Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Situation:
I have 2 websites with similar issues and I've read many posts here from others with similar situations. I'm just looking for some insight and opinions.
- Site 1 -
Regional widget site with PR3 and 300+ backlinks (majority from site itself with the rest being local sites and directories). Site 1 Features widget galleries and reviews of widgets pulling in 2000 searches per month from google until feb 2nd with alegra when I got the common "can't find my site by mycompany name" ie filter=0 problem) and dropped to less than 200 google referrals.
My first reaction was to think I was being penalized for the gallery pages since they all had similar titles and just a couple of words to describe the gallery, so i removed about 90% of the widget galleries (I think that was a mistake now and have since put them back up).
My next thought was my highest google referrals used to be a page about free non-widgets which were a little off theme and I thought I may have gotten a penalty for having an off-theme page.
The next thing I noticed was a 302 redirect site showing up when searching for unique page text from my home page (ie widgetlinks.com/redirect.php?12345). I emailed them and they removed the link but its still in google and when you click it from the google search the script points to their home page. I'm guessing google will sort that out in time.
Finally the site had been showing up 3 ways on google (ie ipaddress/page.html, site.com/page.html and www.site/page.html). I had been using redirect 301 but it seems google didn't notice so I changed it to a mod rewrite 301.
Now I'm down to 15 backlinks in google and still getting hardly any searches. :(
- Site 2 -
Brand new widget lessons site with 2 backlinks and PR0, which is getting major traffic by posting lessons on some high profile widget lesson directories. Some of them use frames on lesson which I *think* is ok. Others widget lesson directories are using php 302's but don't seem to be indexing in google as copies of my page. However another widget lesson site which I didn't submit a link to is showing up #1 in the SERPS with search terms from some of my lessons. When clicked it does forward right to my lesson and the referrer log shows the google search, but it's showing their url and its the ONLY copy of the page in google. Should I be concerned?
- What are your thoughts on Site 1 and Site 2? -
How can I get Site 1 back to its former glory?
Any new insights into fixing a 302 redirect?
Should I give up tons of traffic and quit submitting to lesson directories?
Sorry for the long post but as you can see I've had a LOT on my mind.
