Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
This page is strictly informational. No sales info of any kind other than the standard links on my nav bar. It has also always been linked to 14 other similar pages all containing information along the same lines ... but quite different. Each of those pages contains a different image relating to various islands or parts thereof. None of those pages change appreciably either.
Annoyingly, this page has been the single most popular page on my site (aside from the index page) and has maintained a rank in the top 3 on Google for the past five years. (I say annoyingly because it has nothing to do with what I sell and the image is stolen frequently.)
Sometimes the page is ranked number 1, sometimes number 2 or 3. Recently it fell to number 5 but that's as low as its ever been in recent years. The image (which is the subject of the page) has been stolen by other webmasters countless times and shows up many times in Google images on other people';s sites. I have no idea how many IBL's there really are for this page. A link: search on Yahoo says there are 59 IBL's ... many of which are scraper sites.
For the purpose of this discussion, we'll say the keyword search island image
A 2 word, generic search for island image produces 128,000,000 search results.
A 2 word search for island+image produces 214,000,000 search results
A 2 word search for "island+image" produces 27,900 search results
This page has always ranked in the top 3 no matter how the search was performed.
What I find interesting is that after 5 years of ranking in the top 5:
island image no longer in top 750 results
island+image no longer in top 750 results
"island+image" ranked number 2
When I perform a Google "link" search for this page, there are three links shown to the page, so obviously, Google has given it at least some value. Don't ask me what the Google page rank is ... I don't know and don't care. I use a Mac and don't have the toolbar. Two of the links shown are internal from my own site and there is one IBL from somebody who "borrowed" my image (without asking) but was kind enough to link back to that page.
Now here's the interesting part.
The IBL page looks like a very amateur (student type) case study page dealing with the sugar industry. My image has been modified and now contains 3 clickable outgoing links. The page has paid advertising on it and those ads as well as the number of ads change each time I go to this page. One advert at the top goes to a casino site although the anchor text is the name of a university. Obviously, this is not the innocent "case study"; page it purports to be.
I have two theories on what has happened to this page:
I have not changed the page since January 1, 2006. The only change made was to update the copyright notice as I do every year for all pages on my site.
Both are reasonable possibilities and although Google claims that IBLs can't hurt your site, I am starting to believe they can and do. My site is very clean. Squeaky clean in fact. I don't pretend to be an SEO expert or even a professional webmaster. I don't mess around with my site trying to get to be number one for this or that ... I just write content and provide as much information for my potential clients as I can. I write a page, put it up on the internet and leave it alone until something needs to be changed or I find a mistake.
Now I could go and reduce the keyword density to test and see if that is the problem or not. But the thing is that I don't WANT that page to be so popular. I'm just as happy to have it remain an outcast. I only put it up as a reference for my potential clients. I am sick of people stealing my images and this page's popularity uses up bandwidth. I only wish some of my other pages were quite as popular! On the other hand, I am dying to know if IBL's really can hurt your page reputation or not and the only way to tell is to reduce the keyword density (make it more in line with the rest of my site) and rule that out as a possibility if no change occurs.
My index page (if it matters) has a PR of 5 ... or so I am told. So what do you guys think. Anyone else have a similar story to tell?
[edited by: tedster at 5:39 pm (utc) on June 17, 2006]
[edit reason] fix formatting [/edit]
I know of some informational pages that have not been changed since 1998.
I am still doubtful that a few IBLs could wreak this kind of havoc, but these days, I don't feel so confident about anything I ever thought I understood with Google.
... they've mostly returned in the past 24 hours.
It has been about a week ... since I noticed it anyway. Still MIA though.
I am still doubtful that a few IBLs could wreak this kind of havoc, but these days, I don't feel so confident about anything I ever thought I understood with Google.
Its just a gut feeling that its one of the two reasons I mentioned above. It could just as easily be keyword density because it probably has the highest density on my site. I'll wait a month or so before doing anything about it to see if its just a glitch.
It would be interesting to see if keyword density can be ruled out. Then I'll know for sure that IBL's are causing the trouble. I know there is nothing else which could have caused this. This page has been through all the wars and has never suffered. Until now, it seemed bullet proof.
If you loose position on certain phrase, paste the url of the page that used to rank in google search field to see if it returns a "not found".
... does not apply in this case. As I said, Google shows 3 IBL's to this page. 2 internal and 1 external. In addition, a search using quotes and plus signs puts this page a number 2 in the search results.
The first time I noticed this had happened to a page I simply gave it a new URL and that worked well. The page soon returned to it's usual good ranking under the new url.
Now with the concerns about duplicate copy I am afraid to do this. More recently I lost a page and looking at the backlinks (using yahoo) it looked like a scraper site had the snippet from the lost page but had linked to another page of mine. Sure enough, for a while that page ranked well for the lost pages terms. And the page that ranked well only had the term mentioned once in a link to the lost page. (I've probably lost you trying to explain this.) ;) Oh well, the important thing is it seemed to be cause by a scraper's glitch. I got more links to it both internally and from other sites. It eventually came back to it's original good ranking but I have no way of knowing if the links helped.
Now I've lost another important page that used to rank well. I've yet to find a possible reason why and have been trying to get added links to it.
So it seems that this happens now and then. I don't think it's related to the problem some are having of losing multiple pages. It's more isolated than that.
Just one of those Google mysteries.
<added> I just searched the title of the article and the only thing I get is pages that have linked to the missing page. I'll try some other searches but it looks as if this page is totally missing.
