Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I would like to see if we can break down the reasons why we dropped out of the SERPS, and offer ways to protect our domains in the future. I want to see how many of us have something in common: (more statements can be added)
1. Are you in a competitive money area? (yeah but keywords are not too bad)
2. Are you an adsense publisher? (yes, but really, really doubt this has anything to do with it)
3. Did you make alot of money from Google traffic? (nah, not yet..but was growing enough where it would stink if I lost it...I lost it)
4. Dedicated or Shared IP? Do you think switching to a dedicated IP from shared will improve rankings? (shared)
5. Do you believe you were penalized? If you put in keywords that only you should show up as, are other sites outranking you? (definitely believe I was penalized)
6. Did you forget the 301 redirect, to redirect non-www to www vice versa? (I did!) Are there any other htaccess codes to put in by the way?
7. For those of you in the sandbox before Allegra, did Allegra take you out of the sandbox, then did it dump you back in the sandbox in the Bourbon update? (Yes, I was out of the sanbox due to the allegra update, now im even worse than I was 9 months ago...cant even rank for a phrase with 1000 results. Its to the point where I can only rank if NO website contains the keyword.)
8. How many keywords per webpage do you use when optimizing? How many words per page on average? (about 6-10 keywords...about 180 words per page, keyword density is 10/180 = about 5% max most of the time...sometimes maybe 10% if I have a short writeup)
9. Proximity of keywords? Are they too close? (My headers are always [h1]keyword[/h1], and the keyword also starts at the beginning of my first sentence usually...so the header keyword, and regular keyword are adjacent. Other than that, keywords for me are naturally spaced apart for the most part...about 9-15+ words in between the keywords.)
10. How old is your site? (10 months)
11. How did you obtain links when you first started out? How often do you get new quality links? Did you stop obtaining links, thinking you would continue to get them naturally? (I politely asked other music site webmasters if they would like to exchange links. I stopped doing this after I ranked in G, because I realized I needed more content.)
12. Do spammy sites outrank you? (yes!)
13. Do you do well in Yahoo, MSN, etc? (yes!)
14. Do you hate Google. (no I think their search engine is great, despite my horrible rankings)
Well, maybe we can all communicate to each other what went wrong. If we find out that there is enough similarities between certain things, maybe that could be one cause of our dropped rankings. Perhaps everyone has number 4 and 6 in common. This may mean there is a relationship between 301 redirects, and dedicated ip's. Please, set your anger aside for the moment and lets just talk about the possibilities. Be nice too. No bashing Google, it will defeat the purpose of this thread. Thank you.
I think one definitive way to tell if you've been hit vs just doing poorly, and I could be wrong here so let me know, is to search for your EXACT PAGE TITLE, especially if it is something unusual. On our domain which has been hit our page does not come up first (or at all on the first page) as expected, whereas on ALL the other pages on the un-hit domains they DO come up first. Almost as if the domain is being banned from exact keyword matches.
I don't show up for the EXACT page title, and this is sitewide, unless I use quotes... Still sitting on page 10, and from what I can see, in my area, exact title matches are being discounted, the current #1 site has the SAME title tag on every page of the site, no Hn tags, etc. - rather the opposite of optimized, huh?
Of course the scrapers show up above me, even when I use quotes, how nice. 2 jobs listings on craigslist are even outranking many sites, go figure. Really not sure what to make of this, exactly what kind of "penalty" or "hit" is this?
I did have Adsense on a handful of pages, in a sub-directory, not related to the main site, the pages had been there for years. Adsense was removed last week, since it didn't really earn anything, but haven't seen any changes.
Anyone have any ideas?
LisaB
Same deal for us. We only very rarely appear for extremely targeted searches but sites that copied our stuff appear above us. Yesterday I got a third (or 4th?) note from Google support stating that we don't have a penalty, but I no longer believe this.
I think there is some form of downgrade on sites like yours and ours that effectively leaves places them near bottom for all searches.
- if you have a large site (probably built in some years)
- if you use mostly duplicate content (news agencies, newsfeeds, "free-content", press releases, etc.)
- if you interlink some of your sites or receives several sitewide links
- if your sites does fine in search.yahoo.com (and you're receiving suddenly tons of scraper links)
...you have a 90% chances to be sent to Nowhereland if some of these parameters changes roughly.
