Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I was never black listed. Had a PR or 4/10 and back links of about 101 on Google, then when "bourbon" or whatever came along, my pr and links stayed the same, but first my major keywords disappeared and then slowly, day by day, my minor keywords and phrases disappeared until Google was not a player in my stats at all.
What I (or) they did to put one of my most important websites back, I'll never know because I did so many things to make the website better and did all the recommendations I read about. Something worked.... but for how long? I hope for a while. I'm not naive enough to think that it will stay for long. : ) For now I can sleep at night.
Has this happend recently to other websites for WebmasterWorld members and what do you attribute this to?
It would be very useful for other to have all the details about what happenned, as I am still strugling with bourbon myself.
Do you have an idea about what created the penalties?
(dup content maybe?)
Did you rewrite, or did any redirection to clean up your site?
What are those modifications you made to your site and why?
Did yo contact google so that you can be redirected? If so, by which channels?
How long after those changed did you came back in google?
Thanks for the details!
What I (or) they did to put one of my most important websites back, I'll never know because I did so many things
I think most important thing is to change one thing at a time and wait couple of weeks, and so on. Otherwise you end up like this, no idea what worked and what didn't.
main problem with your approach is that it would takes months to make a few changes - not practical for a site that needs to quickly recover... a test site, yes, but not a real site that needs traffic.
Try doing a search for your keyword/s and if you don't find your website, try using the "dissatisfied" with your results link at the bottom. If you have a good website with a good arguement as to why it should be there.. I do think Google may listen.
I also had some very old duplicate pages that I was using for overture that I didn't want to change the info on overture on, so I just created new pages that were similar. It was a bad move, but it wasn't because I was being naughty, just lazy.
Tami
Yes, it takes time.
And, what are your suggestions?
Something interesting that I found when I was doing 301 redirects is that they don't work on pages that have a space in the url rather than _ or - between words. I even used %20 in place of spaces on pages to redirect from. Doing so took my whole website down until I removed those lines. Another error I got was that my 404 pages were returning a 200 or 500 error...(Google sitemaps didn't like one of those) can't remember which... so I turned to my web mentor and he fixed the line that handles the "headers" somehow. I think he was dancing around chicken bones as he did it, as well.... It's all a little scary for us microsoft rookies. (That's the nice thing he calls me).
Stats still well up as of today. I'm still not cocky, as I'm waiting for Google to turn my world upside down at any minute.
I'm still of the opinion that the entire web will be paid advertising just like TV or magazines. Anyone wanna argue about that?
: )
I think he was dancing around chicken bones as he did it
I love good sense of humour - funny. Hope everything stays well for you.
