Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I now have another page (a good performer, well ranked) showing up in the Penalty Box also. Of course now that it's in the "Penalty Box" it no longer shows up in it's highly ranked position in the SERPS.
I have had other pages cycle in and out of the penalty box, as I know others have reported this scenario as well. These pages are now back in their normal positions in the SERPs, doing very well.
There are no black hat tricks involved in these pages, just substantial unique content on very specific topics, served at high speed using GZIP compression. There may be one or two affiliate links on these pages. The pages are highly valued by visitors as indicated by unsolicited emails (they even appreciate the affiliate links!).
I'm looking for insites as to the cause, and, typical durations in the penalty box that others have seen.
Have you found any specific steps to take to exit the penalty box?
Thoughts are:
1. That these pages are almost too highly optimized so whenever they are updated they temporarily visit the penalty box.
2. This is just a normal Google transient for highly ranked pages. Perhaps Google is rotating highly ranked pages in and out of the top results periodically?
3. My long lived example page in the penalty box may just be too highly optimized, or there are too many concurrent keywords in the page file name, title, description, etc.
Then the ultimate question is how to "tweak" the page so that it does not lose its high ranking (once it exits the penalty box).
A sample Google "site:www.example.com" search result will have this organization:
1. Normally Indexed pages first
2. Supplementally Indexed pages
3. More Normally Indexed pages following Supplementals
Group 3 will do very poorly when you search for pertinent keywords. As soon as a page in Group 3 moves back to Group 1. it will rank reasonably well for it's keywords.
The question is how to get pages out of Group 3 as per the original post?
I hope this is clearer?
If i do a search for content that's unique to such a page of ours, it's displayed as a normal result. Meaning not supplemental. If i do a site: search on the directory it's in, it's shown as a normal result. If i do a site: search for the entire domain though... it still shows the supplemental tag.
And the opposite was the same, for some pages that the site: operator was showing as normal, we got supplemental result tags in any and every query other than the site: operator one.
What i see is that a simple search for some unique content will show you how the page is doing NOW, and the site: operator result is somewhat delayed. Meaning those pages at the end of the list may very well be treaded as supplemental, only not showing the tag.
Yet.
I can't think of anything else than such results being relatively fresh, meaning the data on whether it's supplemental or not, is not clearly defined throughout the system. Could be a matter of datacenters or... and i think this is more likely... the supplemental index data being crawled/evaluated and shown/displayed from different servers/datacenters in general. So all in all, even if it's already normal on one side of the results, it may be showing as supplemental on the other ( but just have the tag, otherwise act as normal page ), and vica versa, even if it does not SHOW the supplemental tag YET, it already is treated so.
Like PR is not live data either.
And again my trademark, that this is what we see, and...
We could be wrong :)
The variety of reasons pages get penalized may be near bottomless. Many of these pages get de-penalized by a data refresh like a few days ago, but can get penalized again. In all these cases I've ever seen it has been an example of a clear stupid mistake on the part of Google. Pages with keyword in URL on authority sites that link to questionable sites (nfollow doesn't help) seems to be a very common example. (Also the penalties seem to be folder wide, that is, if example.com/dir1/ gets penalized, then example.com/dir1/page1/ and example.com/dir1/page2/ also get penalized.)
Interesting I had recently modified my own internal linking. While there is a clear link hierarchy, I had put some redundant links in an IFrame whose source page I had marked noindex, nofollow.
AND today a new page popped into the penalty box, SO, there really is no reason for the nofollow other than eliminating redundant multiple paths, so I've immediately pulled the "nofollows", on my redundant internal links.
I've learned never to deny Google anything it wants whether it needs it or not. (I do still use "noindex" on IFramed content). Google used to index this stuff, but has gotten better about not indexing pages that are there simply for support versus end user viewing. I know there are other ways to do this, but I do like the complete asynchronicity of IFramed content. The primary page content is there immediately and the IFramed content trickles in after the primary content.
Are there any other posts that you know of that actually talk about links at the end of the "site:www.example.com" SERPS?
I've seen occaisional comments, but not a thorough review. Searching is difficult because there are so many posts purely about Supplementals!
1. EMPTY DANCE CARD
If you have a Webmaster Tools account, you can see that Google is recording what amounts to "impressions" -- what search terms are returning your URLs, whether they are clicked on or not. So what about a URL that never gets tapped for any SERP over some period of time - its dance card is empty. Could this be a factor?
2. FRENCH FRY PAGES
Many e-commerce sites have what I recently decided to call "french fry pages" -- these are URLs that give added details for up-sell questions that are something like the famous "would like fries with that?" Such pages talk about things like batteries, accessories, service contracts and so on. Very, very unlikely to be something Google wants to serve up as a primary search result in many cases.
I can see that both these kinds of pages can be a kind of backwater of the site, with little thought give to on-page factors, minimal inbound links even from within the site, and vague anchor text for whatever links do exist.
This thinking is only a working draft, but I thought it might be good to throw the ideas out to others.
Basically the topic is difficult to find detailed information on and if the visitor wishes to follow up, the materials required are somewhat hard to find as well. So I don't think two of the three pages now in the "penalty box" are Empty Dance Cards.
The third page has been in the Penalty box for so long I can't remember how well it ranked or how much traffic it received, it could be it ranked well, but did not get much traffic.
I would say that I probably have other pages that meet the French Fry and Dance Card criteria, while they rank poorly, the important factor is their "site:www.example.com" results are still BEFORE the supplementals.
That's the important distinction that I've heard a few webmasters mention here in other threads but I've never felt there was much of a consensus on this "penalty box" positioning of being properly indexed but located AFTER the supplementals.
Steveb seems to feel it's well established and I tend to concur. I've had pages that rank well visit the penalty box numerous times in the past and they disappear (fall far down) in the SERPS, but then a month later, their out of the penalty box, highly ranked, and producing clicks.
Regarding the webmaster tools, I have other pages that have much more traffic so they push the pages in question far out of fairly short tables Google provides.
Maybe there's just a percentage cap on how many "page one" results pages you can have on a given site. I am fortunate to have a good number of pages ranking highly for two and three word terms, could there be a site wide % limit? Exceed it an pages go into the penalty box for a while.
In this most recent occurance perhaps I was shafting myself by adding a "nofollow" on some of my redundant internal links to these and other pages. I was trying to push some pages down to the French Fry level (level 3 and 4), but still link to them from the home page. Pages like Terms & Conditions, Privacy, etc. There were, however, always absolute links to the pages in question, placing them at level 2.
Again the thoughts are much appreciated!
Main page links to level 1 pages, level 1 pages are interlinked.
Level 1 pages link to several level 2 pages, level two pages are interlinked within their own category/folder whatever, AND feature the nav links for the home page and level 1 pages. But they are not linked from the home page in any other way than... let's say a "highlight of the week" kinda way.
And they don't have the nav links for ALL level 2 pages, just the ones in the same category.
Level 2 pages then may link to level 3 pages, with the same kind of navs, have links to home, level 1, same-category level 2, and all same-level and same-sub-category level 3 pages. Unless you have categories or sub-categories with thousands of pages :P
And so on.
You know you could do the hierarchy in a clear to understand way, and i know why most of us don't do it. Not because we're dumb, but because at some point we had to do fixes, additions to the site, and the navigation became inconsistent, and it would be a pain to correct it.
But it seems that it just has to be corrected unless you want to communicate the wrong message to the bots about which pages you think are important and which pages you wouldn't mind becoming supplemental, or be dropped altogtether.
I just don't believe you can do a proper page hierarchy with tags like nofollow. Okay, that link won't count but in the database it's gonna be a patchwork instead of a pattern.
