Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I am. Was hit April 16th, June and July as well. White hat site following google guidelines 100% since 1998.
Anyone?
Google rewards the cr@p whilst bashing the quality - the serps were not broken last year, since BD they are worse than ever imo
Frankly, Google has lost the plot, its not a war on spam its one on webmasters to buy more dam adwords and it anoys the hell out of me - rant over!
[edited by: RichTC at 10:08 pm (utc) on Aug. 4, 2006]
There has been a proliferation of scraped site (both new domains and subdomains), and this proliferation is now out of control. Nothing is being done. Often these cloaking/spam sites also include AdSense advertising (read MFA), and this apparently enhances rank as well.
This is real bad news, and to me, it is the beginning of the end for Google, unless they really get their act together. No one stays on top forever, especially with these types of practices.
I am not sure if it's any algo that updates every few weeks since I have been suffering from it since April 26th.
RichTC, I feel your pain man. I've noticed hundreds of spam/link farms that have stolen my content, text, everything.. it's a shame google can't realize what they are doing wrong.. or fix it.
Anyone else here RECOVER from the page 3,4,5+ pushed search results?
My initial reaction was that it was algo tweaking from 6/27 and 7/27 updates. But, upon closer inspection and analysis, I determined the main impetus behind dwindling rankings are these SPAM sites (who scrape away without being caught), who continue to outrank me.
I consistently report problems to Google via their spam report mechanism, but I see this as nothing more than toilet that gets flushed, every time I make a deposit.
Google is doomed to failure, unless it fixes some of their core problems and issues; spam site inclusion and click fraud being paramount in importance.
This is my first post here, but this is the first thread about EXACTLY what happened to my website on July 27th, 2006. I have tried to do as much research as possible, and it seems that no one really has a direct answer.
It appears the answer that is common is sites that are over optimized are being affected in the serps. I have a site that has ranked #1-5 for all my top 50 keywords for close to 1.5 years now. All of a sudden there is a big drop, and none of the pages on my website will rank higher than 30.
Even when I type my website's name in, I rank #31 & 32. If over optimization is the problem, do you all think that the solution would be to under optimize the website? For example don't use H1, H2, H3, and other meta tags.
I’m noticing in my niche the current tops sites aren't doing that, so maybe Google has added some sort of addition to the algo which penalizes over optimized sites.
I may be way off here, but I have been reading and doing research about this for the past week or so. I have a strong belief this is what we are facing. The competition for the 50 keywords I was ranking top for doesn't know much of anything about SEO. They know it exists, but not how to really implement it on a website.
That is the reason I assume this is what we are experiencing here. Again, this is just my opinion I could be completely wrong. At this point I don't whether I should just wait it out hoping Google will fix this or if I should turn down the optimization on my website. What are everyone else’s thoughts?
I don't believe it has anything to do with over-optimization. Not on my site atleast, I have been doing this for almost a decade and have not changed anything from the start - clean site always. I do however believe that it is on googles end.. which is unfortunately out of our control..
THAT is why I am trying to see if anyone has "re-bounded" which would shed some light/hope on google correcting some mistakes.
[edited by: AustrianOak at 11:39 pm (utc) on Aug. 4, 2006]
The problem is, what Google class as over optimized?.
For example our clients have sites about widgets with pages marked as "Blue Widgets" Heading tags that say "Blue Widgets" and on page factors that mention "blue widgets" - they are an authority on Widgets and have a quality site about blue, green, pink widgets - this is what they know and they call a spade a spade - The end user likes pages marked up correctly, nice and clear
This authority has been hit with this penulty.
Meanwhile ranking above it are sites with low on page factors, sites with stolen text, spammy sites that should be removed.
Gawd knows its easy for spammers to just produce pages with high, low and medium keyword density, use of tags/ non use of headings tags etc etc. Spammers produce a range of sites to fit most areas so why google is picking on this factor gawd knows.
I see directory sites that stuff paragraphs with different or associated keywords, that run own affiliate PPC advertising with the links going via a cgi bin and they are also cleaning up.
I see a directory with no own original content that has one paragraph of text on its page about the keywords 1% density (which is taken from one of my own sites) and it features a link to our site on it(via a no follow cgi bin) and google ranks this page high in the serps. Meanwhile our dediated authority page on the subject doesnt rank despite it being the most relevent on the net!.
This over optimization penulty is a joke, the spammers are cleaning up and i refuse to re-do pages and down grade the on page factors and spoil the quality to the end user just to satisfy google!
