Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm white hat, and about 6 mos ago added a google sitemap to the site. All's fine.
Suddenly, about 2 weeks ago, my site looses its position completely. I think maybe its a glitch, and will soon be back. Nope.
I just checked google sitemaps, and it says my site needs to be verified (I know for a fact it was already) and the sitemap hasn't been checked since mid Oct.
Coincidence?
I'll be more diligent for now on on checking the google sitemap page.
This is how I imagine sitemap XML works:
1. Google has a list of urls it already crawled that belongs to your domain stored in a database.
2. Your Sitemap XML contains your list of urls.
3. Google uploads your Sitemap XML and compares your list against its own list to look for any discrepancies. This is a straight array to array comparison. Find anything in array_a() not in array_b().
4. Any new urls are added to Google's database of urls to be crawled later.
That's it. It's a very straight-forward, non-evasive process. What do you see in that process that might possibly effect either indexing or ranking?
6 months later and your rankings tank? That's not coincidence, that is "why the hell would you even think to connect those two events?"
If you only have one account under your account, I'm not sure what your problem might be, but there does not seem to be any negative impact of using sitemaps with only one site under each Google account.
Did you have more than one site listed under your Google webmaster account that had links to the page you are talking about? If yes, it might not have been coincidence.
Are you suggesting here that if someone has 6 sites all in a general/similar field and all listed under one sitemap account; and those sites have NO duplicate content (repeat: NONE), however since they appeal to a similar body of websurfers, the webmaster has linked them all together -- that we have signaled to Google our common ownership and therefore they've come up with yet one more way to penalize us?
Tell me it ain't so.
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It may well be so, you're breaking two guidelines, one on having multiple sites with similar content, the other on "link schemes designed to.."
All 6 of them have their own domain names and are added to the sitemap.xml account for the webmaster that created the sites, so he/she can manage it more efficiently.
How can Google hold this against anyone? If in fact it's come to that with them, then it's one more example where their current obsession with penalties is blinding their original vision to deliver relevant rankings based on quality content.
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...but how can Google tell the difference between webmaster A that manages 6 independent sites for 6 different people and webmaster B that creates 6 independent sites for cross link value...
As I said in another post, they have adopted the war strategy of destroying the village to save the village, which is to say, hurt a lot of people to capture a few bad guys. They have to get off this penalty/punishment kick they are on and get back to delivering the most relevant results to satisfy a query. So what if the page which has the very most relevant content just happens to be run by a webmaster that is cross linking to his/her own sites? If the content is truly relevant, then the person making the query will be satisfied.
Isn't that the point?
Google has taken its eye off the ball, and in my opinion, it is a poorer service as a result of that distraction.
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then it's one more example where their current obsession with penalties is blinding their original vision to deliver relevant rankings based on quality content.
There is a grat risk in reading too many webmaster boards - you start to think that Google is your enemy, and that google views you as an enemy.
Webmaster boards are full of people complaining about penalties, sometimes founded, usually not, as well as people speculating or worrying about possible penalties.
The simple truth is that there aren't many penalties out there. The vast majority of people claiming they were "penalized" just had a ranking shift when the algo changed, or they lost a couple of major links.
Google spends most of their time ranking pages on websites. Unless you are doing something risky, you are best served by forgetting about penalties and going back to work on your site.
I have 4 sites in the same field. Three in my name, one in someone else's that I webmaster. One is a community review site, one is a personal review and article site. The third one is a community forum and article site. The last one is specific to the activity in this part of the country.
Google knows about all of them, and that they are related. They are interlinked at an acceptable level. I only have sitemaps on three of them, but the other one is still obviously related. No problems with any of them yet.
...you start to think that Google is your enemy, and that google views you as an enemy
Their willingness to punish a site due to some violation which they refuse to identify is nothing short of devastating when it hits. Small businesses are being injured and people's livelihoods impacted, and Google appears to be totally unconcerned. This entire discussion would end if they simply gave siteowners a reasonable "fair warning" -- their refusal to do so speaks volumes.
I'm glad you are doing well, but the fact is they are hurting other people, and if their lack of response to this situation is any indication, they apparently do not care about that at this point.
Maybe that will change someday -- if so, the web will be a better place.
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My comments about Google being the enemy are not directed to any specific penalties, at least they are applied reasonably across the board. My general issues with Google are:
1. They store too much information on users and website. We will see this become a larger issue in the future. Plus, the recent interviews from the CIA guy (some regional director, sorry that I forgot his name) shows that Google has been talking privacy but doing something different.
2. They are too big. Any time a primary channel of media/internet/news/search that controls the majority of the channel, it gives them too much power. Plus, small changes by them (or slants one way or the other) have much larger impacts.
3. Google has changed from "we can make some money if we do no evil" to "we can make a whole lot more money by doing just a little evil". :) Financial analysts have already started to question whether Google has lowered the quality of natural search to try and incent people to click on paid search results. On an analyst call, all Google would do is point out that it would not be illegal.
4. Their Adwords terms are not implemented fairly or as written. There have been too many cases where a reviewer rejects ads/sites/companies from Adwords because they have a personal problem with the ad/site/company and then reference a term that does not cover the denial. There is no appeal for this and Google customer service simply says something along the lines of sorry it's not like you can go somewhere else.
Just to be clear, I don't think they are "trying" to punish any particular website, however as this forum makes clear, websites are being punished -- whatever the reason.
"Punished" being defined not as a shift in the rankings, but rather as a disappearance from the rankings -- with no understanding as to why that happened, and little or no recourse to make things right again.
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1. I agree that Google keeps too much user information for my taste. I hide anything that I don't want them keeping, but not everyone is able to do that. From an SEO perspective, they should be trying to find out everything possible about potential relationships between sites, and take that into consideration when evaluating links.
Do a little looking into "that CIA guy" and the radio show that posted the story. It was on the Alex Jones radio show. The guy is a conspiracy nut. If it isn't a conspiracy, he doesn't believe it. Seriously, go to his shows website and check out some of his thoughts on 9/11.
The "agent" (not a director) was a clandestine services case worker. He was commenting on stuff that he would have no direct knowledge of. And where would he be now if he was outing accurate information on a major information source like Google, or openly discussing classified information about 9/11? That is big time illegal unless you are the president.
You might also notice that even he claims that it isn't direct knowledge, but he checked with his "contacts".
The guy is either nuts, or attempting to make a name for himself with the wackos to make some bucks. I wouldn't even bet on him really having worked for the CIA
2. Instead of "too big" I would say that they have too much market share. But I can't blame Google for that, I blame altavista, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, ATW, etc. Google was the only on that was making the right choices while the rest were selling their SERPs and flooding you with ads.
3. That is the sort of answer that you would give on an analyst call. As far as financial analyst speculation goes, that is usually about 1/10 as good as the average webmaster speculation, which is wrong the vast majority of the time.
Hurting the natural SERPs will hurt the bottom line in the long run. Bad SERPs happen and the speculation that google is harming them intentionally to make money of AdWords has been around since the first update after AdWords started. The problem is that there are two camps on this and they are directly opposed ot each other in their claims.
Believe it if you want. The fact is that most people are happy with their search results.
4. No company is fair about things like that. They don't have to be and they shouldn't be. They do not have to show any ads that they don't want to, even if it is technically within their rules.