<adding more> I just used Yahoo for backlinks. There are many scraper site links to the missing page. It sure would be great if we could figure out what causes this sort of thing.
It can only have been a "google glitch", but the number of search results Google is reporting has changed dramatically since I started this thread!
Previous results:
A 2 word, generic search for island image produces 128,000,000 search results.
A 2 word search for island+image produces 214,000,000 search results
A 2 word search for "island+image" produces 27,900 search results
Current results:
A 2 word, generic search for island image produces 78,600,000 search results.
A 2 word search for island+image produces 78,600,000 search results
A 2 word search for "island+image" produces 25,700 search results
Curiouser and curiouser! I would love to know what caused it and when/if it will happen again? I am going to keep a close eye on this ... I find it facinating.
I wonder if it really was a glitch or if Google are doing something "major" behind the scenes? I mean ... that is a HUGE difference in the number of search results returned no matter which way you slice it!
2. Money.
Occasionally a scraper will come along, borrow an entire page from a well ranking client site, and throw a lot of links at the dupe. While the scraper won't rank, we end up dropping out for a couple of days until Google figures it out. Occasionally, the scraped page might end up linking to us because I'd put an absolute link on the page.
If you drop out for a search, you can see quickly if it's a dupe problem by adding &filter=0 to the query url.
I've been able to diagnose things further by searching for, say, a six-word text string from our page and finding the pages that match this query. When we've had the dupe problems, our page in such a search only shows up in the supplementals.
What's curious, though, is that while the page won't rank for a long exact string... which you'd think would be the easiest for it to do... it will sometimes continue to rank for, say, three word phrases for which it's optimized if it has sufficient query-related anchor text in inbound links.
The last time this happened to us was last week, on June 12. We came back on June 14, and disappeared briefly again today.
I should mention that other engines are not as swift as Google is in recovering from this kind of glitch.
Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.mysite.com/island_image.html&filter=0
... which isn't surprising since there is no page with &filter=0 but a search for the url alone still shows the same three links. How do you make that work?
By the way, what is an "absolute" link?
a) could link to b) in one of two ways:
<a href="http://www.yoursite/fishing.html" Fishing </a>
That would be an 'absolute' link.
If some fool copies page a) whole, he will still nbe linking to YOUR page b).
The other way is called a 'relative' link, as in
<a href="/fishing.html" Go Fish! </a>.
In this case, if your page is stolen, somebody clicking on the anchor text 'Go Fish!'
is directed to THAT page, but on the scraper's site.
Being rather witless, the scraper more than likely has no such page, so a dead link.
Relative links are much easier to manage. Some people put a line like:
<base href=(your site/) > way up top of each page, so there is no mistake.
I do that, but I STILL keep all my links Absolute for good measure. -Larry
A search for the URL using www.mysite.com/island_image.html&filter=0
I'm not talking about searching for the url. I'm talking about searching for something that the page used to rank on...
&filter=0 goes in the address bar, not in the search box.
Here's a quick example that I trust is OK to post...
Search for this phrase from the Declaration of Independence, with no quote...
the course of human events
Here's the url of the search in the address bar...
[google.com...]
Add &filter=0 to the end of the url, and either click on the "Go" icon or whatever you have on your browser next to the address, or hit the Enter key. The url is now as follows, and the results are slightly different...
[google.com...]
Note that there is now a result from Indiana Law in the #5 spot that wasn't there before because it's a dupe of the other results returning the Declaration.
If you were ranking high up on a phrase previously, and suddenly you aren't showing up any more, try this. If your page shows up again, then you've been knocked out because someone else has duped you.
I'm thinking that when I lose a page like this it might have something to do with the dupe problem.
<added>
The &filter=0 method didn't bring up my missing page. I searched the title of the article as it is unique. That search just showed 3 other pages of mine linking to it by the same words.
But what is really strange is that one other page came up. It's url is [www.www.www.www.www.www.www...] and then the rest of the URL. It appears to be what I think you call a Frankenstein page. It's gathered info from several sites in order to make content and it makes no sense at all. But the title I was searching for is on the page a couple of time.
[edited by: annej at 1:12 am (utc) on June 23, 2006]
I never use the ../page.html or ../../folder/page.html formats. They are best avoided.
The &filter=0 method didn't bring up my missing page. I searched the title of the article as it is unique. That search just showed 3 other pages of mine linking to it by the same words.
annej - When you say 3 other pages of yours, are they on the same site or different sites? If they're on different sites, do their domains get their inbound links from the same domains that the domain of your missing page gets its inbound links from?
But what is really strange is that one other page came up. It's url is [www.www.www.www.www.www.www...] and then the rest of the URL. It appears to be what I think you call a Frankenstein page. It's gathered info from several sites in order to make content and it makes no sense at all. But the title I was searching for is on the page a couple of time.
Can't explain what the Frankenstein url is about, except I can imagine it's some being imaginative with subdomain spam ;). The "gathered info from several sites" suggests it's a scraper. I have been seeing some scrapers with a lot of inbounds knock out pages they've scraped for various queries if there's enough content duped, and if the links and the query are sufficiently in alignment.
annej - When you say 3 other pages of yours, are they on the same site or different sites?
Yes one is on another site of mine and two are from my site
If they're on different sites, do their domains get their inbound links from the same domains that the domain of your missing page gets its inbound links from?
It's a niche topic so there are a lot of links that link to each other here and there. Not as link trades but simply to related pages.
But this is true of all my other pages and they haven't disappeared.
Can anyone explain all the www.www.www. could even be a valid URL? I can't see how it could be hurting my page but it is strange.
