Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Short summary:
QUESTION:
What should I do to recover?
I told the customer that one thing that may help get us out of Google jail would be to buy a Yahoo Directory listing. This carries a lot of weight and could conceivably get us out of jail. Is this a viable solution?
Other thoughts I had were to try and get high quality links by creating <external> content pages with links back to the site. Perhaps a handful of these kinds of high domain authority links would pull us out of the penalty box.
Is this what is considered the Google Sandbox?The site doesn't seem to be completely de-indexed, just the main pages that I've been pushing.
Yet another question:
Some of the Article Directory sites seemed to share similar characteristics for login/navigation. In fact, some seemed to be near clones of each other. How could I check and see if Google regards these Article Directories as "bad neighborhoods"?
I'm pretty sure that this response from Google is directly correlated to the article submissions. What I'm not sure about is if it was the sheer number of links OR if they were bad neighborhoods OR if I didn't change the anchor text/deep link enough.
Help would be greatly appreciated!
- ZenGlen
[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 3:13 pm (utc) on Sep. 2, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics - see charter [/edit]
half the content the client gave me to post on the site, they had already published
A new site with substantially duplicate content is highly likely to receive an unfavourable interpretation. The best thing to do would be to replace anything duplicated with new content.
How could I check and see if Google regards these Article Directories as "bad neighborhoods"?
From the article directories I've seen I'd say, I dunno, most of them are probably bad? ;) I'd say this is doubly true if you are submitting to sites automatically - if a site accepts automatic submissions, then its quality has to be more open to question.
one thing that may help get us out of Google jail would be to buy a Yahoo Directory listing
Links are needed, but a Y! listing alone is unlikely to have any noticeable impact.
Note also that many newer pages experience initially good rankings, which then don't reappear for some time. See the Hot Topic [webmasterworld.com] thread Good Early Rankings - but they disappear [webmasterworld.com]. You'll find other threads worth reading in Hot Topics (always linked from the Google forum homepage) under the heading "Penalties, sandbox and trust".
You can also see others experience of trying to recover from penalties via a site search, e.g. [recover penalty site:webmasterworld.com] [google.com]
If I were you, I would give his money back and move on. He has already done several suspicious activities that it may be nearly impossible to recover for months, especially for a new domain.
I do use an off the shelf software that cost nothing and I could probably give you a list of over 1000 sites that use the same software. My site is not hosted with the preferred provider they advertise and I have try to change the layout and functionality as much as possible to make it different and the results I have seen for a few clients that use the site is very encouraging, especially for longer search terms.
In terms of what content you have been giving you are looking at issues already, especially if it has been used already on article sites. Time to get back to the content drawing board and start again.
You should use copyscape to check to see how unique the content actually is.
If you are going to use article site, make sure that you only use each article once, also test a few and see how they perform for you.
@Receptional Andy - (Duplicate content) I didn't realize how much weight that could have towards a favorable interpretation. Thanks for solidifying that in my mind.
(Article Directories) 90% of the Article directories required sign up and indicated that the articles would be reviewed. However, lots of other things didn't "feel right". Hind sight is 20/20, but in the future I will be sure to be careful about using free submission assisting tools.
Thanks for the links to further resources. I would never have had time to search through the forums for this stuff. (talk about vast!)
@ecmedia Respectfully, I don't think the client is a crook. A bit overzealous, in which it was my responsibility to just tell them to "slow their roll" and let me do this at a more appropriate slow & steady pace.
@whatleywah Thanks for the first hand insight into Article Directories. Clearly, it isn't easy to tell which ones to avoid. I think you touched on what is likely the more important issue though of making unique submissions to article directories when using them.
It would be nice to have a list of high quality directories. It would still be nice to have a method for determining "bad neighborhoods".
I was thinking that one could do a search for the name of the site and see if it ranks well or something. I read recently somewhere that a lot of web directories got slapped by Google, and when you search for their site names that they weren't showing in the top 10 results anymore. Good test?
Both of those are readily available. Google directory lists, you'll find a ton of them. Everyone's already repeatedly compiled any sort of directory out there that anyone's ever heard of.
In terms of bad neighbourhoods, everything is driving by backlinks. Check the backlinks before you get a link. If they're from solid sites and relevant, that's good. Otherwise, they drift into the 'bad' neighbourhood. That's what bad neighbourhood means at it's core; who's linking to who.
You can also check stuff like whether a specific page is indexed in google, how many pages the site has indexed in google, how many of the pages are greybarred, whether the listings are paginated, whether they allow deep linking to your site, and a few other things to get the idea of a directory's quality.
Check the backlinks before you get a link
I would also add, check the backlinks before you GIVE a link. Linking to a bad neighborhood is much more problematic for a site, because your outbound links are completely under your control, but your backlinks are not.
You can also do the standard quality checks before getting into any link relationship - especially, does the domain rank #1 for a search on [example.com].
It's not a complete deal breaker if they don't - there are oddities in the [example.com] search results, so it doesn't always indicate a problem. But if the domain does rank #1 for their own domain name, then you're probably OK. If they don't, then dig a bit deeper into their backlinks and especially their outbound links.
@ Wheel - You're blowing my mind here dude. I wasn't aware there were so many creative ways to use search options. Just didn't occur to me. Would be cool to have examples of:
* How to check specific page indexed in Google:
* How many pages are greybarred (What's greybarred?)
* Whether listings are paginated
* Whether they allow deep linking
If this is all in another thread, please refer. Sorry for my ignorance. Thanks for the help. If you opened a can of worms you can tell me to piss off, won't take offense. :)
@tedster With giving links, that point has been hammered home pretty well into my brain. However, I just had a thought about how much of an administrative burden that might be for managing blog comments. I suppose that's part of akismet's and wp spam free's job. But it occurred to me to mention it anyway. Great point about a site ranking #1 for it's own name. I read an article about that recently regarding a recent Google update putting the smack down on some nere-do-well web directories.
@rowtc2 Links - Yahoo reports:
2040 Domain
996 .edu Domain
1880 home page
1010 .edu page
This is way more than I really went after and the number was higher a couple days ago. These are mostly blog comment links and the majority seem to come from just a handful of sites. Over the course of 3 weeks, I really don't think I got more than about 200 links or so.
Will it help to remove the articles I submitted?
