Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
OK, I'm pretty literate in this SEO stuff, but I haven't been able to figure this one out yet. Recently I noticed that one our sites had been zeroed. It's been a 5 or 6 for many years. I'm not aware of anything that has changed recently, but you never know. I try not to think too much about PR, but falling from a 6 to a 0 is definitely a problem. The only symptom of a ban that I've noticed is the zero PR. I'm having a hard time finding anything that I can say is negatively affecting this site. I'm thinking about doing a reinclusion in google in hopes of figuring out what the problem is, but I thought I'd consult the experts first!
SOME POSITIVES:
Domain active for over 10 years
PR5-6 history for many years
link:www.domain.com - 1360 results (mostly "internal" navigation)
site:www.domain.com - about 80 pages (as expected), only a few of them supplemental
Google is caching the site every few days
Unique, quality content
SOME POSSIBLE NEGATIVES:
(1) site structure
(2) incoming links
(3) # of links on page
(4) class C separation
(5) xml sitemap
(1) This website is structured within our network of related sites on it's own domain. We have several domains linked together as one large site and have had it this way for years. I've heard it said more recently that having multiple domains tied together used to be a good strategy but not any more. I have seen (and operate) other networks in this model with no problem.
(2) Could a spammy site destroy the ranking of a quality one? We had one low quality site in particular that I thought was spammy in our network. It was a directory of links in our industry. It wasn't FFA, but I would call it spammy. This site linked to all our sites, but only a few of them had zero page rank. We had another network of domains that I would consider medium quality. This network also linked to our other sites. It has had a PR0 for 6 months or so. Both of these sites were taken offline about 10 days ago.
(3) Google suggests no more than 100 links on a page. Most of our sites have 300+ per page and have for years. Not sure if google would penalize a site for that.
(4) We have several different class C groups of domains to separate our sites out. Pointless in this day and age?
(5) We had a google sitemap for a while but something broke so we took them offline until we could get them fixed. They are still listed in webmaster tools but return 404s because they were broken.
SOME RECENT CHANGES:
We used to block our ads from being shown to spiders. They now see exactly what the users see.
We took a couple of poor ranking sites pointing to this offline.
I've read the google webmaster guidelines again and don't really see anything. I don't think there are problems with the usual stuff:
hidden text
sneaky redirects
keyword stuffing
duplicate content
cloaking
bad neighborhoods
meta tag abuse
alt attribute stuffing
etc
We also have an active adwords campaign and nothing has changed there. Our landing pages should be high enough quality then. Any help would be great!
Thanks.
The only symptom of a ban that I've noticed is the zero PR. I'm having a hard time finding anything that I can say is negatively affecting this site. I'm thinking about doing a reinclusion in google in hopes of figuring out what the problem is, but I thought I'd consult the experts first!
Relax - there's probably nothing wrong at all, specially if you haven't noticed any problems with traffic or ranking.
If the site: and other commands find pages, then you aren't banned.
Are you still ranking? If so, then you're probably not penalized.
The last TBPR update went a little nutso - half my pages that were PR2 now report that there's no PR available, or are greyed out - and they're ranking #1 and pulling in tons of traffic. Honestly, although they'd never admit it, I think the last TBPR update might have been corrupted in some fashion.
I would wait until the next one (probably in the next 1-2 months) and see how it falls then. But if you are not seeing ANY other symptoms, then I would bet you are merely a victim of faulty reporting.
We have lots of domains that aren't in use except as redirects. Nothing "sneaky", we just have too many names. Lots of them have incoming links and have had a history of use. We pulled some of them offline for different reasons and redirected them through our registrar (enom) instead of doing it on our server or in a script. Problem is they're all 302 (temporary) redirects! When you look at google's cache of the redirected site it shows the page of what it's redirecting to. I don't think we have control through enom to make them 301s like we'd like to. It now looks like duplicate content to google, but we didn't intend on that! I'd say it's a google bug, but we're stuck needing to fix it, right? Any thoughts on this or the site problems in general?
Thanks.
The only symptom of a ban that I've noticed is the zero PR. I'm having a hard time finding anything that I can say is negatively affecting this site.
Has your rankings dropped? I wouldn't worry about this especially if your not noticing a fall in traffic. This happened to my site a few months back and everything was stable as far as rankings and traffic.
It never went back up but I'm still number 1 for a very competitive term and others. Traffic was not hurt. I doubt you are penalized.
In this thread [webmasterworld.com], our members confirm that Moniker offers the 301 service for domains. I have clients who use it, and it is as advertised. There may well be others.
Do you think google would really take points off for a registrar having lots of sites 302 redirecting to your main site? I just can't understand how the search engines would have a such a hard time figuring it out.
Thanks for the prompt replies by the way, I posted this same message on another board and haven't gotten any help yet!
Additionally, the 302 redirects are causing you yet more Duplicate Content issues. Change those to be a 301 redirect to fix the problem. The starting URL of the redirect should not be indexed. That is (most of) your problem.
I noticed today Google traffic has increased from 13% to 23% of the traffic. I know this isn't the whole reason I have been spending quite a bit time in the evenings working on duplicate content, rebuilding site maps etc and trying to get quality links. The latter is like fighting a gator tough trying to get a good quality link in ecommerce..
I also suspect the 404's are as well. Never just yake a url down just put in the place text "Working on new Site Map" why would you just remove it that in itself is sloppy work.
fix them as well with a page other than a 404.
Just got out of a meeting with the uppers who don't want to pull out of the registrar to handle the redirects ourself! I'm really starting to believe that this is A LOT of our problem. We have tons of 302s to our various sites and it's possible that the weaker ones are getting hurt for it. We'll be looking into that as soon as possible.
Any other suggestions?
Thanks.
I had the same issue a year or so ago we were moving host they were just gonna moves the sites and that was that. Shut the other servers down and just pull them and reinstall in another host. This was instant Death.
I did as you are doing asked questions then made copies of them, as it seems they didn't believe me, and took it to them. I told them if the move was done this way I wash my hands of this and the fall from grace should be expected.
They did it as I had requested.
Tell them the move does not remove the register just the dns of the site is all...Everthing else stays the same.
