Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Three years ago I set up a site on a .info domain, naively thinking that all domain extensions would be treated equal in the future.
The site has completely unique content, runs on Wordpress, and until the July update was doing very well in Google. I have a stack of authority backlinks from sites in my niche because my content is good enough to be referenced by them. Since the July update, Google queries have collapsed to a trickle, although oddly I still rank highly for several extremely competitive keywords but have been wiped out on most others. (There is another thread on WW discussing this same phenomenon but unfortunately I can't find it again - apologies). Indeed, most of my traffic now comes from those backlinks on bigger sites. Yahoo and Live queries have peculiarly become much more active in the same timeframe.
I use Google Custom Search on my site, and alarmingly since the July update it has become virtually useless for helping visitors explore my site because hardly any of the site's pages appear in it anymore. Yet if I google with the /* extension around two thirds of my pages show up in the Goog index. I can't understand why the CSE won't show the pages when they are in the Goog index and the search is by its very nature restricted to one domain. I have a few meta keyword and duplicate page issues in WMT but nothing outrageous -- it's hard to believe that's what sparked this problem. I do have text link ads on the site - perhaps it's as simple as being penalised for that.
Anyway, given I have had a meltdown in terms of SERPs, I am wondering if I should use this as an opportunity to shift most of the site's content to a .com domain. My pageviews can't get much worse at the moment and given the way .info seems to be getting increasingly penalised I am thinking to make the jump now and rebuild the site. The major thing that concerns me is how to redirect all those links from authority sites seamlessly to the new domain if I did it -- I've tried this before with another site and made a hash of it, so I could really use some advice.
Thanks in advance for any help
Advice on moving a site to a different domain [webmasterworld.com]
That thread is available in the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.
Now the big question - have you been penalized simply because of the .info tld, or will the current problem simply re-appear if you duplicate the site on another domain. I'd say it's important to resolve that before making any decision, since changing domains is usually not easy. What you're describing sounds like either a big fat penalty - or a big fat Google bug.
Right now, from what you report, I'm leaning toward a bug somewhere - either on your own server or in Google's data. Even with a penalty, I'd think that a CSE should work with all the pages that show in a site: operator query. That's why I lean toward the idea of a bug.
Do you have a Webmaster Tools account set up? There may be some good information for you in there. Also, do you use an xml sitemap? Might be a good idea to add one if you don't already use it.
[edited by: tedster at 4:58 pm (utc) on July 31, 2008]
thanks for the thoughtful response as ever.
Yes, I have Google WMT set up, and have had a functioning sitemap since 2006 I think. Until recently I had an XHTML sitemap too, but this has recently been considered a bad idea as it's more than 100 links to the page. I deleted that last week.
WMT tells me I have some duplicate titles (and they are very similar - <title>*unique word* blah same phrase blah </title>) -- but only on 30 of my 500 pages. They are not pages I have ever tried to rank for but rather drive traffic to from my unique content pages.
I agree with you that beyond the possibility of a paid link penalty or a .info penalty, the Google CSE results is the thing that's really puzzling me - I'm in the Goog index but it can't see me! I am also now seeing a trickle of keywords I used to rank for returning in my referrals ie I am ranking again for them. Really don't know what else to do - tried resubmitting my sitemap and have had some quality backlinks just this week from external sites.
I will go and ponder the link re moving to a new domain. Thanks again for your help.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:11 am (utc) on Aug. 1, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed specifics [/edit]
