Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In many categores where I would previously place in the top 10 on the first page my site is now nowhere to be found. This is in a fairly wide variety of pages that are environmentally related. This is just too wide/large a drop to assume it is by some update.
I also run another similar site covering information related but different information. This site is doing fair as always maybe even increasing 5% due to the disappearence of my flagship site.
I haven't made any changes in the last couple months, certainly nothing major. This is just out of the blue. Am I being penalized?- Has a competitor been successful in filing a compaint? Is there a way I can check with google and find out if something has been done?
This is also weird because it follows an extreme (likewise) drop in adsense earnings starting about 2 weeks ago. I'm really at a loss for what to do. I don't do sneaky stuff or try tricks or anything, just sit here and do the best I can and usually stay to myself.
The only thing I can think of is that several people are envious of the success I've experienced and have whined and got their way.
Help?
I also run another similar site covering information related but different information. This site is doing fair as always maybe even increasing 5% due to the disappearence of my flagship site.
loner - Do these sites have common hosting?
Do they have common inbound link sources?
Do they link to each other? If so, how much.
How related is the information? Do you use the phrases that your flagship site was ranking on prominently in your second site?
Inbound links vary between them. Most, 60%+- traffic is from Google.
They link to each other extensively.
- Site 1 summarily describes places/points of interest, photo oriented.
- Site 2 contains additional information on the places; geology, plants etc. plus a glossary of terms related to both. The glossary has index/back links to both sites where terms are used.
Phrases used between the two vary slightly.
--
There is also an original site (site a). Which has remained in a state of gradual decline as I have developed site 1 (acceptable and expected).
I think I see where you're going. I've been expanding site 2 in the last several months- adding historical information having to do with the places (with internal links to environment and back links to places) on site 1.
I have site 1 planned for an update and expansion describing animals associated with the places- backlinking to glossary and environment.
The sites were developed separately for organizational reasons. My ability to comprehend/organize multiple attributes of multiple locations was surpassed about 6-7 years ago. I was ending up confused constantly and decided to get a somewhat fresh start. All sites (a, 1, 2) were fused with a common look and menu about 5 years ago.
The sudden drop in the flagship (site 1) is disturbing. Could I have strengthened the competition by adding content and cross-linking?
One million rules? Oh man, maybe I got tagged because of doorway pages?
Through the last 7-8 years I've been buying local domains naming places and forwarding them to pages on site 1 with limited local information and links to places in the area.
ie:
LocalTown-01.Net forwarded to Site-1.com/local-01
...
LocalTown-20.Net forwarded to Site-1.com/local-20
Each is linked to from the bottom of each page of all sites. Up until about 3 years ago I used to sweat this arrangement. It's never seemed to make a difference.
Not that I'm evil or black hat (intentionally?)- I just can't see perfectly good local domain names going to the corporate world making money without any local involvement. Which most of these are scrapers/MFA(?) making money from adsense.
Dead man typing.
Oh well. I like doing what I've been doing with the site, and have quite a bit of local (moral) support in regard to providing a site with regional information provided/edited by a local. Many national outfits cover my area, but it's mostly by tourists who aren't involved or who visit the area once or occasionally at the most.
Of course, there's the idiot savants at Wikipedia that spew wild-eyed misinformation about the area- I haven't read the profile of any 'editors' that live in this region.
So, in case anyone out there is interested, here's my plan; proceed with updating my site as intended. Resubmit each page as I update and do what I like to do to virtually illustrate the area/subjects I enjoy.
If that's what Google considers 'quality', ...
It might be helpful to others to know that I've traced the origination of the penalty/problem to about three weeks ago when I was contacted by Google regarding adsense and my site. They said they had looked over my site and thought I would benefit by them helping me optimize my site. I replied affimative and received no response. About a week later I recieved anoth email from a different Google rep. asking the same; again I replied, "affirmative- do it, help."
Two days later I found myself blasted and penalized. Apparently damned by Google.
As indicated by my screen name, I don't mind playing my own game. I was broke before and looks like again. Didn't scare me then and it don't scare me now. Thanks for the help 'G.'
