Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It starts with the usual sad story... a sudden unexpected drop in ranking (from 5 to 0)... the anguish... the tormentented, 'what did I do wrong?'....
Then the long, hard struggle to recover.
I put the site on a SEO Detox Diet... remove anything likely to give offence.... submit my abject apology and hope for the best...
Then that little bit of faint hope... gradually building to a cresendo... Yes, I finally got my ranking back to 5...
But, it is not yet a happy ending...
Google seems to ignore me. She never sends visits anything like she used to.
Is it that she can't stand the site of me?
A mutual friend, link:www.mydomain.com, tells me that in Google's eyes I only have one back link.
However, it is not true as I have many relevant back links created over the years. Besides Google knows that is not true or she would never have given me back my earlier ranking.
This is borne out by another friend, 'site:www.mydomain.com singles', who tells me I have around 30 back links for that keyword and around the same for many other related keywords.
A very good friend, inurl:www.mydomain.com, heartens me by saying that there is no one to match my site and that it is unique.
Why is Google being so fickle? Why won't she take me back links? Is this why my organic traffic has gone to compost?
Google is 'a-void-ing' me. She has put my site in a void where it can just about exist but not really flourish.
What am I to do now? My pagerank is back to 5 (and has been for a couple of months) but traffic is still very much at the level it was when it dropped to 0. Is it over between Google and me? Should I write her a poem, send flowers, or what?
In woe and contrition...
William
>>A very good friend, inurl:www.mydomain.com, heartens me by saying that there is no one to match my site and that it is unique.<<
are you sure that it really means that google cannot find any web pages that are really similar to yours ?
I ask cos I'm not certain that that tool actually works like its supposed to, unless it does something else altogether
But
>are you sure that it really means that google cannot find any web pages that are really similar to yours?
Not sure, but I am not too fussed to be honest. My site has been around for 5 years so even if someone did grab the content I reckon (fingers crossed) that Google would be smart enough to know my site is the original.
By the way, I forgot to mention that only the home page got back its 5 ranking. All the other pages are still 0. Even very simple ones which seem very unlikely to have something SEO dirty about them.
cheers,
William
Actually we seen this a while ago for us. Just hang in there for a while. It should correct but so far the correction has been slow. What it says in the toolbar is not wat it may actually be. Be prepared to see a little improvemnt. When you do see some improvements and your internal pages are still a 0 you can expect some PR is flowing to those pages and will see that PR on the next visible PR update. If you believe you are doing nothing wrong then just hang in there.
I always think of google as a "he."
OK. Guess I just need to be patient.
Thanx for the tip.
poetic license...:)
I wouldn't bank on Google's smartness.
One of my sites was entirely cloned by a Russian site and Google sometimes served up a Russian result in preference to my original. As I've carried on updating, this phenomenon has gradually gone away.
The other problem I had was that someone scraped an article from Wikipedia that just happened to have a link to my site embedded in it. So I suddenly got over two thousand unwanted IBLs from virtually identical spam-type sites. The day before that happened, Google's link: used to work perfectly - the day after (and since) it's been completely broken. Not just a little broken - _completely_ broken. I only found the problem by doing a link: search on Yahoo and finding over 2,000 IBLs when I'd had 250 or so the day before.
