Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I still seem to be getting referrals from G, just a lot less. What other kinds of troubleshooting can I do?
People need to wake up to the fact that the Google Algos are so complex that a tweak here or there can take out swathes of good sites. Until it happens to you though you remain in denial. We in the UK call it Friendly Fire, the US are particularly good at it :)
The good thing is that it nearly always corrects itself. The problem though is that you are a bit too close to thier radar now and you may find your site flip-flopping as they tweak the algos and filters.
The best thing to do is read the stickies in this thread, see if you are guilty of any of the technical errors that Google wants you to solve.
Bought links are the new "BLACK HAT". Have they devauled your link building?
Good luck in recovering and believe me when I say this...a lot of it will be down to luck.
90% of G traffic gone and apart from a handful of pages, the site was either totally supplemental or gone from the index completely. Neither the -30 or -950 scenarios seemed to quite fit the problem.
As for what caused the drop in my case, I've no idea as there were several possibles that all happened at once, including me stuffing up the URLs big time, so I don't know which one was the 'culprit'. It may have been nothing I'd done as this happens every year when G tweaks its algo. So far, the site has always bounced back and gone on to be stronger than before.
The good news is that after watching G shuffle a few pages per day in and a few others disappear completely, things started to come good again exactly 1 month later on 5th May. So far, it's still putting pages back in and things are almost back to 'normal'. I've always had some supplementals, which is to be expected.
It seems like the site was put on a 30-day penalty.
Suggest you take the opportunity to clean your site up anyway, and see if you bounce back in 30 days (or sooner!). :)
mmm...simonmc from the UK...
who's got your back? USA maybe? I would love to see another country compete with the search engine giants but it seems no other country does.
As a German in the UK, I can tell you it's called british humour. Don't take it too seriously.
The points he made are valid in as such, one might have unsolicited nbound links. Google machines are stupid. They can maybe detect that there is a link rich, content poor net of sites thaEt mention SO. If you are on it, even unasked Google shoots you down if they reach a certain percentage imo. Let's call it collateral damage.
And he is also right when he says it's gonna be down to luck if one gets out of there.
Suggest you take the opportunity to clean your site up anyway, and see if you bounce back in 30 days (or sooner!). :)
I don't think cleaning up ones sites helps. The problem is one needs to clean up other peoples site. :\
I don't think cleaning up ones sites helps.
You don't? That's your prerogative. :)
It certainly doesn't do any harm though, and the OP could do a lot worse than check for inadvertent dupe content, multiple URLs leading to the same page, www v non-www issues, dead links, making sure the site returns proper 404s, etc., etc.
It may be that none of the above have contributed to the problem, but it's good policy anyway and won't do him or his visitors any harm for the site to get a spring clean.
I'm glad to know that the traffic may come back, though somewhat disappointed that luck is such a big part of it :-)
What is the best way to check for the "supplemental" problem that several have mentioned here?
Site seems to have gone supplemental.
Right now cannot find my homepage when searching for my domain name although using site:www.example.com gives me all my pages.
Traffic down to 20%. Earnings too.
For me may be two things :
- I noticed my in Webmaster Tools that Google encountered a URL timeout when crawling my most busy page on April 19. Could have been an outage that I wasn't aware of.
- And probably IBLs devalued.
In any case, what happened has thought be a couple of good lessons...
What is the best way to check for the "supplemental" problem that several have mentioned here?
Do a site:example.com search on Google and see what comes back. Your supplemental pages will say 'supplemental result' after them.
Repeat for site:www.example.com and compare the results. You may discover you have a www v non-www issue.
While you're at it, especially if you're using a CMS, check that there isn't a dupe content issue with multiple URLs pointing to the same page. If there is, 301 the 'dupes' to the correct URL.
And lastly (or maybe firstly!), read the Hot Topics which Tedster linked to earlier. There's lots of useful stuff in there. Good luck. :)
Does your homepage come up if you search for it without the www? This was a problem on one of my sites; after happily indexing it with the www's for three years, G suddenly indexed the homepage (and only the homepage) without them and returned nothing when searching for the domain name. A search without the www's found it straight away. This now resolved by 301 redirect from non-www to www, which I've implemented on all my other sites as well, just in case. ;)
Does the site:www.example.com show your pages as supplemental or non-supplemental? If they're showing as non-supplemental and you've simply 'disappeared' from the index, you may have a -950 penalty which I didn't seem to have.
- I noticed my in Webmaster Tools that Google encountered a URL timeout when crawling my most busy page on April 19. Could have been an outage that I wasn't aware of.
I don't know if an outage on one page would cause this problem; we had a total outage - just one of the 'possibles' I referred to earlier. Do read the "Hot Topics", I got red eyes from all the reading, but found a lot of help in there.
Hope you bounce back quickly :).
Does your homepage come up if you search for it without the www?
Searching with and without www returns the homepage. It's only missing when I search for the domain without the www. and .com. Homepage used to be right there at #1.
Does the site:www.example.com show your pages as supplemental or non-supplemental? If they're showing as non-supplemental and you've simply 'disappeared' from the index, you may have a -950 penalty which I didn't seem to have.
both www and non-www search produces the same results - 90+ percent of the site has gone supplemental. About a year ago, I added a variable in my URL string so about 450+ URL's went from :
http://www.example.com?variable=1
to
http://www.example.com?variable=value1&variable2=value2
But this had no effect on my rankings for almost six month when I was at #1.
I don't know if an outage on one page would cause this problem; we had a total outage - just one of the 'possibles' I referred to earlier. Do read the "Hot Topics", I got red eyes from all the reading, but found a lot of help in there.
Found one duplicate of my homepage (named index2.php) though... I did not delete it because it was used purely for testing and there was absolutely NO links pointing to that page. I wonder how Goog indexed it! I have sinced removed every test page from the server. Only time will tell if this was the case
Hope you bounce back quickly .
Hope so too... the traffic drop has really hurt... and will continue to hurt as advertisers pull out. For now, I have decided not to mess with this site (for fear of making things worse) and concentrate on adding and improving content for my other sites. Fortunately I have learnt many important lessons through this... ; /
