Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've noticed that several of my pages are no longer prominently ranking for searches to the keywords they are targeted (as an example 'purple bananas, green bananas, orange bananas'). These page's used to rank well for these searches and have done for a while. They are still appearing in searches but have been bumped from 4th, 5th to 160th, 170th. I have lots of other similar pages (targeted toward 'stripey bananas, dotty bananas, luminous bananas etc) that use the same structure (different content, meta data etc naturally) and are linked to from the same page and have similar numbers of backlinks, sometimes from the same sites. These pages are still ranking well. In addition to this, I have loads of other pages, not related to 'bananas' that are still ranking well also.
My question is, has anyone ever seen several of their pages penalised or sandboxed by google, while the vast majority of the rest of the site and the rest of their similar pages rank well? If so, any idea what may be causing this?
Cheers for any help guys
CM
The -950 name only describes the most visible and painful result. But it's going to be painful whether the re-ranking sends your url to page 6 or page 99. In my mind, whether the url falls 120 spots or 950 spots, these major types of ranking drops all point to one kind of process. We just haven't got a great name for it, yet.
What happens, if I have this right, is that the "raw" ranking order for relevance to a given search is next subjected to a further kind of re-ranking. This step shuffles the order within that raw set of urls, with no urls being added or substracted from the raw list.
A multiplier, or a possibly subtractor, is factored into the raw relevance scores, based on natural language thresholds. These thresholds measure all manner of phrases that are related to the query terms -- not just stemmming variations or synonyms.
Here's an excerpt taken from our Brief Summary thread [webmasterworld.com].
Everything I've seen since then has confirmed for me that there is a mechanism in play that is based on the logic of the spam detection patent [webmasterworld.com]...1. The re-ranking is triggered by crossing a threshold.2. The threshold can be different for different search terms.
3. The threshold can be different for different markets or website taxonomies.
4. The threshold is set by measuring and combining many different types of
mark-up and grammatical factors, and not by absolutely measuring any
one factor.5. The threshold is NOT set absolutely across all web documents. So phrases
in the travel space can be held to a different measure than, say, phrases
in jewelry e-commerce.The patents suggest scoring all kinds of areas, for example:
"[0042] ...grammatical or format markers, for example by being in boldface, or underline, or as anchor text in a hyperlink, or in quotation marks."
"[0133] ...whether the occurrence is a title, bold, a heading, in a URL, in the body, in a sidebar, in a footer, in an advertisement, capitalized, or in some other type of HTML markup." Note that measurements are suggested here for position on the page.
Going over the top with a "de-optimization" effort could deflate your pages to the point where they NATURALLY should rank at 950! So use a gentle touch, record your changes - and know that if you are just barely over some threshold then it might not take much to move you back.
Also, the threshold will be re-calibrated from time to time and you might "pop out" of the penalty without doing anything at all, or for reasons that are not related to the changes you did make.
In short, look for excessive repetition of core keywords, including in page titles.
