Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The site has been running for around seven years and has thousands of pages. It is updated about twice each week and sometimes more often. One thing I have always noticed is that it has always taken around three months to get a page rank indication in the Google toolbar. My last page to get a good search position does not have a page rank indication in the bar, so I don't think this is an issue in itself.
My site is a review site so the new pages have the same format as older pages. No big changes.
One area where I started to worry was that I also answered questions people posted. Because my answers were often fairly brief and on a similar topic a lot of the answers ended up as supplemental pages. I was wondering if this has dragged the site down. This service ran for over a year until I stopped it in September.
Other than that I cannot think of anything I am doing that is different and I cannot understand what might be causing only the new pages to perform badly and not all pages.
I consider the site to be white hat and have not done anything on purpose to over optimize etc.
Thank you for any help you can give me.
In addition to the factors you mentioned, Google has recently begun to tag urls as supplemental if they do not have strong PR. So it's worth examining your site's internal linking to be sure that you are "circulating" Page Rank in a healthy fashion. A few deep links from other domains might also help the situation.
A lot of the pages that are suffering do have links directly to them from other sites. I must admit I am not sure how to improve my internal linking. At the moment I think the linking methods I use suit my visitors and I hope make the site easy to use.
My problem is still ongoing and this week I have noticed the following:
Last Friday posted new page. Checked on Monday page in position 5 on 1st page of Google.co.uk. In fact just two sites above it. Tuesday disappeared completely (put this down to Google data centers). Wednesday back in position 5. Checked again on Friday now around position 80.
To me this looks like Google has re rated the page. So initially it liked it, now it doesn't. Is this normal? Can anyone suggest any reasons why a page may well rank well for a few days and then drop dramatically?
Thank you
...reasons why a page may well rank well for a few days and then drop dramatically?
This pattern describes what was a common experience when the "Sandbox phenomenon" first started showing up. Several Google reps have described what we informally call "the Sandbox" as the final effect of several different filters.
The phenomenon itself, as we see it on our end, has changed in several ways -- for example, many people now report getting past these filters in a shorter amount of time. But those filters are still there, even though they have been tweaked this way and that. I suspect it is also those filters that are playing with your new pages.
If you have not studied the "sandbox" issue closely -- to me it's more of a set of trust filters that were added to the Google algorithm as a spam defense -- here's a recent thread from Oct 2006 that make a good starting place:
[webmasterworld.com...]
I certainly agree that it looks like I have lost Google's trust. The site has been online since 1999 and this is the first time I can recall hitting any sort of problem.
There are lots of pages on other websites covering similar subjects to mine that are doing fine and were written after my pages. Therefore I am sure it is related to problems within my site that have set off the filters.
I have taken a long look at the Sandbox thread, but apart from more than 100 links on pages nothing jumps out as a possibility. I have already tried taking the links off, but it makes the site a lot harder to navigate.
At the end of last week I filed a request for reinclusion, but I am not hopeful. In fact I must admit to feeling utterly helpless right now.
I have always been aware of being over reliant on Google for traffic, so this is my own fault for not really taking that risk on board. My excuse of being too busy writing content is no excuse now. At least this is giving me a sharp prod in a painful place to try and come up with a much better balanced plan for attracting traffic in.
Thank you for your suggestion.
Sorry, but what do you mean by AS?
I have not added a site map, becuase I was wary that it might cause a problem.
Andy
No the pages are free from Adsense.
One thing I did add was an advert for a shop I use on a regular basis. The advert was in the form of a 120 x 120 banner. I have always been suspicious of this even though the timing of adding the advert and the pages ranking poorly does not quite match. The most recent page I added was without the advert, but the same problem still exists.
Everything I have read suggests penalties are only applied to text links that appear to often throughout a site so I thought the banner would not pose a problem, but I might be wrong. Even so - as I say - removing the banner does not appear to have made a difference. This is also the only banner advert throughout the whole site so it would be strange if I had been penalized so heavily for it.