1. Are you in a competitive money area?
Not really.
2. Are you an adsense publisher?
No.
3. Did you make alot of money from Google traffic?
No, just pocket money.
4. Dedicated or Shared IP?
Shared.
5. Do you believe you were penalized?
Yes, to the extent that the site has dropped considerably for its own name, and fallen off the map for several queries where it used to be in the top 10.
6. Did you forget the 301 redirect, to redirect non-www to www vice versa?
No.
7. For those of you in the sandbox..
It's too old for the sandbox.
8. How many keywords per webpage do you use when optimizing?
Natural keyword density.
9. Proximity of keywords? Are they too close?
No, there's no keyword stuffing.
10. How old is your site?
4 years, but around 2 at its current url.
11. How did you obtain links when you first started out?
Dmoz, a few link exchanges, niche directories.
12. Do spammy sites outrank you?
Depends on the query. Some are irrelevant.
13. Do you do well in Yahoo, MSN, etc?
So-so.
14. Do you hate Google.
No, but I think it has a problem.
This site is my oldest, with the most original content. It's also the most heavily scrapered, and I'm fairly sure that this is the cause of its current problems.
I have eighteeen sites. All are SEO's pretty similarly. Most are on completely different topics.
Only one got hit.
And man... did it get hit. Owwww... Google traffic is off over 90%.
Looking at all of these categories of analysis, I just have to say "I have seventeen sites which did the same things and didn't get slaughtered."
Of your 17 non-hit sites, how many of them have incoming links compared to the hit site?
Also: how old is site # 18, compared to the others?
We have 3 sites, exact SEO, look and feel. With Bourbon, the 2 less than year old new sites with comparitively less links tripled in traffic while the bread and butter 5 year old site with many more links lost 95% of Google traffic.
Possible causes - Shots in the dark?
1. We were concentrating on link solicitations for the new site lately and hence the age of most links to the old site are older.
2. Some of our old domain and obsolete urls from the site which got hit were flooding the SERPS during the early phases of Bourbon (However, there are proper 301s from these urls. Also, for the last couple of days these seem to be getting cleaned out from the SERPs but our traffic is still down).
So now I have emailed big G for assistance.
This is one of those spammy price grabber sites and they have 428,000 of these 302 redirects using a php script (that's just one php script I was looking at).
They also hide these links inside tables and aren't visible to normal users - just the bots.
They show up when doing an inurl:mydomain.com
Strange coincidence - they starting doing these links in Feb - about the same time i started having problems in G results.
Anyone else have links from ostg
Yes, but not overly so.
2. Are you an adsense publisher?
Yes, That was one of the few things that have changed since I went from #1 for ALL keyword searches in my niche to being lost. I just have to feel that Adsense has something to do with it.
3. Did you make alot of money from Google traffic?
Yes - 90% of my income has been lost.
4. Dedicated or Shared IP?
Dedicated or shared IP?
Dedicated IP.
Do you believe you were penalized?
Yes - I am the only "niche" site of my kind - and have always ranked #1 for my key words, and in the top 10 for many others. Now I'm nowhere to be found.
6. Did you forget the 301 redirect, to redirect non-www to www vice versa?
I never had a problem with it before, so I never even thought about doing that. The bot has always known the difference I thought - Now I've got every page of my site duplicated! I've asked my host to put in the 301 redirect, I'm a publisher, not a webmaster.
8. How many keywords per webpage do you use when optimizing? How many words per page on average?
Never thought about it before, Always was in top 10 without keyword stuffing.
9. Proximity of keywords? Are they too close?
No idea again
10. How old is your site?
7 years on same domain
11. How did you obtain links when you first started out? How often do you get new quality links? Did you stop obtaining links, thinking you would continue to get them naturally?
People just link to my site. I've got the Yahoo and DMOZ listing, as well as few other directories. Other than that, I am an authority site, so people link to me that are in my field.
12. Do spammy sites outrank you?
As another poster said, not so much spammy as totally irrelavent.
13. Do you do well in Yahoo, MSN, etc?
Yahoo- great, but they don't deliver the clicks that Google did.
MSN - I started having 302 and indexing problems with them in the last two months. Before that, no probalems at all.
Other engines like Gigablast, Atomsphere, Clusty I am still number 1 I lost 95% of my traffic though when Google dropped my sites down the index. From 10,000 a day to 1200 or so. And that 1200 doesn't click on anything or buy anything like the Google refs did.
