Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It happened to me recently, I had a personal site which I decided to remove from the web and put up a page with no content. When the site had content it was #1 in Yahoo and MSN for a few low traffic tems and, of course, my name. In Google I was at #20, as there is an actor that shares my name.
Now that there is no content on the site it shot to #1 on Google too. #1 on G/Y/M and all because of a title tage and a few inbound links!
An unquoted search for my name brings up 10,000,000 results in G and Y, I'm sure they should be able to find a better page than my empty one.
Study that one hard. There are often things to be learned by that sort of anomoly. ;-)
Could be a freshness factor resulting from a substantial change of content. My guess is that result will not stay.
I'm also wondering if maybe the page originally had a penalty because it was over-SEOed (too much use of the keyword, keyword in H1 tag, outbound links to "bad neighborhoods", too many links to the same website).
We are about to try this with our website as we have nothing to lose.
We have around 3,400 links into our website with various keywords in the anchor text, since december our website tanked from page one slowly to infinity for the keywords that we were ranking highly on before the jagger disaster.
We are going to remove the keys from everywhere in the page except for the title.
What do you think?
Bek.
No more worries about duplicate content, copyright issues, none of that.
In a way its beneficial. Scrapers usually can't spell worth a damn anyhow.
What a relief for the visually impaired! -Larry
I'd be carefull about scraping empty pages, IBM might own the patent on empty pages or maybe pages with very little content on them.
Sorry just couldn't resist.
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The "empty pages" rose to the top based on offsite factors, incoming links or whatever.
Unless I'm wrong, the content was weighting on the SERPS like a boat anchor.
A careful study of the original pages could be very revealing!
Was there duplicate content? Thats the first thing I would check for.
Keyword stuffing? Hidden text? There must be some evidence.
Check the wayback machine and of course the cached copy if any.
Quite possibly, there is an excellent lesson in what NOT to do. -Larry
I wonder if a paper company ever tried to copyright blank pages.
I wouldn't put it past them, look what they do to innocent pretty trees. -Larry
I don't think that would really work, first there is nothing to copyright.
A hello right back at ya.
Sorry for drawing the attention away from caveman's correct observation. It is small things like this that provide important information.
Remember a definition can't really use the word it is defining to define itself.
Good morning oldpro.
[Dissatisfied? Help us improve] link on google can be helpful in this situation.
Certainly not facing any duplicate content penalty. lol
Kidding? Not really :)
I figured out that if you made a few pages site with very original content and SEO'ed it well you will find your way like a rocket to top sports. Well, not because your site is the best, but because all other sites are facing a duplicate content penalty.
I think someday we would be seeing results 1-100 blank!
On a side note...#1-3 ranking sites do seem to have little content....(see scrapers, etc).
What does the cached copy of the page look like?
This man is a genius, once the new page is cached expect it to go bye bye..
