Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have an informational site that has admittedly used articles from an aritcle bank to supplement my own original content. Original content is 70% and all of my recent articles are original. While I do add my own editor's note before the non-original articles, some of the non-original content is in the supplemental index and understandably so. I do give proper credit to the original authors. I am wondering if it is better that I delete the non-orginal pages, do a noindex nofollow, or should I leave it alone? I do see that even some of the original articles are in the sup index.
Almost all of my dynamic pages, which happen to be the articles, that require a GET paramater, have little to no PR. My other pages do have healthy PR, even though they are dynamic (PHP) (the non-GET pages are all also linked via an absolute URL while the GET pages were relative). While the GET pages have been rewritten to static urls in the past, I have only recently found out that if one went to the site via a non-www link, it forwarded to the www-version. But it then displayed the dynamic url version. This was true, even if it was via a static url. I have fixed this problem, but don't know if it is the real cause of 95% of my paramater accepting pages being PR 0 and in the supp index.
For example:
Requested page: http://example.com/widget.htm
Forwarded to: http://example.com/widget.htm/pages.php?title=widget
Instead of http://www.example.com/widget.htm
and those who reached me via
http://mysite.com/example.htm/pages.php?title=widget,
did not get forwarded anywhere.
I think, I fixed this thanks to reading some of JDMorgan's posts.
Now if someone comes via http://example.com/widget.htm
it forwards to http://www.example.com/widget.htm. And the dynamic urls get forwarded to the static versions with no endless loop.
That's fine and dandy.
But Google has indexed the https version of most of my GET pages. When I do a Google search, site:www.mysite.com, it also shows the https version of my site in the supplemental index.( My home and non_GET pages show the http version. ) I have rewritten the GET pages as absolute urls (before I used relative urls), but still see them in the Google index. I have also put disallow in my robots.txt file for the https version of my site. I went to the Google url removal site, but was afraid it would remove both my http and https versions of the page and it doesn't accept https versions anyway. Has anyone had any luck getting Google to remove the https version or should I ignore it because it is in supplemental?
Almost all of my traffic comes from Google images, Yahoo search and MSN.
I think I have been severely penalized by Google. One reason is that this website had a blog that I moved to another site. Now that blog receives traffic from Google, when it did not before. Now it could be the name, because one of my keywords is in the new name, but I still find it odd.
Obviously I didn't know jack when I first created this site two years ago. I was doomed from the beginning. Has anyone got included back into the SERPS after correcting their mistakes? What did you say or do?
<edit reason: use example.com and de-link>
[edited by: tedster at 12:02 am (utc) on Aug. 16, 2006]
Concentrate on cleaning up the site, and making it work.
Sort out the http / https business; get it right.
Make sure your navigation works (xenu is your friend)
Clean out spammy links and exchanges.
Remove clutter and duplicate stuff that is of no value to your visitors.
Re-read Google guidelines for webmasters, then start springclean #2.
That may be all you need; thyen you can start the boring but vital SEO stuff - meta tags, titles, ALT text, appropriate Hx ... etc., etc.
But first the cleanup.
My biggest concern is getting rid of https. I did everything like changing everything to absolute urls and putting a disallow for the secure port. I was wondering if there was a way to get rid of the https that is quicker than sitting around waiting for Google to do deindex it. I am guessing that it is seen as dupe content.
I've never heard of xenu, but will check it out.
