Trust Rank taken away?

[monster88]

I have a PR 7 that moved up to a PR8 in the latest update. However, my trust rank was completely taken away. Before the update, most pages on my site ranked on the first page of google serps for the targeted keywords. However, now I only rank for the site name. The following are possible explanations:

1) I added a few hundred pages of content to try to monetize my site. Each page included an affiliate link with a rel='nofollow' tag. Perhaps google recognized the affiliate links and took away my trust rank? Perhaps I added too many pages? My site went from ~300 pages to ~900 pages.

2) All new pages were added in a sub-folder. Perhaps google thought the theme of my site had changed and penalized me? (although my index page stayed relatively the same)

3) Moved site to a dedicated server about 2 months previous.

Any thoughts?

[cavendish]

It seems unlikely, but you may have triggered the sandbox filters. If I were you, I’d try to get external links to your new added pages. Your actions (to triple the site size) may seem similar to a spammer buying an old, established domain and adding spam content.

Again, give it time and good external links to your new pages and I think you should be back on track. Also, make sure you have a good internal link structure.

[petehall]

I have reduced number of pages on a couple of my sites.

These pages are now only accessible via JavaScript being enabled as Google was pushing all the pages into the supplemental index (PR1 pages).

So the site has gone from 900 pages to about 300.

The site has taken a small hit in rankings - but nothing too drastic.

I expect things to improve over the coming months.

I'm keeping all PR5 and below sites small (-300 pages) from this day forth!

P.S. Can you sticky me your URL as I'd like to have a look at the structure of your site. A PR8 site should be able to cope with 900 pages no problem.

[glengara]

I'd suspect it's a combination of being a PR8 and the sudden massive increase in monetised pages, IMO you may have got away with it with a PR4 site, or if there was no monetization...

[cabbagehead]

huh? you're not allowed to make money of your site now?

[europeforvisitors]

What kind of content was on those 600 new pages (which tripled the size of your site)?

[Frederic1]

> huh? you're not allowed to make money of your site now?

lol I was also wondering =)

[trinorthlighting]

Have your competitors added new pages recently bumping them up?

[idolw]

huh? you're not allowed to make money of your site now?

don't you know it yet? positive visitor experience is important. nothing else counts.

[jimbeetle]

my trust rank was completely taken away

Just to clarify and not get confused, none of the explanations the OP proposed has anything to do with TrustRank. From uspto.gov [appft1.uspto.gov]

TrustRank is a link analysis technique related to PageRank. TrustRank is a method for separating reputable, good pages on the Web from web spam. TrustRank is based on the presumption that good documents on the Web seldom link to spam. TrustRank involves two steps, one of seed selection and another of score propagation. The TrustRank of a document is a measure of the likelihood that the document is a reputable (i.e., a nonspam) document.

As glengars said, the tripling in the number of pages might be an explanation. There have been a few recent reports that adding many pages at one time has had a not very good effect on sites. Matt Cutts has stated that the number of added pages has to be a truly significant increase in order to trip whatever it is that's tripped. What that percentage is can be anyone's guess. For what it's worth, most of the reports on WebmasterWorld stated that the problems were mostly with pages in newly added directories.

[monster88]

The content of the new pages are different than the content of the main site. The main site content is software/technical/rss information. I have thousands of incoming links from .edu's, dmoz, yahoo directory and such. The site would rank high for just about any keyword I mentioned on the page. But, I wasn't making much money on the site and having to pay for a dedicated server every month. Then I added a page to promote a webhosting company and made about 2k the first month. I then decided I could make more, so I joined Commission Junction and started making pages to promote each one of their merchants. That's how the pages went from 300 to 900. Most of those newly added pages were ranking on the first page of google results for the targeted keywords. Traffic on my site exploded for about a month. Then last week, all pages on my site went from top 10 SERPs to nowhere to be found. My visitor log now shows that the only keyword i rank for in google is my site name.

I basically screwed up bigtime. Maybe had I added pages a few at a time, I wouldn't be in this mess. Do you think it would help if I got rid of all those pages? The pages are still getting traffic from MSN, but it's really not worth it. Has anyone ever had this happen? Is there a chance the site will come back?

The site is basically worthless now. Before I was getting lots of traffic from software/technical search terms. All that has been taken away too. I've lost all my google traffic.

[monster88]

Answer to some questions:

"is your new server set up correctly, was the old server setup correctly?"

Yes, the servers were set up correctly. Google was crawling and indexing the pages with no problems.

"Did you really add 600 pages, and over what time period, what is your previous change rate?"

I added 600 pages in less than 1 month. Previous to that, I had added 300 pages in a period of 3 years.

At this point, I think the only thing I can do is remove those 600 pages.

[monster88]

I've had some requests asking for the url of my site. For now, I would prefer to keep the site url confidential. Just being cautious in case there is a chance I can get my site rankings back.

I'm not too optimistic though. I've seen this happen before with free hosting and free forum type sites. At one time, any pages created on these free hosting sites would rank high. But then Google put some kind of filter/penalty against these sites. After that, those sites only ranked for their site name. Even though the sites retained it's high pagerank (greenbar still looked good), the pages didn't rank for anything.

