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]
But let me emphasize again, this is not theory. It's kind of like Google is saying "You want to manipulate our SERPs? Here's how we manipulate our SERPs." The symptoms of this special but rare "message" from Google are that EVERY previously higher ranking, including the domain name search itself, now return at #31, at the top of page four.
If this does not sound exactly, and I mean exactly, like something you see on your domain, then you don't need to have any concern about it. It's not likely to be a regular part of how Google operates. But for those rare sites who do suffer from it, there is a kind of coded message here. Just as walkman said above, "I know the problem. I 'knew' when Adam from G posted but this confirms it."
Clearly we are not going to get into specific details - our Charter [webmasterworld.com] prohibits it. So for most webmasters, this discussion may need to stay just a bit mysterious. But it is not just a theory.
But here is something different. My home page shows up good. It is number one for several very competitive terms as well as showing up for majar city name plus my key words. But all the city and state pages more in position 31.
Anyone else see this?
Also, if I have a page for every city and state is that a problem, in itself? Should maybe I delete most of the cities and just leave the major cities and all the state pages. The state page do have a search box with a drop down box of all the cities in the state that is indexed.
My competition goups togeather cities in an area on one page. Is that better?
Today I'm ranking better than 31 for the first time - at 28 it's not much better considering I'd been top 3 for previous 3 or 4 years, but at least it's a change in the right direction.
Now it could be temporary, but it's the first real hope I've had of the penalty being lifted.
Anyone else seen this?
It sometimes floats around from 28 to 41.
When I "Do a search for your domain, ie www.whateveryourdomainiscalled.com" as you suggested, I am number one with a breakout of 4 of my largest state pages right below my home page.
But when I search for "state key word" my home page is number 4 but my state page is Minus Thirty Plus. So my home page is doing fine but all others are Minus Thirty Plus, many of which are exactly in postion 31.
So it sounds like I have a little different version of this filter or whatever it is. My pages are all the same exact the city and state name, maybe that is the problem. How can I make my pages each different? They are generated pages. Would showing the top 10 listing from my database on each page be enough to be "different".
I've seen what you describe when there's keyword overuse according to Google's measures - especially in anchor text. But that's a keyword-specific, search-term-specific thing. The particular situation this thread is discussing is really across the board -- #31 for any and all search results that previously were first page.
This "condition" does seem to be breaking up a bit. The bellweather domain I've been watching is now on the move -- down below #31 after months at exactly #31 on every search they used to rank well for. Since I'm pretty sure they have no intentions of changing anything, I expect this domain to totally disappear from the index at some point.
I have made many changes, but gog has yet to see them. I rather not wait though and make even more; anything is better than no traffic.
thanks,
Go back through the thread, Gimp has - at least a search for his domain is not at 31 anymore, it now ranks no1 in a search.
I'm really hopefull, optimistic that we will recover, once we have cleaned up our mess.
I cannot remove the liks because they are created by a 3rd party control. However I have blocked all dynamic links in robots.txt for googlebot.
I verified that no other site is having links to those dynamic pages except my site. So assuming that will google remove all the pages in "sup index"? And remove the penalty?
Walkman,
How long after you removed the sup pages, did ur rankings come back. and how long did it take for the sup pages to be removed from the index? what method did u use?
Anyone else has experience with a similar situation?
Please let me know.
Thanks
Leo
When I wrote them a year or so ago, the people who answered were probably unaware of the filters existence, as at the time I was explicitly told that the domain at issue had no penalty.
Per your comment on 11/19/06:
Everything was fine until they put up a mirror development site in November 2005 causing duplicate content. But that has been gone 10 months +.
I don't understand how the Google robots would have ever found the mirror site unless you placed a link to it from a live page? Am I missing something about how their robots work?
I'm asking because we had a similar situation and are going through a Minus 30 penalty (as proven by a domain search being found around #31 and sometimes lower), starting on Nov. 3rd. It's had devastating effects on our traffic and income.
I can't find any other possible causes for our penalty. I'm in the same boat as others who have expressed frustration at not knowing how to proceed. We have not knowingly used any blackhat SEO technique and have not hired any SEO outsiders.
Our mirror site (for new site development purposes) was at a different domain (xxtest.otherdomain.com). Now it is at xxtest.samedomain.com. I hope that would be enough to relieve any concerns from Google. Anyone concerned about this set-up?
Thanks so much to everyone for posting and keeping this discussion going. I've been reading the forums like crazy for a couple weeks.
how the Google robots would have ever found the mirror site unless you placed a link to it from a live page?
Googlebot gets urls from many places - apparently even from URLs entered into the toolbar. If you do not want to see urls indexed, you really do need to explicitly deny them to Google -- through robots.txt, the meta robots tag, or password protection.
I'm struggling with this right now for a client who is developing content for a new domain but they put the working draft live in a "secret" directory on a different, well established domain.
