Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
After a few months we noticed some obscure pages coming up in the 40s and 50s, but the results were weird. A search for '*city* maps' would put our homepage at number 45 for example, and our perfectly optimised '*city* maps' page would come up UNDERNEATH it at number 46. Clearly there was some sort of filter/penalty at play.
Since we seemed to be getting nowhere, we decided to really pull our socks up and make the site ten times better than the competition. We spent six months building community forums, writing new articles, getting endorsements from local officials and generally forgetting about making money, and just building the kind of site that visitors would love to use and come back to. We were rewarded with links from Wikipedia, DMOZ, Yahoo, and heaps of other reputable sources and natural traffic began flowing in at a greater rate than it ever had before. We started using Google Sitemaps and Google Analytics and ensured the site was in perfect shape and three weeks ago, we did a re-inclusion request via the sitemaps website (that link seems to have been taken down though).
Well, low and behold, this morning I did some searches which we used to rank well for and there we were. Back at number one. I checked some other pages in the site and yep, there they were - all fairly consistently top ten. Some other pages weren't coming up, but it's early days yet, so we'll see what happens.
The moral to the story? If you want to do well in Google, forget about trying to squeeze out every last cent and work incredibly hard to build a website that people will love. If you've got a philosophy that visitors come first Google will eventually recognise that and the results will follow as a side-effect. I've firmly believed that Google's webmaster guidelines are the best, and perhaps only rules you need to follow, after ten months of work, I think I've finally been proven correct.
Anyone else had penalties lifted lately?
What if you didn't do anything at all to cause the drop and it was simply a sign of problems at Google? Not being able to rank the correct page first sounds more like a search engine problem than a penalty.
1) Your site is rockin'.
2) Then Google has issues with indexing and your ranks drop and flux.
3) You make unrelated changes.
4) Google fixes whatever bug was causing the drop and your rankings come back.
That seems as logical a solution to me as your 'penalty from too many affiliate links' does. Both fit the facts and the timeline but one is simpler and makes more sense. There is no Google Webmaster Guideline telling you not to monetize your traffic. There is no Guideline that says affiliate links are bad. They do say you should not have a 'thin' affiliate site that does not offer original content or user-added value, but that does not fit your description of the site at all.. so why would it be penalized?
A couple of questions in particular I wonder:
- does the URL contain a hyphen?
- do you have other regional sites which have performed better and have more users in general, and which are linked up to this site?
I have a regional travel site which is lost in Google right now. I'm hoping we may come back too someday.
[edited by: tedster at 12:56 am (utc) on June 14, 2006]
Now, I would say that would tend to be a problem. It may very well have caused you to drop under a filter.
But the reinclusion request would have done nothing for you. That would have only applied to sites that have been banned in the index not just ranking poorly. That is what google states anyway.
The only thing that I continue to have issue with is Google's stance that you can't sell advertising to who you want.
Why can't I sell a link to a cell phone company if I have a real estate site. If google doesn't want to count it as a link..so what? Fine. But don't say I am being irrelevant. I am just trying to make a buck too. Isn't that why I have a site? Newspapers started it all. And they made money thru ads. Now with google's thinking, if I have a link it can only go to another real estate site? As we say in Texas.."that's bull"!
Sorry for the rant. I don't even carry ads on my sites but some of the talk lately is starting to burn me.
Why can't I sell link [etc.]...
You have the freedom to do use whatever criteria you like for linking to other sites.
Google has the freedom to use whatever criteria it likes for determining search rankings.
Is that so unreasonable?
All the stuff you talk about, this is the only thing that would almost certainly incur a penalty.
While is great to get feedback from people who have been in and out and in again ;-) I doubt whether many similarly affected webmasters will suddenly be saying 'dang, how come I didn't think of that?!'.
Sorry, but working 'incredibly hard' at building a content-rich site is not an alien activity around here. That ain't no remedy nor is building a website people love. People love my website, trouble is Google does not any longer.
Google's webmaster guidelines are becoming more onerous and imo moving in another direction to the 'build a website people love' strategy. People actually find my low-key targeted affiliate links useful - why should I have to ditch them to retain Google serps traffic?
Makes you wonder whether we shall have to eventually create two versions of every site, one for Google, one for users + other search engines?
People actually find my low-key targeted affiliate links useful - why should I have to ditch them to retain Google serps traffic?
You don't.
Is that so unreasonable?<<<<
Actually it is. In this concept, if google is trying to derank anyone selling advertising other than google's could eventually land them in federal court. It's called anti-trust and "restraint of trade".
You don't.
well I guess that is a moot point and is part of another discussion about what exactly contitutes a relevant external link.
According to Cutt's blog..you do.
Just like you my rankings in Google were #1 for all my targeted search terms and then tanked in December 2005. Unlike you, I caused the tanking myself by hiring programmers who put up a mirror site to test the programming but did not keep Googlebot out of the mirror site.
Googlebot found the mirror site and in 5 days my rankings fell the #30-#50 and have remained there. After fixing the problem I filed two reinclusion requests with Google but have had no improvement. I also have put up a tremendous amount of new content and updated the entire site over the past 6 months. Still no improvement.
A duplicate content penalty supposedly carries up to a 6 month penalty. Therefore, it should expire this week. I am keeping my fingers crossed.
This sort of hysteria is pretty funny... Google is screwed up and can't retain a solid index; now any site who fluxes out of their rankings blames it on themselves for somehow making an innocuous mistake. Sorry, but Google isn't that smart (penalizing for affiliate links? the point of that blog entry was not to make THIN affiliate sites without content... those are easily identified because they all have the same datfeed content. Cutts never said anything about penalizing for affiliate links.)
(penalizing for affiliate links? the point of that blog entry was not to make THIN affiliate sites without content... those are easily identified because they all have the same datfeed content. Cutts never said anything about penalizing for affiliate links.)
Does anyone remember the Google "Spam Recognition Guide for Raters" document that was leaked a number of months ago? The guide made it very clear that affiliate links per se aren't a problem. For that matter, GoogleGuy has said in this forum that "added value" (not the presence of affiliate links) is what counts.
EFV..sure I have. But that is not what I am referring to. I am suggesting Justice dept. vs. Google.
As in Feds vs.:Alcoa, or Standard Oil or one that affected everylast American citizen...At&T in which they broke up the largest communications giant in the world.
Now these examples aren't exactly spot on to the Google problem but you can also check...the Sherman Act.
could be that google has a set time penalty, say 9-10 months. Once, I did nothing and my site came back after 9 months.
Why trot out a straw-man argument that's so easy to refute just by looking at Google's search results?