[Google] said they had looked over my site and thought I would benefit by them helping me optimize my site. I replied affimative and received no response. About a week later I recieved anoth email from a different Google rep. asking the same
I think one/the other or both reviewed the site and threw it in the ashcan. I doubt I'll be hearing from them again.
I figured that my site(s) may have had a review several years ago and that things, albiet, were maybe fractional, that I hadn't crossed any line. An assumption because I've always thought that search engines can't tell intent, where a human could. Stupid assumption. Glad they left all the crappy pages ranking though :). It's not a total loss to me- yet.
That is an important point. I was hacked. The hacker is going bananas in my logs today trying to get back in.
[edited by: tedster at 2:29 am (utc) on Mar. 28, 2007]
loner, check your Webmaster Tools (or Sitemaps) and your site pages to make sure you haven't been hacked. Invisible links inserted onto your pages can cause a drastic Google drop.
This is too sudden to be a co incidence. It might be a hacker or something that has suddenly reached the tolerance of a "major filter" on Google that has been overlooked in the past. Here's some suggestions:
- check if the hacker might have inserted robots.txt on your site [ nasty as it can put you into a 180 day exclusion period with Google, even if you resolve it today ]
- check for 302 hijacks [ normally a bit slower to activate ]
- check internal duplicate content per [webmasterworld.com...] [ this can be fast to activate
- are you putting link ads on your pages as "part of a large linking network" [ Google often drops these from the index and can take out a whole site, not just the pages ]
Please keep us informed to help you through this.
[edited by: Whitey at 2:40 am (utc) on Mar. 26, 2007]
it looks like there are no answers for pulling out of the slump.
If you have a quality site don't give up. There are some things you can try. They are in the threads though you have to read a lot to find them.
I suspect it was the phrase based filters that got you as that has been happening to many old established sites or pages within these sites.
Is your home page gone?
In a sense this resolves some issues I've been concerned with but too antsy to deal with, like two of my sites coming up in the top ten results for the keywords I want the most. But that only covers a basic search where 98% of my SE visitors come in looking for a variation at the end of those keywords. Keyword1+keyword2 + related item.
I'm not sure I understand what a 302 hijacking is. However I don't think this is what's happened. I have read the threads provided but think that this may be a case of prolonged, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. What was ok 8-9 years ago is different today.
Man, I'm getting tired. Thanks for the help everyone! Will have more tomorrow.
It might be helpful to others to know that I've traced the origination of the penalty/problem to about three weeks ago when I was contacted by Google regarding adsense and my site. They said they had looked over my site and thought I would benefit by them helping me optimize my site. I replied affimative and received no response. About a week later I recieved anoth email from a different Google rep. asking the same; again I replied, "affirmative- do it, help."
Loner, I had a similar experience, sans drop in rankings. They seem to be a bit disorganized there @ AdSense, since first one person/team mails out a bunch of emails to sites of interest and then seemingly, another team takes care of responding. Or something like that.
But they eventually did get back to me with "proposals". The proposals were basically to:
a) Remove borders around ads to blend them with content
b) Intersperse internal site links with "sponsored links" modules
I don't know about you, but I find that it's quite hypocritical of them to keep repeating the mantra about how people will "not get confused since all ads are clearly marked as such" and yet make such recommendations that specifically aim at confusing people and making them click on ads by mistake.
But long story short, this whole episode (BTW, I refused to implement their "optimization" proposals) did NOT have any noticeable effect on rankings. I am inclined to believe that cases described in this thread are more of a coincidence.
It came up with a robots.txt file that was over 5000 characters.
Can you come up with a plausible explanation how something you did might have accidentally altered robots.txt (or created it, if you didn't have one previously)? If not, the fact that any file suddenly and mysteriously changed is a good reason to do some investigation, looking closely at all your files (both the public ones and the private ones such as scripts and .htaccess), or at least a large sampling of them.
I can only think of two ways that a request for robots.txt could retrieve your home page text: a) the text in the robots.txt file could have been replaced by text copied from your home page (or whatever page it was), or b) You could have a redirect in .htaccess (or its equivalent) that causes a request for robots.txt to obtain your home page instead.
