Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
First thing I want to clarify is what this pheomenon looks like: your domain used to rank well for a number of searches, and now all those searchs show you at position #31, top of page 4. The very best test to discover if you are infected is this: do a search on your domain name itself - type example.com into the Google search box, a search where you naturally expect to be #1. If you have this particular penalty against you, then even that search will show you at position #31.
No other types of suspected penalties are relevant to this thread. If you are not showing #31 for a search on your domain name, then this discussion does not apply to your site.
This position #31 penalty is not at all widespread. I brought up the topic all over at Las Vegas PubCon this past week -- and I barely found anyone, even in this seriously hooked-up crowd, who had a clue what I was talking about. And for the few who did, it was because they read this thread, not because they're bumping into it on their sites or with their clients.
Adam commented a bit on google groups but said he would not comment more because of google secrets.
This seems to be the official comment from Google: no comment. Even with 25 Google employees in attendance at PubCon, no further comments could be heard. As I said, the crowd here had no attention for the topic either.
Although some who suffer this experience appear to be mystified, I sense that the majority have quite a good sense of what's happening - what past marketing approaches may have brought down wrath from Mountain View. It clearly IS associated with practices that were aimed directly at manipulating the Google SERPs, rather than honest marketing practices. Maybe the site owner doesn't know what someone else in the company did in their name, and maybe they're just dissembling.
It seems to me the position #31 penalty is a warning shot -- and a very unusual one at that, quite loud and low across the bow. I believe it will not be a long term feature of the way Google functions. I do not have any sense that new sites will be contracting Google Flu #31 in an ongoing fashion. One morning, not too far from now, we will wake up and not see this.
Until that morning, I think patience and good hygiene in online marketing are the way to go. Scour the Google Webmaster Guidelines, and demand full disclosure from all staff and third parties involved in online marketing/SEO.
[edited by: tedster at 3:49 pm (utc) on April 5, 2007]
i'm back at 31.... on all data cenres too.
I personally don't think that it means anything.. even though I wouldn't complain if it was some "fix" in the works.
Time will tell..
Personally, I am at the end of the rope: I deleted 1/3 of the pages and if this doesn't do it automatically, I will resubmit once and then move to another domain. I will still leave this active, just block google. I can't update for ever without any rewards.
In many case this issue will be OBL related and Matt Cutts says:
Several times during the session, it was readily apparent that someone had tried to do reciprocal links as a “quick hit” to increase their link popularity. When I saw that in the backlinks, I tried to communicate that 1) it was immediately obvious to me, and therefore our algorithms can do a pretty good job of spotting excessive reciprocal links, and 2) in the instances that I looked at, the reciprocal links weren’t doing any good. I urged folks to spend more time looking for ways to make a compelling site that attract viral buzz or word of mouth. Compelling sites that are well-marketed attract editorially chosen links, which tend to help a site more.
Which isn't to say that reciprocal linking must be overdone and it seems clear that SEs will allow a degree of reciprocal linking.
If the answer to all of those questions is yes, then it's wise to doublecheck, then be patient / continue to develop your site. And optionally file a reinclusion request, if you've fixed issues associated with previous guideline violations."
[groups.google.com...]
Also it seems that being a thin affiliate /one of the 1000's of similar sites /not useful according to G is the main criteria. I think he threw the "Am I abiding by all of Google's Webmaster Guidelines?" as the catch-all but the first two seem to do it. If this was manual then we'd need to definitely file a re-inclusion request; Adam says we shoudl do so to speed up the recovery if we want to, but Googlebot will eventually get it.
Point is.. with this type of penalty.. (and it doesn't matter if one day we are -28 or -50 something, we should be #1 on our domain) we should be getting some kind of word from google. If they would think that we are doing something intentionally, then they would ban us. But they don't.. just cut off our limbs..
[edited by: AustrianOak at 2:42 am (utc) on Nov. 24, 2006]
They do not want to give a reason, because they suspect that you might be an accomplished webmaster and will deal with their response appropriately to get your site back to #1.
But there is obviously a hidden agenda, and they are covering this with hogwash comments like 'we are protecting our processes'.
How many people here have cleaned up their sites time and time again, till they are better from a Google Webmaster point-of-view than all the dross above them in positions #1 to #30?
In all these forums , no-one has got out of this penalty. Follow Walkman's + others advice and start afresh, cos your head aint never gonna knock that wall down.
Hopefully this will stick, the christmas period in now fast approaching and is usually the most profitable time of year for us.
thanks,
I put the ‘NOINDEX’ tags on around 3 weeks ago, as well as on my robots.txt file, and my rankings returned around the 20th. I put them on all the pages that I knew had too much affiliate content, so basically it’s a case of duplicate content. I’m now in the process of gradually rewriting all these pages and putting them back in the index 1 by 1.
The funny thing is, I did a lot of cleaning up on the site (tidying up the code, meta tags, navigation etc…) and now the pages that are still in the index rank slightly higher, so im pleased.
