Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
What do we really know about this penalty, what causes it, and most important of all, how do we fix our sites to restore normal rankings?
Just wondering if I should do a complete rebuild tear down 5 years of work and drop the affiliate program.
Has anyone recovered from this penalty? Any luck with test pages or directories?
other option...back in the real world working.
oh hummmmmm.
johnhh, I don't think there is any point to doing a reinclusion request as your pages are in the index. Reinclusion would be more for a site that has been banned.
No luck at all with the tests we ran/running - any page well ranked remains well ranked - any page down in the depths ( which is most of them ) stays down in the depths.
This result applies even if the page is redesigned...
southernmost, Did you click on the link for
'repeat the search with the omitted results included' That you find on the last page of the regular search? I found that is the only way I could find my missing pages. So the pages are not totally missing but severly penalized.
Yes, if I do the search with the omitted results included the full 999 search results come up...and I'm then at the very last result (#998 & #999)...unbelievable.
If this is a penalty, it is tremendously misplaced and unfair. This is a very legitimate, white hat, semi-authority site.
Can anyone else confirm this PLEASE!
ps can you post a link to the rest of that thread?
[edited by: PhattusCattus at 5:30 pm (utc) on Jan. 22, 2007]
We have been through some strange happenings with Google over the years, certainly Florida was like waking up in the twilight zone but we have never, ever experienced anything like this; 7 year old high end sites just sitting there in position 995. I’m sure there’s a reason, but its just surreal looking at it.
I have a completely white hat shopping site that is dropping from existance. Google traffic down 90% in last week.
I see that MC is back from vacation. I sure hope he will take a look at this thread.
Are people finding that more and more of their pages are going down or does this seem to have stayed pretty stable?
Why google want to tank a real company is beyond me
not very encouraging so far
When you click on the link, it takes you to a worthless page that has a link on it in HUGE text with anchor text of the search term I've been watching. Click on the link, and it takes you to a totally WORTHLESS directory of sites with that search term. Yes, my site is listed on that pile of you know what page. With a scraped snippet, of course.
Thanks, Google. I'm so glad my original on-topic content which is part of a larger site that is part of a theme, and full of unique content, rates just slightly better than a site that is totally worthless spam.
A regional issue may be an issue. I am located in the NE US. For search terms that were previously in the top 10 in Google.com -- stil appear in top of SERP in Google.co.uk.
However, in other regional Google engines such as Google.it, Google.es and Google.ca, I still have have the same page missing issue.
[And my big complaint is that these pages all contained original content.]
That's not accurate either because pages are usually fifty or so places from the last result, so even if you have prefernces set at 100, the penalized pages may not be on the literal last page.
There has never been anything regional about this penalty. You are either dead or not... but again there seem to be several similar 950 penalties so how things are for one page may not be how they are for others.
Today's data refresh seems to have rescued some pages.
When checking SERPS against Analytics, I came in #1 for one of the keywords that showed most improvement, but results for other keywords that Analytics showed with traffic were back on last page by the time I checked.
Overall google traffic remains down by about 80%.
After 160 posts in this thread, I feel that we are not much closer to understanding what is going on.
And why the deafening silence from google guys?
Age of site has nothing to do with it.
Overoptimization doesn't seem to be an issue, either.
Authority sites in niche areas as well as in more general areas have been hit.
Sites with affiliate links and without have been impacted.
AdSense and no AdSense as well.
Commercial and personal sites have been hit.
Sites that have been in trouble for years, and sites that have ranked well for years are penalized.
I'm surprised this isn't a bigger issue than it is. Is it just a handful of sites in the big scheme of things, or have people just not recognized that their site has been hit, since not all search terms are affected?
Did you check for copyright infringement or multiple duplications of content from your site in the UK?
In your INURL: site search are there numerous Proxy Sites listed with your title and URL?
One thing I did notice is that only one region will have good rankings. In your stats, do you get a decent amount of traffic from the UK?
The regional is only one possibility, but I cannot figure out why I would have top 10 rankings in another region than where I should be, unless the filter is only running in some regions, but I would assume the UK would be hit early as well.
>>pages are usually fifty or so places from the last result<< I wish, in the searches I've done my pages are like 3-5 from the last. <sigh> Not that it matters since you are sunk either way.
I spent some time today trying to figure out if the page will show up well on searches that relate to something on the page but are unrelated to the search phrase I suspect as being the problem. Earlier I had thought it was totally phrase related but now I'm not so sure.
It seems to me that somehow a phrase has caused the problem but once that occurs the page is penalized no matter what the search term. But it looks like when you use a search term other than the phrase the page results are a little higher but still penalized.
Would some other people experiment with this and share what you find?
I just went back to Google UK to do some poking around as you asked to see why I was not affected there - but guess what, now I have been penalized there now as well.
I'm so confused! :o There is no doubt that if you hit on the right search the page still comes up high in the serps.
You are either dead or not... but again there seem to be several similar 950 penalties so how things are for one page may not be how they are for others.
That is what I said. I believe there is more than one cause of this penalty. In fact, I think that one of my site's has been the victim of this penalty since 2003.
And my current site suffering from this penalty, well it was back on top for about 5 days and is now back in the can. Other pages are starting to go as well.
[edited by: jtoddv at 3:19 am (utc) on Jan. 23, 2007]
the keyword is included in the page title, anchor text linking to the page, headlines, etc. and the page came up #1.
I then searched for an exact phrase match, WHICH OCCURS ON THE SAME PAGE. This phrase is also in the anchor text, page title and headlines, together with the keyword i search for first. The result? Dead last.
When i search for these keywords on google english i am consistly at the bottom of results.
i am not sure what this means except that this is the most b-s penalty ever. why on earch would the same page rank #1 and dead last, when searching for text that appears in the title? makes zero sense.
If you guys have any identical pages, which is very easy to have unintentionally with auto generated DB content, I would dissallow the less important ones on robots.txt specifically for googlebot. Also, when submitting you sitemaps to Google, I would not list every single page that you have if you have like 100,000, especially, like the "back", and "forward" (aka 'bookmark") pages where you display x amount or results per page.
First of all, when my site first got the penalty, there was no Google Sitemap at all. Never had been, but I've added a text one since then just to see what would happen. So far, no changes.
I checked my search query report from Google Webmaster Tools, that shows one of the exact search terms I've been monitoring at #9. My site is hosted in the U.S., has a .com domain, and according to the downloaded report, my search term is #9 on Google.com!
There is no way, I've been checking this term daily, using multiple C-classes. This really makes me feel like Google thinks a search term is at a particular position, when in fact it is not - it is buried at the bottom of the SERPs. When we had that little blip earlier this month, my pages all popped back up to the top of the results.
I'm beginning to lean more toward Google having a problem that they either don't know about, don't want to fix, or can't fix. And this is because I'm getting information from Google about my site that I know is incorrect.
I then searched for an exact phrase match, WHICH OCCURS ON THE SAME PAGE. This phrase is also in the anchor text, page title and headlines, together with the keyword i search for first. The result? Dead last.
[edited by: tedster at 4:25 am (utc) on Jan. 23, 2007]
