Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I thought this was worth posting; any help/advice would be greatly appreciated!
Here’s my story: A site of mine was doing really well in the SERPs, coming one and two for some great keywords.
It has over 3000 pages of content, all of which are unique; contain pictures and helpful links which offer the reader more information on the same topic, articles were never below 500 words.
One day, all the SERPs disappeared. Now, the only thing it ranks top 10 for is 'example.com'.
The site now only receives traffic from Google images, 90% of the traffic before it was penalized was from Google.
After investigation, I’ve listed the possible motives behind this penalization:
Three days before the site disappeared, I sold 5 links on the homepage. (which I have now removed).
Two weeks before the site disappeared, I added one affiliate banner per page, masked the link to: example.com/go/affiliate.php and disallowed the directory /go/ in robots.txt (which I have now removed).
Lastly, the only other reason I can think of is theme links. I would say 50% of all my back-links are from blog themes, all of which helped me achieve these great SERPs over a year ago.
I've sent of a reinclusion request in webmaster tools after removing everything that I think could have caused this to happen.
Just to note, the site is included in Dmoz and Yahoo dir.
The site is isn’t a MFA, it's a real great addition to its niche and it used to receive some great comments whilst it was in G’s index.
I’m not sure what to do about this from here on, a great site that had on average 5 new articles posted a day and helped out a lot of eager researches may as well not exist!
Looking forward to your replies,
Thanks!
Lee
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:06 am (utc) on April 30, 2008]
[edit reason] changed to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]
1. Google may have started to be treating bartered links (I give you "free" website theme <> you give me sitewide footer link) similar to purchased links? I think it is fair (and aligns with Google ideology/PR) to make these theme footer links rel=nofollow. If your theme is good, eventually some popular sites using your theme will send more and more visitors.
2. Could be much simpler - sitewide footer links from elsewhere, in combination with trustrank, enough to trigger an algo penalty or manual review. There are hints on sitewides in other threads.
3. Something else
Lastly, the only other reason I can think of is theme links. I would say 50% of all my back-links are from blog themes, all of which helped me achieve these great SERPs over a year ago.
I don't know if your themes were for WordPress, but you should see Matt Cutts' comment on this...
By the way..
[mattcutts.com...]
By the way, in case it isn’t clear from my previous post about hidden links and disclosure of paid links, I agree 100% with Matt Mullenweg’s post about sponsored themes in WordPress.
