Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have always been totally white hat, just a handful of link exchanges with good sites in all that time, google guidelines obeyed. I just kept adding info pages, labeling them exactly forwhat they were, and the site climbed slowly and surely to some nice rankings.
Almost a month ago, it dropped some 50 to 70 (varies from day to day) positions. It lost over 90% of google traffic and we depend on it.
We have been searching frantically for problems. The sitemap isn't updated well enough and we are working on that. There seems to be a problem wehn we run the sitemap now - the index page shows up over and over again with the ending /?index=##
So we figured it was something one of the blogs did and heavy heartedly we are taking them all down and replacing them with a different software and starting them over. Maybe once all the old content has disappeared from the index we can import the old blog posts. This hurts.
We also found tons and tons of blog spam all over the web that contains our site name, another site name, and a bunch of gobbledygook. Must have been a competitior, and I can't remove that spam.
We also found our site in frames under someone else's domain names and we got the guy to take these down.
I filed reinclusion requests citing these items and haven't heard a thing.
This is severely affecting our income of course, and I am not looking forward to the day when I have to let my team go.
I thought google responded to reinclusion requests? I wish I knew what the problem is, maybe its one of the above, maybe it's something I don't know about.
Sorry, I am new here...
[edited by: tedster at 12:06 am (utc) on Aug. 11, 2007]
I did go to the webmaster section, the site is certified there and there have been no responses to the reinclusion requests.
I don't have a linking scheme, I have only exchanged links with a handful of very reputable sites.
We started a new blog today, and it appeared right away in #4 position for the title of the first post.
I wonder if that means something?
Take a proactive approach by searching this forum for posts that share the same scenario.
Common reasons for dropped ranks of that sort can be:
1. Canonical issues with the website index / root (duplication in Google of content between different pages of the website)(plenty of information here about this)
2. 302 hijack / framed content / proxy server (all examples of how Google can be gamed to toss your results under the right conditions.
3. Competition - inbound quality links increase which surpasses what you have.
It's most likely with that kind of movement there might be issues with 1 or 2, I would start there.
Best,
Todd
The competition makes little sense, (although there is lots) because all keywords fell exactly the same number of spots at exactly the same time. About a week or two preceeding that I noticed the PR falling by one point.
Now the listings regularly struggle up to page 4, hit some ceiling there and bounce back to page 7 to start all over again.
Something good that happened last night - we replaced our news blog with a new spoftware (wordpress) and left all the original content off for fear of having dupe content. So there is only one entry, and it made it to #4 under it's title almost instantly and this morning it's still there.
Something odd, when I search fror www.example.com , the index page is #1, the above blog post is #2 and then we have a couple of places that use my site name as spam in their sites, a couple of press realeases we did, and then pages and pages of blog spam in our name. Over 10,000 entries.
[edited by: tedster at 7:25 pm (utc) on Aug. 11, 2007]
[edit reason] swithc to example.com - it will never be owned [/edit]
Something odd, when I search fror www.example.com , the index page is #1
Thats all that matters then, having your own domain show up #1 for it's own domain name is a good sign.
I forgot to add to you, in addition to checking those other elements we have spoke of in the thread, run the Xenu Link Checker program and scour for broken links and fix them as I have seen those cause problems when a large number of links are broken.
[edited by: CainIV at 3:50 am (utc) on Aug. 12, 2007]
I contacted the starter of this thread who was generous enough to share the url. I ran some basic, basic, tests on the site using.
gsitecrawler.
xenu
and found a stack of dupe content
eg sitename.com/pagename
sitename.com/pagename/
sitename.com/pagename/index.php
Also, many outbound links, to pages that 301 or 302 redirect. Though I've not confirumed this is deadly in itself, giving links to pages that redirect in my mind causes a lack of confidence in your site to search engiens, so I run software that updates all my links to link to the redirected target url, and relnofollow all links unless purpose is in fact to pass a vote for the site rather than to advertise them, or to link to an affiliate.
My point is, highjacking happens, and stolen content happens, but in my experience 99 times out of 100 a ranking slide is to do with something you did, not what a competitor did.
We will get on all of these things on Monday.
Thank you to webmasterworld, too, for providing this space. I will join to support, and I will also go to Pubcon and bring my team so we can educate ourselves.
I have just been concentrating on the content and not the site itself. Time to start concentrating on making both perfect.
I'll let you know how it goes. Any additional ideas are always welcome. Thanks.