Rather than say what the page is and
The other thing I failed to mention is that I have seen a like of sites with matching url's and 1000s of anchor text from link farms with the exact same texts. Those sites are being penalized in the same way. For example:
A website name www.bestpaper.com
It has made a page here: www.bestpaper.com/best-white-paper.html
It has 100s or thousands of links pointing to that page with the anchor text as "best white paper".
It is a highly optimized page.
It was ranking #1, now it can't rank over 30.
This means either google is making some changes to the algo which is having a side effect causing the penalties or google is targeting these types of websites and pages.
Since older authority sites are being effected as well, more and more its leaning toward Google making some changes and its just affecting quality websites. Again I could be completely wrong. While it sucks for all of us, I do feel a little comfort knowing that my website is not the only one going through this.
One interesting symptom is that my home page does not come top within my own site in this search either. Can't help thinking there is a bug in Google.
Sites have been around over 3 years,cover different subject areas, had good but not top positioning, have exchanged links but only on topic, no black hat.
Still zero recovery from April 26, June and July google mishaps.
It's ironice as I have personally begged many sites to remove sitewide links to my site just not to fall victim to this (I think linking has to do with it), yet it still happened. Now I have to spend a lot of cash to advertise, and will never, ever again make the mistake of asking a site to remove their links to me.
1) Are you being truthful here? Do you have another site in the SERPS that is similar in content, hosting IP addresses etc? If yes you are on page 3 because of this.
2) have you been getting links from only links pages? If so then links dir and not doing as well as they used to.
Now if this is your ONLY site and the content is unique, then go and buy some links. Try a sitewide, see if that works as that would be the easiest. If your site is unsanboxed then it may work. But really the best IMO is lots of links from different c class IP's. Pay some bloggers to write about you etc. Do not stop until you have enough. Gathering links to quickly is not an isssue if you are unsandboxed.
There is really no cheap way out but I can guarantee this works from page 3/5 back to page 1.
Now for those of you who beleive the drivel that google feed you,do not listen for a minute. They tell you not to buy links because links work.
I know on this site now a lot of people are going to pick holes in what I say because a lot of you are in the dark. But what I have thrown you here is truly a nugget and it is up to you whether you are game or not.
But I would rather advocate the pursuit of real, quality links from single pages on lots of domains. The kind you get when having the kind of site people like to link to naturally.
The reason spam pages temporarily can be doing better than your pages, is that they have the resources to simulate these natural links. But remember that Google is doing lots to keep them down in SERPs as well. In a couple of weeks or months, these particular sites are pushed down by some tiny filter change, which won't affect clean sites with lots of good incoming links (no matter what the PR of those links are).
It's my firm belief that time is on the good guy's side.
Also, when I see threads like this, I can't help but wonder what more specified, two or three word searches look like for the affected sites.
question:
when you do a site:domain.com, does Google list your index page on top?
crush - 1) Yes I am being truthful, otherwise I'd be wasting my time. I dont' complain, I just try to find solutions, hopefuly with the help of people in the same situation. 2) I have maybe 5% of my links from link pages, most are from legit - theme related sites that I have built up over the past 4-5 years.
nikke - "It's my firm belief that time is on the good guy's side." I am with you on that one.. that's why refuse to join the spammers, etc for a quick few month boost. Hopefuly in time my quality and legitamit site will prevail.
Everything is legit. That's the problem. I have been caught in some google algo-tweak.. and penalized for reasons still unknown.
[edited by: AustrianOak at 12:54 pm (utc) on Aug. 13, 2006]
Make no mistake that this is an automated penalty of some sort. I have hundreds of links from all sources, so showing up for "domain.com" should not be be a problem. In fact, I have a "verygenericname.com" that has ZERO links and just one holding page, yet it's #1 for "domain.com."
My website that will not rank higher than page 3 on google.com has about 40 pages full of unique and original content. Are you saying I should take a few of those pages and change the all the content on that page, let google index the new page, and that page should rank again?
I ranked #1-5 for just about all of my keywords, but now my highest ranking is #24. If this is what you are suggesting please let me know, I will try it.
The index page for my site I almost never updated it with new content, is this a possible problem for "filter" some of us are experiencing? Or is it simply lack of links? Thanks all.
It sucks to be one of the good guys.
All of the scraper sites popped up in my area on the 27th of Dec 2005.
The guessing game will only continue..................