Now, exactly how Google found that content, with no inbound links that we know of, isn't the real challenge - in fact it's pretty much irrelevant. The fact is that the URLs were found and indexed - and pretty darned fast, too. So it's damage control time now. If this organization wants their new domain to rank, then we need to use Google's URL removal tool [services.google.com] and get that potentially duplicate content out of the index first.
Tedster is right on! I have no idea how Google found the development site but they found it about as quickly as the programmers put the site up. There was no linking whatsoever from a live page.
So, follow all three of Tedster's suggestions: robots.txt exclusion, noindex, nofollow, and password protect it for all development sites. Then, and hopefully, Google won't find it.
And its very easy to accidentally have a link to the domain somewhere.
I invariably do a check at marketleap and find a link to the devel site.
I would really like to preserve this spot for discsussion of this exact, rare penalty situation. Yes, fix all kinds of technical errors, but I don't think they are the root cause of "#1 yesterday and #31 today".
Your comment causes me a great deal of concern.
Our -30 seems to have been due to purely technical issues.
Severe duplicate content, unrelated links, some links (<.5% of pages.)to "pills porn and poker." We also had some links out to "bad company"
The -30 was lifted before we removed the "bad company" and "pills, porn and poker." So it may not have been involved but it is out and stays out.
We do no promotion other than publishing our news.
We do not exchange links.
We get good links because of our news and commentary.
We hardly ever post in blogs and when we do, it is to engaged in discussion on a news item.
If you say these things were not what subjected me to the -30, then I am concerned about what did. That is key because it may come back in the future if I do not fix it.
Specifically whatt do you think causes - 30.
How did you get unrelated links, links to pills and porn without exchanging links?
They were put into the siteby my people.
[edited by: tedster at 1:31 am (utc) on Nov. 29, 2006]
They were put into the site by my people.
I'm surprised to hear that you saw movement above #31 with such links still in place.
That is the kind of "bad company" situation that I thought this penalty was aimed at. Not just any old "p-p-c" links, either, but involvement with a certain select group of aggressive marketers. There would be cases where the site owner could have been in the dark -- and those who were paid to work the site may have taken certain actions that the owner didn't know about. But there would be more cases where the site owner did know what was going on.
I don't know 100% that I am correct on this. I'm reading between the lines a bit, and there is certaily a chance I could be wrong, though I would be surprised if it turns out that way. But it looks to me like a large and loosely woven promotional network (or two or three) got hit with a warning shot from Google. My conjecture? Only the core organizers got the worst of it, and the rest of the domains involved, the ones that went along for a ride, got the position #31 situation.
It's still excellent for any site to fix all their duplicate issues and so on -- but there are many, many domains with exactly that kind of trouble and their rankings were not all set to position #31.
There are other kind of penalty situations where certain rankings go down by 10, 20, 30 (and I've even heard 50.) Those situations do not affect the domain name search, in my experience, but are tied to certain keywords.
Now maybe, Gimp, you do have a domain that proves my theory wrong, as I said above, I am reading between the lines a bit and maybe I am being a bit too creative. My long-time rule has been to value what works, above all. You took some very good steps.
[edited by: tedster at 6:28 pm (utc) on Nov. 28, 2006]
I am lucky to have had a member of this board look at my site and tell me in polite words that it was junk.
I am following his advice right down the line in the process of fixing it.
Your comments are extremely important also because I do not want to miss a thing due to more negligence and stupidity on my part.
Please understand that I made my post also to try to give you smart guys something to chew on. Maybe the data will help. And that may help me with more feedback.
dangerman,
I was just looking to see if anyone has seen a patern:
1. Site has 100 pages
2. 75 are OK
3. 25 are supplementals
when deleting the 25 supps rankings came back.
Hi Walkman
That is a fair question, and it would be interesting to hear whether those people who had any Google penalty recovered after taking this step, in the hope that it might be applicable to -31. I still have a number of supplementals for pages that I really don't want to be associated with my site going back nearly a year. They are proving quite hard to get rid of, and is the last remaining site issue, but perhaps the effort might be worth it.
But I have found in our sector one particular site, which a year ago seemed like a good resource and in fact I can't quite believe the results I've found.
First it has gone to PR 0.
Second I can't find its URL in the first 12 pages of google results.
Third, it went from about a couple of hundred links to 14, 000 odd, most of which are complete rubbish and not on topic.
We linked to it in various places.
Also, we had exchanged links with sites that were similar to ours and with others that stretched the "similairty" a bit!
This is now being resolved, in amoungst them I found 15 sites that come up at -31+ for their URL.
Yes we have been foolish and should have vetted sites on a monthly basis, as you don't know who they are getting links from as time goes by.
We should have done better here and were supposed to have sorted it out earlier in the year.
Anyway, with all of the changes we have made, are making the site looks a heck of a lot better to me - so in one sense I'm quite pleased - its doing better in MSN and Yahoo!
We are all playing chess, and the pone is Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask! So why the heck do you want to discuss the strategy in an online forum?
I want to beat them.....I look for a solution, I don't need a feel to share with them, as that will not be productive!
They know their algo's.......So how do we win here?