I will "noindex" another few hundred pages just to be sure and then add them back one by one. This gives me hope. I also added two more features and even some very "thin" pages are no longer supplementals but I am not taking any chances.
Yes all the results were filtered so that they were buried very deep in the index, it started on June 27th like many people I think.
In a funny way, I am glad this has happened because page by page, my site has improved 10 fold and I am now doing well in MSN where previously I didn’t rank at all!
I guess this filter is applied for many reasons though, the problem on my site was staring me in the face.
You gonna change your handle now? ;-)
It is not the same problem for me. I completely removed any non-relevant and thin-affiliate pages (though I didn't have that many) from the site.
imo and with respect you may possibly not have had this particular penalty. The 1st massively obvious factor anyone notices with this penalty is not that their pages are buried deep, but that ALL THEIR FORMER TOP POSITIONS WERE NOW EXACTLY AT #31 (though this has very recently - last weeek or so - been muddied to #31 - #50).
I have seen other penalties like yours bounce back after such an adjustment, but not a -31 penalty.
Walkman - Good luck with doing that. The way I looked at it, my Google traffic was next to nothing anyway so there really wasn't any harm in trying this approach.
Breaking news: AustrianOak, if your site is about cartridges and has country in its url its now no1 in google when you do a URL search.
my site was one of the early ones to get hit, the infamous April 26th hit. One thing I am noticing is that my Google cached pages are either showing recent dates such as November and then a small percentage are showing dates prior to the April 26th hit - such as March and May.
One thing to note is that these pages have been updated many times since those cached dates, however they don't seem to be updated in cache by Google.
Is this perhaps some clue that these pages are linked to the penalty? Like I said before, I have changed/updated these sites as was relevant in the past 6.7.8 months time.
Why would google not use the latest cache/crawl dates as it does on 90% of the rest of my site/content?
Might be something.. anyone else experiencing anything similar?
According to one SEO "expert" I read, Google may penalize for
navigation menus that show on every page. This, to me is absolutely
absurd. If you have main sections on your site, why wouldn't you have
this main navigation menu throughout your site?! As far as I know, as
long as there has been INTERNET and WEB-SITES on the INTERNET this has
been true! Honestly, I personally think that these SEO "experts" don't
have a clue.
Further, I personally believe that some "engineer" at Google tweaked
something over the summer and messed their whole "algo" up (further)
and to look all intelligent and save face, they are coming up with
these lame-brain excuses for why people's sites are in the supplemental
index.
By the way, you should read about how AllTheWeb (which is owned by
Yahoo) outperformed Google this summer with 3.1 Billion pages indexed.
Google quietly bumped up their figures to 3.3 Billion pages indexed
within a few weeks and then all of a sudden this Supplemental index
appeared.
Navigation, I did look at this last week, as I suddenly noticed a very big Cheese in our market wasn't in the usual top 10 it normally is. Their URL hasn't gone to -31, but they have dropped significantly and there are a couple of things they did to their site a few months back that may have resulted in this.
1) They added navigation to the bottom of their pages as well as having the usual down the left hand side navigation
2) They added, what may be considered doorway pages.
They have a shopping cart system that doesn't lend itself well to search engines. So, and although they may be considered doorway I actually thought it enriched the site as well as it added more information, this may have caused their drop as well.
I have one page of similar sites. 1 of the results is mine. about 1/3 are 'uk' endings. None of them have been attacked with the 31 penalty.
I refuse to believe that there is anything spammy about that site - are we dealing with another bugdate?
Martin, do a search for your domain i.e www.whateveryoursiteiscalled.com and your friends.
What do you see? Are the domains coming up anything less than first place on the results?
If so then you have the same penalty we're banging in about.
We are talking about the googlebar function of "similar pages" correct?
Are you saying that sites that are affected by this penalty, when they search their "similar pages" all the sites come back with this penalty?
I have also noticed, while punching in random sites that when I click on "similar pages" for them, they always come up #1 on teh list.
So once again, my situation.. I come up dead last and none of the other sites have the 31 penalty.
My questions is - why would one think that example.com should come up first search: "example.com" - what if there are more "relevant" websites for that search?
I believe it was in May 06 when Matt Cutts said that they have changed the search - and now when one types the domain name - instead of matching it to the list of domains, google will actually do the "string search" and would search - as though it was a simple word search (appearently to catch the misspelled domain names)
this is different: there's NO way that 30 directories or sites are more relevant that "domain.com" with 500+ unique backlinks to it.
or it maybe that example.com is "overoptimized" for the keyword "example.com" - this way all we are seeing the "regular" "over-opimization" "penalty"...
I sure if New York Times were to do an article about my site - and would include the domain name in the title and all over the article - that article would come up higher on Google for my domain name than my actual domain name - because in Google's eyes this article is way more "relevant"...
