Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In my case, applying the process of diagnosing a patient to diagnosing Google's problem with my website seems to be helpful, although I'm not sure my diagnosis is complete. I'm going to offer up the process I've gone through here, and hopefully somebody out there can see something I'm missing and make the correct diagnosis.
HISTORY: My site was humming along in a highly competitive keyword space, ranking in the top ten for many heavy-traffic two-keyword phrases, bringing in lots of Google searches. From February to August, I owned the 9 or 10 spot for our most important keyword, and all was good with the world.
Then, around August 17th, our homepage disappeared from the rankings, and was replaced by an affiliate link with several querystring variables. A couple days later, this site disappeared as well and our homepage was no longer in the index.
Thinking that this was a duplicate content penalty, I used robots.txt and the Google URL removal tool to eliminate all URLs with the affiliate querystring variables. They disappeared the next day, and a few days later, our homepage returned to the SERPs, although it had dropped 6 spots for our most important keyword, and several other spots for some other keywords (note that some keywords were unaffected).
Note that I've recently been doing some aggressive link-building via a forum that lives on a subdomain of the main site.
In addition, we had some poorly implemented Javascript redirect pages that Google may have interpreted as doorway pages. I've removed them recently, but they are still in the index.
We've been stuck with the new results (with the usual everflux) since the homepage has returned to the index, update or no update. Some other strange things have happened in the last week... they are outlined below as "Symptoms."
SYMPTOMS:
-- After returning to the index, our backlinks suddenly jumped from 447 to 1 when the BL update recently occurred as part of "Gilligan".
-- The number of indexed pages (via the "site:" command) just about doubled as part of "Gilligan".
-- PageRank in the Google Toolbar went from 6 to 0 for the homepage, but is unaffected for all other pages in the site.
-- The majority of our SERPs took a hit after the disappearance, but some took a much bigger hit than others. A few non-competitive terms actually got a boost.
DIAGNOSIS:
I still have a lot to learn, but it appears to me there are a few possible diagnoses that fit the symptoms. Here they are in order of likelihood (in my opinion):
1. Google penalized my site for all the Javascript redirects. When the update happens, the homepage may disappear again. GoogleGuy posted that Google has gotten better at finding Javascript redirects, so this diagnosis seems likely.
2. Google penalized the site for "over optimization" or "gaming Google". Since the new forum was born on the subdomain, we've been getting a huge number of links with identical link text-- an obvious flag for over-optimization.
3. Google penalized my site for duplicate content. This seems unlikely since fixing robots.txt and using the removal tool got us back in the index.
So that's my "resident" diagnosis. I'm appealing to all you veteran SEO doctors to help me answer the following questions and treat the patient:
1. What's your diagnosis?
2. Given we can confirm one of the above diagnoses, what can I do to regain my SERPs/ lift the penalty?
3. How could the site have one single backlink (down from over 500)?
4. What does a zero pagerank for the homepage really mean in this case?
Here's to hoping you can help me to find a successful treatment.
this is it IMO, since you said that all dupes are gone. Only time will cure it. After a while I think Google accepts some links.
If it's dupe content that hit you, eventually (1-3 months after removing) it will all sort itself out and you will be back.
I still don't know why you got the PR 0. Sounds manual, but not sure. I doubt Google trust the algo to automatically 0 PRs.
Please note that this is just an opinion.
Then, around August 17th, our homepage disappeared from the rankings, and was replaced by an affiliate link with several querystring variables. A couple days later, this site disappeared as well and our homepage was no longer in the index.Thinking that this was a duplicate content penalty, I used robots.txt and the Google URL removal tool to eliminate all URLs with the affiliate querystring variables. They disappeared the next day, and a few days later, our homepage returned to the SERPs, although it had dropped 6 spots for our most important keyword, and several other spots for some other keywords (note that some keywords were unaffected).
It can take several months to recover from a Google penalty.
However, you might be better served by removing the query string variables from the individual pages and not just rely on robots.txt.
SYMPTOMS:
-- After returning to the index, our backlinks suddenly jumped from 447 to 1 when the BL update recently occurred as part of "Gilligan".
Don't use Google to check backlinks as it doesn't report them all (only 3-10%) and when they drop that far it's probably part of a penalty anyway. Use Yahoo instead.
Also the Gilligan update eliminated a lot of Javascript redirects and doorway pages. Being as you used the former you may just have to wait out the pentalty time. In the meantime gather up more backlinks and remove anything from your site that can hinder search engines and I would think query string variables would be a first priority.
The number of indexed pages (via the "site:" command) just about doubled ...
When this happens this is a bad sign unfortunatley. I see this happening usually when there is confusion between www and non-www pages. Seeing pages double I believe is the start of duplicate content problems.
Try this on your own domain:
site:www.example.com
site:example.com
site:example.com -www
In the above site commands, the numbers of pages returned in the first two results should be the same. The first two numbers should also reflect the (approximate) number of pages on your site (which hopefully should also be be the number of pages indexed by Google).
If your server is configure to show pages as www (and not non-www pages), the number of pages returned in the third site command should be zero.
When site:www.example.com and site:example.com do not give the same number, I believe this points to duplicate content issues.
Then, around August 17th, our homepage disappeared from the rankings, and was replaced by an affiliate link with several querystring variables.
I have seen this before but acutally on Yahoo a while back where the page of an affiliate was pointing to some content. The page which was being pointed to was given credit to the affiliate URL pointing to it. Not sure if that is what happened in your case but thought it was worth mentionnning.
So, Google was indexing a copy of the homepage, which was just the homepage with several querystring variables tacked on, even though no such physical page existed.
I guess my main question is, what could be causing the strange drop in Serps?
Basically, for phrase "A B" I've dropped about 10 spots. But for phrases "A B C," I haven't moved at all. It looks to me like there is an over-optimization penalty for keywords "A B" but the phrase for "A B C" avoided the penalty. Thoughts?
DIAGNOSIS:3. Google penalized my site for duplicate content. This seems unlikely since fixing robots.txt and using the removal tool got us back in the index.
Don't you mean "likely", not "unlikely"? It may not be the only penalty, but if your pages got back in the index immediately following the de-duping, it seems consistent with a dup content penalty.
Don't you mean "likely", not "unlikely"? It may not be the only penalty, but if your pages got back in the index immediately following the de-duping, it seems consistent with a dup content penalty.
Calvin, what I meant was this:
Assuming that I have remedied the initial Dupe Content Issues, it is unlikely a second penalty has been applied.
Google has penalties that start expiring after the dupe has been removed. Example: if it's one month, you will be back on SERPS, one month after you removed the dupe. It's not automatic
You are fortunate that you still have some good rankings in Google. My Google traffic has dropped to almost nothing.
