Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Has anyone recovered from June 4th catastrophe?
[edited by: tedster at 5:43 am (utc) on July 1, 2008]
Remember you dont build a site for the users but for google, if you add to much of the same text or links on each page to help a user find what they need you get filtered for dub. pages
How long ago was that? And was one request sent in for all the sites, in Webmaster Tools, or one request each?
some common things:
- all seem to be "normal" sites, no silly blackhat stuff
- if u search for domain name, all show up in 1st position in serp
- some lower traffic keywords are ranking as usual, but the ones that brought higher volumes have seemed to completely disappeared
- site:domain returns usual results as before 26 june
anyone else experience this? any idea whats up?
[edited by: tedster at 7:04 pm (utc) on July 8, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
If members here would like to work to analyze this situaition more deeply - maybe figure out what is triggering these falls in ranking - we need to "give it up" a bit more. Defending the "white hat" nature of your site doesn't help - clearly the algo thinks something is not good, whether rightly or wrongly. So, without posting any information that helps people find your exact site, let's talk about the factors that your penalized site shows. Maybe we can find a common thread.
So what about it - do these penalized sites show any particular character that might be the common factor? How many total links on the Home Page? How many characters long is the title element? Do you use any forms on the Home Page? Do the other sites on your SERP that were not penalized show something that your site is missing?
Were the ranking drops all around -100 - or more? - or less? Is the penalty position relatively stable, or does it show a "wave" or "yo-yo" character, going up and down like a roller coaster?
Except for a few cases, it doesn't look like this problem is going away any time soon. It started a month ago and it has mostly grown. So let's put on our thinking caps and let's brainstorm.
[edited by: tedster at 8:06 pm (utc) on July 8, 2008]
Also, do these apparently penalized sites make use of many backlinks from other domains that the site itself controls? How varied are the backlink profiles? Are you making use of paid ads, especially text ads or paid blog posts, that are transferring PR? How about running your own affiliate program with tracking strings in the links?
Also have a look at [google.nl...] I saw some changes there today.
I believe this is just a dance nothing more, you must also see it from Googles site, such a dance can get webmasters to make there sites more white.
I still wont touch a font on my site.
no backlinks from same c block or same whois info
Google can see domain relationships through many other avenues than these. The "nodes" that related sites create in a webgraph jump out as statistical anomalies, and Google has a ton of statisticians on the payroll.
Also, while the questions I asked were some that occurred to me, please feel free to list any other charactersistics your site has that might put it "on the edge".
I dont understand why you so quickly say that its a Penalty
You're right zeus, I may be jumping the gun a bit. But something started as early as June 4, and that's a long time. The phenomenon has only grown, not shrunken.
I don't have any domains under my oversight that were affected, so I'm at a handicap in trying to help. I plan to look at some SERPs to see if any competitors may have been caught up in this change. That might offer some clues.
My best guess. from all the reports here, is that this is some new kind of penalty. As often happens with new things, it's also catching some edge cases and they are collateral damage. We certainly can hope that the edge cases that are truly not up to anything dodgy are soon returned. And in the mean time, we certainly can look for common factors among the affected sites. Who knows, we may find something - we have before.
Damn I really see changes now, also on .com if this is not the case for some of your other i maybe know some tricks, we have to wait and see, can maybe also just be a dance
My SEO had 3 of his other clients with the same thing happen around the same time. We have both spent quite a bit of time analyzing the situation and we are both pretty convinced that it has nothing to do with on-site factors.
Since Google has obviously been spending quite a bit of time tweaking it's algorithm in an attempt to nail paid links, it seems far more likely that some of the links that we have acquired lately are tripping a new filter that was just put in place. Some of the links that we have acquired were on blogs that looked clean at the time we got the link but have since sold several more links and now look like obvious link sellers. We are going to systematically go through all of our incoming links and eliminate the ones that look "fishy" and hopefully will nuke the one(s) that have tripped the filter.
I know that the prevailing wisdom has always been that Google won't penalize your site for buying links because then your competitor could hose your site, but I think that wisdom is now out the window. I think that they have decided that they want to deal strongly with those that purchase links and that if some innocent sites get hammered that the collateral damage is worth the gain.
Just because it's an affiliate site doesn't mean it should be banned.
Right, and that doesn't happen. Do you offer uniqe information and services compared to similar sites? Or are you flirting with being a thin affiliate [webmasterworld.com]? If you are the central site and you have authorized affiliates under you, are they up to anything sneaky?
1) Sites with affiliate links
2) Sites that depend on reciprocal links
Number 2 is not always as easy (especially in the market where i'm in) to avoid, but number 1 is probably easy to fix if i put javascript links instead of using regular outgoing links (nofollow or not, it makes no difference is my exprience).
But.... if i change my outgoing links to javascript links (or any other suggestion Big G can't read and follow) am i going towards blackhat?
Tedster? anybody?
[edited by: ray19833 at 9:59 pm (utc) on July 8, 2008]
I basically do price comparison for the most part. The thing that gets me is all the sites were banned at one time. Some of the sites even had extra stuff added like text written by hand. If anyone has a contact email for Google or something I can try writing to them as well. No sites are under me. I don't think Google bans for being a thin affiliate site that is usually a penalty not a ban I thought. I'd have no problem with being penalized. It's the ban on 8 sites at the same time that irks me. This of course brought our income to a big zero.
And the mere fact of afiliate links is not a problem - but if the site offers little difference from what other similar sites offer, then that can be.