I have also started having major problems with 302s like sailorwjd. Google has always said that nothing that another site does can hurt you, so I never worried about it before.
Maybe Google should just start ignoring all 302 redirects!
They (the 302s) are still showing up as major SERPS when I search for my domain name, and it would take me a year to report them all. Actually, I accidently 302ed my own site through ignorance, and I'm still trying to clean that up.
If 302's from another domain can hurt a site, maybe we should all start 302ing our competitors to make a point. Legally, you can't stop an offshore site from 302 hi-jacking, and they keep popping up, so you can't report them all.
My site which was affected is on a domain which is a little over a year old. The site existed on another domain before that. The old domain is 301'd to the new domain.
Also, the site has been reorganized, so there are 301's from this site to itself.
It seems to me that perhaps Google, in it's attempt to fix their 302 bugs, screwed up 301 handling.
Hey, it's a theory...
Will - I'm wondering about that as well since we've seen no changes after extensive 301s placed 2 months ago after our traffic meltdown. Our use of 302s to count outbound clicks plus some accidental duped content seemed the most likely problems for us.
In your case perhaps they've decided there is not enough additional unique content on your smaller site to offset the adsense ads or affiliate links (if you have affiliate links too).
Obviously they didn't actually look at the site as it includes articles by some of the top people in my field. The site even has references to the books used to help write each articles plus links to related information. Teacher and students all over use this site. If that isn't enough value I don't know what else I can do.
I did just go through my pages and removed the second ad units that I had on some long articles. I don't want to remove my Amazon affiliate links as they are to books that I have handpicked that relate to each article.
It just occurred to me that I sometimes have the same book linked twice, once in the references and once to a picture of the book cover. Could that be it?
I went from page 1 to page 2 and I started to nose around my site and reading everything I could find here on WW.
Scraper links were talked about and I went to a recommended website to see if my links had spiked and they sure DID! In one month I had thousands of links.
I have a page where links are added right away and I am emailed about them and within 48 hours I check to see if I am listed on their site. During the month of April I was so sick I neglected everything but middle last month I started going manually through my links and boy was it a shocker!
Every site that even resembled a scraper was deleted and all who did not link to me were eliminated (that means most of them) until I was left with a few links but they were honest ones. Took me days.
my site rose back to number 7 then went back to it's original position of #8. Today I recieved the link notice for software seller and clicked on it, looked kosher so decided to wait the alloted time to see if they linked back. I went to my links manager and was just nosing about and saw 2 of the same links for the software site, same url etc and I clicked on the 2nd one and just for a swift second I saw the original site then a dup site but with Warez software showing there.
I promptly deleted them both! It pays to check out all your links even if there are so many that you have to hire someone to help as who knows how many more are using the "bait and switch" or redirect urls!
I feel this could be a factor as my smaller site tanked way down to about #50 until I did the same and it came back and gained about 6 places.
Ann
Will - I'm wondering about that as well since we've seen no changes after extensive 301s placed 2 months ago after our traffic meltdown.
I placed a www.example.com to example.com 301 redirect in my .htaccess file at the end of March, and I saw one positive change about a week ago: For the first time in recent memory, a link: search showed the same number for example.com and www.example.com, which suggested that Google had finally figured out that inbound links to the non-www and www versions of my domain were going to the same place.
I checked my site using inurl:mysite.com and there was a site with another url when you clicked in it redirected to my homepage? There was only one but what does that mean? Is that bas it does look like pricegrabber. Thank You for your help.
That is not my issue -- my demolished site has almost no outbound links.
I had hoped my suggestion would help some as it did me...good luck.
Ann
I would think they would have considered how much text per page as sites that are mostly articles are not like the sites they are trying to get rid of. Yet several people here had had their content sites hit.
I am filling out Google spam reports like mad.
Over a year ago I 301'd the old domain to the new domain.
For almost a year now, they have been showing the same number of backlinks and the same number of pages. They have been one domain.
They are now showing different numbers of pages and backlinks.
It appears that 301's are dead.
I wonder if Google did this on purpose or on accident?
It would be quite rude for them to change this and not mention it.
I wrote them both a letter to cease and desist...copyright and all that etc..
I guess I am going to have to rewrite the whole page.
Darn!
Ann
