Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
HISTORY
My affiliate site in 2003 was doing relatively well. Florida had no effect on it. With Brandy it began a decline that culminated in its complete demise at the time of Allegra.
My site suffered another blow that coincided with Allegra. The major retail company it is affiliated with changed from one affiliate marketing company to another, leaving all of my affiliate links as dead ends. As a consequence, all of my pages went URL only.
Since internet marketing is not my primary source of income, I let the whole business rest dormant for awhile. Then in May of ’05 I hooked up all of my affiliate links with the new affiliate marketing company. With that my snippets came back – no more URL only problem. But my pages were basically still in the abyss where they have remained.
I did some experimentation to see if I could give my pages a boost up the SERPs.
Experiment 1:
Date: September, 2005
Action: Reduce links from a range of 50 to 120 to a range of 5 to 10.
Results: Nothing discernible to date in Google, dramatic reduction in hits from MSN
Experiment 2:
Date: September, 2005
Action: Vary the anchor text in internal links to the home page
Results: Nothing discernible to date in Google
Experiment 3:
Date: October, 2005
Action: Remove bolding from pages (I had bolded all of my text for better readability.)
Results: Nothing discernible to date in Google.
Experiment 4:
Date: October, 2005
Action: Seek outside links
Results: A few sites have started linking to my site bringing a
small amount of traffic, no discernible improvement in Google
SERPs
PRESENT ACTIVITIES
1. I am continuing to add information pages as a service to my readers and to attract outside links and traffic. This is based on my decision to make outside links and bookmarks my major source of referrals.
CURRENT STATUS OF MY SITE
1. I have owned my domain name since 1999 and it was never owned before that.
2. My affiliate pages have unique content. There is no issue of duplication with materials borrowed from the site I am affiliated with.
3. My pages are short with a small amount of information and a couple of affiliate links to one retail company site. There are no other outbound links.
4. My pages are all static.
5. My pages have mostly text and, in most cases, no more than one image.
6. Links on most of my pages are less than 100.
7. My pages are made up basically of pure HTML, no fancy stuff.
8. My site has not been involved in linking schemes or connected to any bad neighborhoods.
9. None of my pages have a cookie cutter quality.
10. My pages are quite heavily optimized. Keywords are in the url and in the page name (example: www.mysite/widgets/bluewidgets/bluewidgets.html). Keywords are in the title, in the description, in the ALT tag, in the H1 Header, in the text a few times and in anchor text pointing to the pages from other internal pages.
11. The text including the keywords reads very naturally.
12. My keywords range from quite obscure to very obscure. Most of them are in keyword phrases of two to four words.
13. There is no hidden text.
14. There is no cloaking.
15. My site has never been involved in scraping other sites.
16. I have no evidence of any other sites scraping my site.
17. My HTML does not validate well in the W3C validation service.
18. There may be a canonical problem with my site. A search on “site:mysite.com -.www” returns 120 pages. A search on “site:mysite.com” returns 783 pages.
19. My internal links all include “www.”.
20. My site has been little affected by Jagger updates and Big Daddy.
21. My pages have had very few inbound links, but this is starting to change slowly.
22. My site has a link from the Yahoo! Index.
23. My pages’ SERPs in Google range basically from 100 to 1000+ positions down from the top. A handful (optimized on extremely obscure keyword phrases) are in the top five.
24. My site gets virtually no referrals from Yahoo! Search.
25. My site gets very few referrals from MSN.
SOME QUESTIONS
1. If the broken links situation (see “HISTORY” paragraph 2 above) is the main problem, will it take many more months to recover or should my pages have shown dramatic improvement by now?
2. Where should I start making changes to improve my ranking in Google and other SEs?
Thanks for any advice you can give me.
Richard
10. My pages are quite heavily optimized.
I have a suspicion that Google is wary of heavily optimized sites because they don't fit Google's idea of what a "natural" site should look like, and the optimization can trigger a spam filter.
I have a site which twice lost all Google traffic, but when I de-optimized the pages the traffic returned and I have had no Google problems since. I limited each page to keywords in the title, a H1 tag, and a few in the text, and I removed all alt text, meta titles, and all H2, H3 tags, etc.
My guess is it helped - but who knows?
18. There may be a canonical problem with my site. A search on “site:mysite.com -.www” returns 120 pages. A search on “site:mysite.com” returns 783 pages.
Fix this with an htaccess file. Most SE's view this as two different sites and may cause a duplicate content penalty and possibly splits PR between the two.
My HTML does not validate well in the W3C validation service.
Some say this has no effect, others say it does. Look at your site the way that bots do - One good place that I know of is "poodle predictor". Search for it.
10. My pages are quite heavily optimized. Keywords are in the url and in the page name (example: www.mysite/widgets/bluewidgets/bluewidgets.html). Keywords are in the title, in the description, in the ALT tag, in the H1 Header, in the text a few times and in anchor text pointing to the pages from other internal pages.
Make sure your title doesnt have too many words. Sample- Mysite.com: This page is about big blue widgets. Better would be - Big Blue Widgets ¦ Mysite.com
(This tip helped me a ton)
Make sure that all of your titles are different AND your Meta descriptions.
Also, you didn't mention if any of your pages are supplemental. If they are, that definately says there is a problem and you need to find out what is causing it.
This doesn't seem like a major supplemental problem to me. Am I wrong? Could these few supplementals affect the SERPs of my other pages?
The only work-a-round I see is content rich pages. If you’re describing products and duplicate the content from elsewhere you’re back in the same boat. To little content and you’re probably going to duplicate by accident.
All of the posts have good points.
This doesn't seem like a major supplemental problem to me. Am I wrong? Could these few supplementals affect the SERPs of my other pages?
I think you are right in that it is not a supplemental problem - I do not think those few pages are affecting things.
numerous optimized doorway pages pointing to another site
I don't think this is true as Richard has said that his pages have unique content and are not cookie cutters.
Not sure what to tell you as it seems like you are doing things right. Would have said to be patient but you have been.
Sometimes, when things get messed up, I find the best route to take to start a new site. Is this possible for you? Can you pull the site down for a while and just start on a new domain (I would not recommend using a 301).
<<<<We pulled our site completely from Google using the url removal tool and will reintroduce a few pages at a time when the timer for reentry expires in a few months.>>>>>>
Let's say you take down your site with the Google URL removal tool. Then, you put it back up a few pages at a time. Can you be certain that all the old pages are gone and won't cause a duplication problem?
<<<<<<< (I would not recommend using a 301).>>>>>>>>>>
Some have recommended using a 301. Could I hear some pros and cons?
Thanks, and have a great day. :-)
Richard
