Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In further research last night I (think I) came to the conclusion that the pages that we lost were over optimizised. But in what way and where are the questions. I could only compare who is listed, and who is not.
On one of my main search terms, where last week I was numbers 2 & 3, I am now # 59. (other sections are worse, but sticking to this problem for my research)The result should be one of my deeper pages, to the actual related page of the site. But what appears here is my main index page. The page that should be here I have not found yet.
So if i am thinking i am over optimized, i want to see what others on the google results page are having success with. Guess what? They are way over optimized. But this is the difference that I can see so far. In the unlinked content on the page, they repeat the search term over and over - key phrase density probably twice as much as i have, maybe more.
But I think the difference is that where I repeat the term, it is anchor text internal links. I think I repeat the phrase in the anchor text equal to or more than I do in the content on the page itself. It does not appear spammy, it is basically the navigation links that I speak of.
So, is it possible that google is looking at the anchor text links and weighing those phrases more than what is in the content itself and considering repeating phrases within the link as spam? Could it be the anchor text density verses the density of the content itself?
Am I making any sense to anyone?
[edited by: tedster at 9:20 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2008]
The phrase is the name of the 'war between the states' plus 'widgets'. I'm not even sure if it matters if 'widgets' is there. But the war phrase must be considered suspect.
I have now found 3 penalized pages with this phrase in the page title. <title>
I also have one other page with the phrase in the page title that is not penalized. Strangely that one is a directory page with links to 'the war phrase' through another period in history. The phrase is in many of the outgoing links. You would think if anything a links page would be penalized.
I do have several other pages where the phrase is mentioned in fact one mentions it several times. But the phrase is not in the page title and all these pages are doing just fine.
The phrase is the name of the 'war between the states' plus 'widgets'. I'm not even sure if it matters if 'widgets' is there. But the war phrase must be considered suspect.
Are you suggesting that the term "War of Northern Aggression" is penalized? :-)
Unless there's a "quality" link to that page from an on-topic, relevant page on a "trusted" site that validates the relevancy and value of the page being linked to for that particular phrase.
Unless there's a "quality" link to that page
I checked the backlinks and believe it or not outside of links within my site there is only one link to it from a Dutch PR0 forum. The scrapers haven't even found it! Maybe it is just so totally unimportant that it didn't get penalized. ;)
Isn't it curious? And BTW, what kind of "help" is that?
I know its too early to celebrate, but this is the first ray of hope since then.
I am coming off worst traffic/sales week in three years.
Take me back to 5th Avenue, G!
I have been hard hit by the 950 on 14 of Jan as well, I don't know what happened, thousands of Entries we have had good positions in google for years that were receiving google traffic are now on the 100 plus page and receiving nothing, my site is over 4 years old, all 6000 entries on it are 100% original written by me, each entry had about one keyword per 5 line paragraph. I'm totally baffled, I'm sure i haven;t spammed them. I noticed now as well that RSS sites that reference our content and sites that just plain steal our stuff are now above us, it is very depressing.
I have always appreciated the traffic that Google has sent me, what other company besides digg.com sends free traffic to webmasters. Their generosity is unrivaled and in return however small it might be, I have always put adsense on my site and the adsense revenue we were earning up until we hit by 950 was unbelievable I'm talking 6 figures a year and sure google was making double what i was, so it is very confusing why this has happened.
I'm hoping the entries will regain some position soon, I'm checking everything to see if we did anything wrong, I hope it was just a googlebot update go wrong or else I might just have to go find another way to make a living that doesn't rely on google, I probably shouldn't have relied on them so much. I just wish I could just speak to someone at Google about this, I finding it impossible.
Regards Paul
one page on a site can list at number one while another page is hit by the 950 penalty for no apparent reason.
landmark, one of my pages went from the top ten for "blue widgets" to #100 today, while it remains #1 for "red widgets". Some pages on my site got clobbered, others didn't.
- removed additional keywords from title tag
- moved disclaimers and stuff like that into a file and linked to it
- installed a new version of our CMS - CSS-Layout only, less HTML overhead
- removed teasers from links to related articles (did that yesterday - I do not think that this brought the site back)
Good luck to anyone and thanks for a really constructive and helpful discussion.
I used to think that only G was a search engine that was not broken but looks like all of them now are.
However I will keep my changes. My site is cleaner now and smaller.
We dropped on Jan. 15th originally.
I feel like we would have come back without the changes as well. We mainly added links and content to our site over the past couple of weeks.
We also seemed to have strengthened and improved on MSN, for what it is worth.
What I'm wondering is how long anyone who's page(s) came out are staying out, so that possible changes can be identified that might give a clue to factors causing the penalty.
I reduced the keywords on one of the pages some, removed the keywords from a couple of outbound links to other sites on the same topic, just leaving the site names, then I added a small amount of additional content (rewrote current content and expanded it a bit) to reduce the keyword percentage some, but that's about it.
I'm going to give it a couple of days, as some of these changes were just made this weekend. I do see that Google has already spidered the page, though, almost as if I sent for it, so perhaps it won't take very long to know one way or the other.
I thought I'd start slow and make more drastic changes if nothing else seems to work.
What gripes me is, I'm building my site for Google, not for my visitors. And Google shouldn't be putting us in a position where we have to do that. And I still see horrendous spam sites in Google ranking much higher than I do with all original content. Something is very, very wrong with this picture. If I can identify a spammy site after looking at it for 10 seconds, Google's fancy algo and thousands of employees should be able to as well, and, very obviously judging from the recent SERPs, they aren't.
I have a feeling the main causes are:
heavy anchor text (side and bottom bar)
high density kw's
more affiliate content over unique content.
I've decided to give it one more week to see if i bounce back!
northweb
Traffic came back as prior on Jan 14 for 4 hours then back to basically nothing.
I did not change anything - traffic came back to the reg traffic prior to Dec 20 last sunday Jan 20, but as of the 27th, I am back in the abyss.
Who knows, maybe I can expect to be pulled into the game for 1 week per month!
Anyone else have this experience with these dates?
It's almost sickening to see a page come back, because I then have to check what pages have tanked again.
Yesterday though threw a lot of spam into the index, so it was more of an algo adjustment than a standard data refresh.
In fact on one missing page Google's results are still showing two pages from the site clustered at #3.
I have the contents page back and the article page that was flitting back and forth seems to be staying now. But the rest are still gone.