[monster88]

"you may have triggered the sandbox filters. If I were you, I’d try to get external links to your new added pages. Your actions (to triple the site size) may seem similar to a spammer buying an old, established domain and adding spam content."

My site is over 3 years old. Yes, what I did is exactly what a spammer would have done. I added a bunch of unrelated pages to try to monetize the site. And google punished me for it. I didn't think I could trigger a sandbox filter on a 3+ year old domain with a PR 8 with quality backlinks. But, Google is much smarter than than I thought.

[walkman]

IMO: You fit google's description of a spammer. A combination of things you did triggered the filter and you essentially sandboxed. Best thing is to hope that it's a short one. If those pages are good ones ($$ wise) I'd keep them and ride this out, especially since there's no guarantee that removing them will help shorten the time.

[wanderingmind]

Did you expans the site from 300 to 900 in a single day or was it gradual? If gradual, how gradual?

Have you checked whether you have fallen victim the supplemental/ dupe content problems?

[kennylucius]

This sounds like what happened to me on Sept 15 as described here [webmasterworld.com]. I didn't add any pages, but I did change the template of my site to use AJAX to load submenus. That might look like an advertising script. It was fine for a month, and then I dropped from SERP 18 to 600 in one day.

Has anyone been sandboxed for adding a non-adSense script to their site?

[theBear]

I vote for a tripped filter, that is about a 7100% change in the page creation rate.

[monster88]

"Did you expand the site from 300 to 900 in a single day or was it gradual? If gradual, how gradual?"

I added 300 pages on one day. 2 weeks later, I added another 300 pages. I thought that since my site had a high page rank, it could handle 300 pages at a time. I thought wrong!

Have you checked whether you have fallen victim the supplemental/ dupe content problems?

When I do a site: search for my site, the pages do not show up as supplemental. The content on the pages are unique with unique meta tags.

[monster88]

"Has anyone been sandboxed for adding a non-adSense script to their site?"

I did not have adsense on the new pages.

[monster88]

"I vote for a tripped filter, that is about a 7100% change in the page creation rate."

Does anyone know how to 'un-trip' a filter? Will it help to remove the pages?

[jimbeetle]

Does anyone know how to 'un-trip' a filter? Will it help to remove the pages?

As you don't as yet really know what caused the problem taking any action is actually just a shot in the dark. Yeah, it might be that you tripped some sort of "spammy looking increase in pages" filter, or it might be normal--or abnormal--fluctuations caused by the last data push.

Can't give any really good advice, don't know what I would do given that situation. I might ride it out while adding a few pages each day and hope for the best on the next update.

[theBear]

Google claims to measure url creation and destruction what they do for a fact is only(maybe) known by them.

[theBear]

kennylucius,

You are aware that Google can see any links that script of yours sets up aren't you?.

Is it possible that each page now has a lot more effective outbound links than it did before and you actually changed your sites PR distribution(along with other items like link text) drastically.

Just guessing on my part I haven't got a clue as to how your site changed.

[walkman]

was the content simliar to other sites? I mean you added 900 pages just like that and they were money-making pages? If you had added 900 biographies of people, I doubt this would be a problem whereas adding mortgage and loans would. It could be that in addition to the numbers of pages added /rate, google also checks the content and if it's "spammy" it's blocked from appearign high (by penalizing your domain)

[monster88]

"was the content simliar to other sites? I mean you added 900 pages just like that and they were money-making pages?"

The content was unique. Each page had a small paragraph about the target keywords. For example, I had a page about 'netflix movie rentals' which included a short paragraph about netflix movie rentals and ended with an affiliate link to netflix. This page was top five on google for anything related to netflix movie rentals. I added about 600 pages similar to this, ranging from just about anything that was offered by Commission Junction. shoes, clothes, electronics, laptops, bikes, sports equipment, flowers, books, etc. Most of the pages got lots of hits and most converted to sales.

[walkman]

>> Each page had a small paragraph about the target keywords.

there you have it. Not enough content and most likely repeated in 100's of other pages, even if not word for word.

[longen]

I thought that since my site had a high page rank, it could handle 300 pages at a time. I thought wrong!

Instead of number of pages - think % of new pages.
Adding 300 new pages might be no problem - if the site already has 1000's.

I added about 600 pages similar to this, ranging from just about anything that was offered by Commission Junction.

GoogleBot probably had gorged itself by the time it consumed a 300% increase in new pages with interesting kw's.

Perhaps nofollow, noindex would have been advisable - then the new pages could be gradually indexed over 12 - 18 month.

[greenleaves]

Did your new pages have many links to other sites, especially links with Affiliate codes?

[monster88]

"Did your new pages have many links to other sites, especially links with Affiliate codes?"

Yes, every new page had a link to another site with the affiliate code. I used the rel='nofollow' tag on each link.

Google just didn't penalize the new pages, they penalized the entire domain.