google un-natural growth flag

Has anyone else seen a dampening effect after un-natural site growth.

[seoheadche]

At around the start of the sept, we added a new product range to our database.

We use a URL-rewriting to deliver friendly page names instead of querystring heavy version.

The new product range of around 2000 items has generated approx 6000 additional pages,(minimal duplicate content). In our infinite wisdom we set this live overnight and this was picked up in our google sitemap (dynamically generated) immediately.

Within a week or so, our traffic has halved, however we cannot really discern where we have lost placings as we still seem to be around still maintaining front page and top spot positions. (do less people search in September? it almost seems like this kicked in on the 1st of the month)

It seems like google has applied some sort of dampening filter to us but we cannot see where?

We pride our site on being best practice so would hate to think we have been penalised out of hand.

We have also noticed a bloated page index, up to 4 times larger than we actually have including old pages and pages blocked by the robots.txt.

Has anyway else been hit by an un-natural growth flag, if so how long did it last and did you regain traffic afterwards?

Am I clutching at straws and my competitors are simply kick my ass?

Is anyone listening? does anyone care?

I know you all care about a strangers woes really?

thanks

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums.

we cannot really discern where we have lost placings

Have you analyzed your server logs? I would strongly encourage this to pinpoint what traffic sources have dried up for you. Otherwise you may just spin your wheels -- or worse, make a new problem where there was none.

page index, up to 4 times larger than we actually have

Lots of recent reports on that. Seems like a G problem, and not a webmastering problem.

[stinkfoot]

Log anals are the way forward to try to get an answer butt they are not going to tell you everything. google in all its wonder is for a large proportion of the white hat black hat grey hat red community broken.

there is only one way back at them and that is use msn and ask all your friends to do likewise /wink