Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
What you describe does sound a bit questionable to me. Google may be looking for some real editorial judgement, rather than favoritism.
I'm kind of in a catch-22. I can't remove my own links because that would cost me sales but I don't want this to cause me penalties with google either.
[edited by: Northstar at 7:22 pm (utc) on Aug. 27, 2008]
But no, it doesn't require a reciprocal link to cause ranking problems.
I run a couple search engines. The first five or so links in each category are links to my own sites (same hosts and IP's).
If I'm understanding you correctly, these links are appearing in your search results.
Are you by any chance linking to your search results themselves... ie, are those pages appearing in the index... or is Google somehow spidering them? Google doesn't like that to happen, whether your own sites are in the results or not, and offers this in its Webmaster Guidelines [google.com]....
Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.
See also Matt Cutts on this...
[mattcutts.com...]
Blocking those results pages therefore would solve a multitude of potential problems.
Tedser: thanks for the help, Is there a way to check for parasite hosting on my site?
...the site I own don't show first in searches on my page. I'm displaying my links first on every directory category page. My directory is divided into different categories and the first ten links on each category page are usually my sites.
I'd say that this degree of interlinking, whether or not it's the cause of your July problems, is not a good practice and is liable to lead to problems... particularly with sites that have related content and share IPs.
If this were a minor part of the overall link profile of these sites, you might get away with it. If it's a large part of the overall link profile of these sites, then, IMO, you're asking for trouble. Each site should have its own independent set of inbound links.
... yo-yo penalty every July...
That said, with regard to the July Yo-Yo that you've been noticing, I've never seen Google apply cross-linking penalties in a way that varies by the calendar. Did you actually observe this Yo-You problem last July (and the July before) as well as this July? "Every" is a big word.
If all of the sites have been showing similar problems at the same time, though, then either the entire market area is being subject to the same kind of Yo-You testing by Google, and for some reason that's been happening in July... and/or Google is seeing some sort of commonality among the sites and for that reason is hitting them all at once.
Such silly rules people/search engines come up with.
Is there a way to check for parasite hosting on my site?
Yes, run link checking software like Xenu on your domain and examine every outbound link it finds. Parasite links are often invisible inn a browser, but software will catch them.
Also, you might do a search over your source code for any <iframe> tags that you didn't put there.
Linking to your own sites is bad because it is not possible for the same entity to create more than one great website.Such silly rules people/search engines come up with.
Google actually hasn't articulated any rules.
The way Google looks at it, as I believe based on sites I've observed, is that if you have created more than one "great" website, then each of these great sites should be good enough to gather its own great inbound links from "great" independent sources. In that case, you may not have a problem.
Generally, though, multiple websites are created to take an easy route which leaves footprints... and these footprints generally include common hosting, similar content, crosslinking to boost ranking, not many other inbound links from independent sources, and lack of greatness.
If you have created independent websites that are truly "great" and satisfy independent needs in the same market area, it's possible that they will do well. I've found that it's easier to create one great site than many mediocre ones... but I've also seen that creating completely independent sites in the same market area can help you ride out the vicissitudes of a Google algo change.
That said, Google only has ten natural search spots on its home page... and it's clear that as competition increases and Google attempts to display results from different verticals, those ten spots are going to be subject to great scrutiny. Common ownership may well be something that Google is looking at. Common hosting, similar content, mini linking networks, and crosslinking are definitely under the magnifying glass.
I have a second directory style site that was good till this year and now I'm seeing the same yo-yo with this site as well. I lost 70% traffic to it on July 13th it came back Aug 16th for three days then gone again. It seems the same google filter, penalty or whatever is happening to both of my sites now. I'm really at a loss as to what I'm doing wrong. My competitors don't seem to be effected.
The only thing I could come up with so far was this linking to my own sites. To explain what I'm doing further. I have directory categories in each category this first 5-10 links are sites of mine that are related to that category. After my top sites are hundreds of user submitted site links. I'm not sure if the problem is linking to my own sites first or I wonder if it could also be because my content doesn't change enough at the top of the pages. Because I'm linking to my own sites first only the new submitted links add new content weekly and they are halfway down the page in each category. I'm not sure if ether of these could cause this problem I'm experiencing.
After my top sites are hundreds of user submitted site links.
Are these links nofollowed or do they pass PR?
If they pass PR...
a) do you accept all listings?
b) or, do you edit the directory and reject some submissions?
If (a), this may also be a source of problems. Additionally, do you check to make sure that you're not linking into bad neighborhoods?
I can't comment about the annual pattern, except to ask whether there's a seasonal aspect to your market area.
I will say that it's a setup that sounds like it would be prone to lots of problems.
I do try to monitor the submitted site and reject some of them. I just went through my link database and found about a 800 old links that may be considered bad naighbors and removed them. But that is out of 35,000 links total so I would think that 800 would have caused all of these problems for my site.
[edited by: Northstar at 11:35 am (utc) on Sep. 2, 2008]
Other reasons for traffic drops fall into categories - for instance you have filters, algorithm changes, seasonality changes, the "yo-yo" cycling that some sites pick up, safe-search issues, changes in the PR formula, changes in Google's evaluation of domains that link to you.
What you can do is study your situation closely, looking at the data from good times and comapring it to rough times. Sometimes the light bulb goes on.
In your situation, I think it's a little early to decide that rel="nofollow" had no effect. Give it a few more days.
Is they anyway to varify a penalty?
Check out the Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] section, pinned to the top of the Google Search forum home page, and look at the Penalties, Sandbox, and Trust section.
