Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Since solutions to the problem cannot be offered without proper background, I am offerring that background as briefly as possible.
I have been in the internet business for 8 years so I am no mewbie. For that entire time I have done all my own SEO so nothing blackhat is involved. Up until December 13, Google always found my site relevant. For 11 1/2 months of 2005 I ranked #1-5 for most of my targeted search terms. Suffice to say traffic and business was very good.
In order to improve my website's quality, I reinvested profits into the site. I hired an outside progamming firm to upgrade the database and spiff up the technology. They utilized a http://dev.mysite.com/ mirror site to test the programming. Unfortunately, they did not use a noindex, nofollow tag on the dev site, Google found the dev site link and within 5 days, I took a major hit in the SERPs.
By a major hit, I mean I began to rank #30-50 immediately. Although I have advised Google of this and even filed a reinclusion request, I still ranked the same.
When Big Daddy rolled out earlier this year, my site was almost no where to be found. BD's cached pages were from July and August 2005 and only represented apprx 10% of my site's pages. I advised Google of this on March 9, gave them background as stated above, and within 3 hours I received a reply from Google advising me that they had passed my message onto their engineering team for further investigation. They also thanked me for my patience.
Within days, my number of webpages in BD went up dramatically to over 400,000 now (which is about right) although googlebot did not increase their crawling. This proves that Google had them but did not include them in the BD index. However, I am still stuck at #30-50.
Then just last week, I found via Link Sleuth that the same programming firm had incorrectly used 302s instead of 301s for a ton of links. That was corrected last Tuesday.
Mozilla Googlebot rarely visits and when it does, it doesn't tarry too long. The limited number of refreshes takes about a week. In the good days, Google crawled aggressively and refreshed within two days.
Any ideas what penalty Google has assessed? Any ideas how to remove it?
Or should I just keep my powder dry and remain patient?
Mucho thanks!
[edited by: tedster at 5:45 pm (utc) on Mar. 30, 2006]
[edit reason] deactivate the url as a link [/edit]
