Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The stable site (Site A) is a personal/resume site. The one that's seen a big drop (Site B) is more commercial, with AdSense and some affiliate links (not a ton) including two sitewide affiliate banners in a global include.
Site B actually has many more links, all on target, many I didn't even ask for, just links based on the quality of the content. It also has much more content, much more traffic (before the drop anyway), and is overall cleaner. In other words, it *should* be doing better than Site A!
I've come up with some possibilities, please suggest anything else I should look at:
1. Google hates affiliates. Sure, some affiliate pages still do well, but overall Google doesn't like them.
2. There are several sites scraping my RSS feed - could Google see this as dupe content and be hurting me for it? Previously I always ranked while the dupes were buried so I didn't think much of it.
3. I recently moved servers, could that be it? The stable Site A also moved along with Site B so this doesn't seem likley.
4. I did a few design changes to clean navigation, consolidated a bunch of nav links into drop-down menus.
Any suggestions?
--Illah
If you feel this may describe your situation, see this related thread in our Search Engine Promotion forum:
Links hijacked in search engine [webmasterworld.com]
For all of you following this topic, I would strongly suggest that you run a DNS Report on your domain and make sure that there are no failures such as the Open DNS Servers. This issue with DNS Cache Poisoning is a serious one and can affect every single one of us where our sites are hosted on servers that allow for DNS Recursion.DNS Report
[dnsreport.com...]If your host gripes one bit about this, it's time to change. Get out of there quickly before you come under the same type of attack or even worse, a DNS DoS Attack which will bring that server down in a heartbeat.
--Illah
Checklist for Sudden Drops in Rank [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped from Google - a checklist to find out why [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com]
Any thoughts on the scrapers? Should I try and get those sites to stop scraping me? Haven't really cared too much in the past since I figured they were either ignored or it might at least count as a low value link.
--Illah
If anything, I suspect a percentage of scraper site listings will demonstrate a 'naturally busy site' and could be a good thing. At the end of the day, being 'scarped' is a natural accurance and I would never mess with 'natural' occurances! The links are probably ignored as the scraper sites will have a poor profile but some will deliver traffic and may even give pr.
We get the odd good link from a scraper and often launch sites from scraper links alone. The seo benefit is low but the traffic is enough to make a site viable without google. An old site of ours was banned by google but I don't think the scraper links had anything to do with it. Anyway, the site still earns good money from these links, so without any proof that scraper links are bad... having them is a usefull fall back position.
I can't say I really understand the issue, and I suspect it would be a big job to move them all to a server which passes the test.
I'm hoping this is a Big Daddy hiccup...
--Illah
what does site:www.example.com show, are ALL your pages indexed?
I have lost just over 50% of my pages for the last month atleast with BD and have noticed a few people onll NOW losing pages while some have said theirs are returning.
Are ALL your pages indexed?
Yep..started happening to me yesterday.
Mine have been gone since the begining of March, the count has increased but only by 4 or 5 pages and remained there for the last 2 weeks.
Funny thing is, my SERP's are holding and traffic is excellent, so I aint missing them but would be nice to think that when they come back traffic will rise.
Interested to see other statistics on this
What % has gone?
How long (so far)?
If they returned
What % is back?
EDIT] My site has around 930 pages normally now says 405 [EDIT
Being gone since Feb
Amount Gone 90%
50% came back for 2 days then it was gone again :)
Traffic Down by half
Ah one funny thing my old links still there, I am talking about links that no longer exist.
Why doesnt big daddy just leave us alone and make thing go back to the way it was, I GIVE UP :(
Funny thing is when I do a 'site:www.sitename.com sitename' search 9 of the Top 10 results are from the old verson of my site - those pages were taken down 8 months ago! They are supplemental though.
Oh well, I've been over my site quite a bit and I really can't find any major issues with it, guess I just have to wait for the Big Daddy dust to settle and hope for the best. I'm pissed at the scrapers outranking me though, how is that supposed to be an improvement in the algo? If we were all killed together I could kinda understand, but knowing that I was probably taken down as collateral damage in an anti-spam shootout while *real* spam survived...that gets me :-)
--Illah
I think I'm being hit with dupe content from the scrapers. I did a search for one of my most recent posts and several scrapers are Top 10. I'm nowhere in the top 250. When I get to the end of the SERPs and hit 'repeat search with omitted results' then I'm around 30-40, but I don't show unless I select to see omitted results.
Great job Google.
Just to clarify, almost all these scrapers are getting me through my RSS feed. I've also submitted my RSS feed to news sites and RSS search engines & directories. Could Google be getting confused as to the source of this content and think I'm a scraper? I really don't want to do it, but would eliminating the RSS feed help?
So what if anything else can I try in the event that this isn't a Big Daddy hiccup?
--Illah
Anyone else seeing this?
--Illah
No, I think that Google has many problems with the Index......
[edited by: mattg3 at 6:45 pm (utc) on April 13, 2006]
What does this mean? Inconprehensible...
What does this mean? Inconprehensible...
Ok thanks, I ment page hemmoraging, but I doubt that will clear it up. ;)
That was the only thing I understood with that post.
This certainly stinks of screwy SERPs to me.
-S
Yeah, my RSS feed file has some of the highest PR of any page on my site except for the homepage... I don't want to take it down completely as I do have subscribers - I've had it up for 8 months with no issues until now. I was thinking of modifying it so it only contains snippets of my content, maybe strip the <img> codes too, so that if dupe content is the issue then at least scrapers won't have exact copies of my site content (right now I include entire posts in the feed because if I were a subsciber I'd prefer that).
--Illah
That was the only thing I understood with that post.
So you missed your AMC then. ;)
It's very simple. Google has indexed your pages, so when you use their site search that for example comes with adsense, you rely on all your pages being in the Google index. But if 80% of your pages are missing in the index, the site search becomes inaccurate for your users. Hence I used one of the Open Source search engines to replace the Google site search. Programs like htdig, nutch etc etc.