[edited by: SteveWh at 1:58 pm (utc) on Mar. 26, 2007]
This thread is a good example of how we can't assume all the lost pages and/or sites are a result of the same cause.
Loner I would also consider:
-Using nofollow on intersite links for now
-Searching for unique text snippets from your index page and searching for copies of your website. Thats one way to find out if you have been hijacked. Do a header check on the offending page to see if they are linking to you using a 302 redirect. Search the threads here there is lots of good information on that topic already
-Do a site: search with and without www and report whether your index page shows in position 1.
-Only add the robots.txt file when you are absolutely certain of what files you want to block, add only those, then replace.
-Contact Google and report issue, explain what has happened.
Despite what others might say this penalty is recoverable, I have recovered some of my websites an so have others here. It takes some hard work and investigation.
[edited by: CainIV at 6:39 am (utc) on Mar. 27, 2007]
I've always figured, scan everything, sort it out. Apparently they have :)
I do have duplicate content issues using some pages of public domain reports by the "feds*".gov. It's just been recently I figured out duplicate content meant -the web, not just the site.
This morning I added the suspect directory holding these pages to the robot.txt, disallowing google. Then resubmitted that directory.
A couple things I've noticed since uploading a robots.txt file and resubmitting; not as many pages are showing up in the final page of results. They aren't back near the old position, I think somewhere in the middle. I'll check site: later. I also noticed 1 hit on the top page "/", for a somewhat minor keyword, something I haven't seen since this started.
Another thing I've noticed is an inordinately large amount of requests for two particular local community pages. I'll check these out and clean them up, and resubmit.
There was some more good ideas, including contacting google (but I've never been able to figure that one out- there never seems to be an appropriate section(?). I can't read and reply so I'll try out the suggestions given above and try some more.
Yesterday's stats were a little better, but only relative to the two days before. That most likely is because of lower weekend traffic.
Very uneven results.
site:domain.com = 1,170 (about what I've seen before)
site:www.domain.com = did not match any documents.
site: domain.com = 133
site: www.domain.com = 11
Currently in webmaster tools I have no set preference; changing that to-
Display URLs as domain.com (for both www.domain.com and domain.com)
-Done (I feel like virtual "Deer Hunter")
I do see a way to contact google. Need to piece together what to say besides "wah, wah, wah, sniffle, moan..."
No easy fix.
Despite its relatively few faults, my site provides a lot of useful information utilizing legally usable and well selected content. Of the thousands and thousands of photographs illustrating subject matter on my site, I've taken all but maybe 20 (historic), and I do have the legal right to use them.
Judging by the amount of similar threads (950, index out, etc), this is Google's problem overall-
I'm not going to sweat this anymore. I have better, far more interesting ways of wasting my life than catering to Google's whims.
I've fixed what I could, admitted (confessed) to whatever it was I did and submitted a request for reinclusion. If things get better, cool, I like the internet, but if this is what it is; life wondering why you're being spanked with no explaination and repressed creativity due to greed and some weird psychological need for power, well it's time for me to fire up a big-'ol joint and head down the road less traveled. :)
Good luck everyone.
Now it's all gone. My site traffic has plummeted. My adsense earnings are now about 10% of what it was.
I really feel for those people out there who run online stores and their livelihood actually depends on the internet.
It's like having a bricks and mortar store and every morning you come to work, your store has been located somewhere else and nobody can find it.
Then you work at finding your store and everything goes along smoothly, and then it happens again. Without warning and without recourse.
The mantra of search engines is that they strive to return the best sites that have the most appropriate information.
I am not bragging when I say that my site is number one on the net for our niche in the quality of information it provides. It's a narrow niche and there's not much competition. So Google is failing to return the best sites when they omit the best from their returns.
I, too, am about to throw in the towel. It's not worth the aggravation. We're all playing by rules we're not allowed to know. When this happens, people suggest that I make changes to my site, based on conjecture. Easy to say, hard to do when you have over 1000 pages of content. Besides, after I complete the changes, Google will once again change the rules (that we don't know) and blow the whole thing out of the water again. This has happened to me, on average, two times a year over the last 5 years.
Screw 'em. At this time the paltry sums of money earned by my site isn't worth the effort.
Anybody want to buy a really good niche site?
