105
64.233.171.107
66.102.11.99
66.102.11.104
66.102.11.106
66.102.11.107
66.102.7.99
66.102.7.104
66.102.7.105
66.102.7.106
66.102.7.107
66.102.7.147
66.102.9.104
66.102.9.107

IMHO this is not an update, just filters coming into play and maybe some tweaking.

dazz

<added>not far away from an update though judging by some movement</added>

[texasville]

I agree with Dazz. Not an update. Yet. But from what I have been reading, these symptoms always occur just before a big update.
Particularly pages suddenly reappearing(long since gone from your site).
Pages with old cache dates.
Sudden avalanche of scraper sites reappearing.
Inshort, all the things people have been talking about. If you google google update, you can find lots of articles all describing these same scenarios just before a major update.

[reseller]

pescatore

>>what is a thin affiliate site?<<

A Thin Affiliate is a handsome man whos body weight doesnīt exceed 78 kg, or a gorgeous women whos body weight doesnīt exceed 55 Kg :-)

Ok. Here is the serious stuff, in accordance with the bible of "Spam Recognition Guide for Raters"

Thin affiliates are sites that usher people to a number of Affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user.

[europeforvisitors]

1) Google does not penalize ads or affiliate links.

2) Yahoo and MSN do not filter sites that run AdSense ads.

If you seem to be having problems because of affiliate links, it isn't because of the affiliate links per se, but because you don't have enough real content to go with those affiliate links. (See GoogleGuy's remarks about "thin affiliates" and "added value.")

If you seem to be having problems because of AdSense ads, it's because of some other factor (e.g., too little real content or site characteristics that trigger an algorithmic filter or manual review).

If you're still convinced that affiliate links or AdSense ads are the sole source of your ranking problems, then please include the URL of an affected site in your profile so the rest of us can take a look. Otherwise, we'll continue to be skeptical, because we can summon up any number of examples that contradict your hypothesis.