Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It was ranking on page 1 for its most competitive keyword and suddenly was out of SERPs
Website has a unique IP.
Below is the detail, i wonder what could be the reason:
Site wide links coming from two other domains of the same client with more than 1000s of pages. Some pages are linking to internal pages of the website and some are linking to the home page.
No content present.
A lot of JavaScript is used in the code.
404 pages in webmaster tools, few of the pages are not present and that pages are getting free links from other websites.
No link building is being done since ever.
Redirect loops are present on few pages, which is now fixed.
Website has more than 10,000 pages indexed and is still present in Google's index.
It is ranking for few keywords, but not for the major keywords it was ranking for.
Any help would be appreciated.
domain (important should always rank #1, if not your index has been davalued)
www.domain.com
domain.com
"domain"
If your ranking for a keyword has dropped, but when we type the four options that you mention and we rank for our domain name, does that mean that it is not a penalty but a drop in the rankings for that keyword?
Checking the domain name search is a basic step to begin learning whether there is a penalty - or technical problem - against the whole site. Also not every ranking drop is a true penalty, it can just be an algo change. But in the case of a dramatic drop such as awaisashraf describes, it often can be some kind of penalty.
Take a look at this thread as a good summary introduction...
Google -30 & 950 Penalties - brief summaries
[webmasterworld.com...]
Can you have a penalty for some terms and not for others?
Yes... as has been observed in various -950 threads, generally it's the most competitive terms that are affected, and on-page optimization and inbound linking are both important factors.
I'd also suggest looking at the Yo-Yo Effect discussion, though it sounds like you're not up that high in the rankings. It's perhaps different from what you're experiencing, but it should give you another perspective on the kind of churn we're all seeing on Google.
Yo-Yo Effect - Observations and Understandings
[webmasterworld.com...]
As the duration of some of these discussions should suggest, there is no one simple explanation.
I'd recommend as well that you do some reading in Google patents, also referenced in Hot Topics.
Site wide links coming from two other domains of the same client with more than 1000s of pages. Some pages are linking to internal pages of the website and some are linking to the home page.
awaisashraf - Top of my head reaction is that the sitewides from the same client might well have something to do with it. It's possible that they boosted you up temporarilly and then were discounted by Google.
A URL rewrite was done on February and appropriate title and description tags were added. The website started to rank on page 1 for its major keywords.
After Google update in November the website lost its rankings.
What i think is:
As the website has no content, this could have been a possible reason for the drop in rankings, because Google now lays more emphasis on On-Page after the update.
There was no link building done by the client, all incoming links are natural and 2 site wide links from the clients websites, but they are of different IPs.
Site wide links can also be a problem.
What do you say?
Here are the results:
domain - Ranks 166
domain.com - Ranks 1 with site links
www.domain.com - Ranks 1 with site links
"domain" - Ranks 154
No content present
As the website has no content
I missed that the first time I read your post. Yes, this would be the first place I'd address. Google would not want to return a search result to their users if there is no content there.
But I am not clear on what you mean, since you talk about 10,000 pages indexed, javascript in the source code and so on. In what way is there "no content"?
domain (important should always rank #1, if not your index has been davalued)
www.domain.com
domain.com
"domain"
...........................
Each page has optimized title and description tags, but there is no text present on any page.
Only product categories, sub categories and product pages but no description about the product with keywords is present.
Hope my point is clear now.
Remember, Google sees - pretty much - the code, not what you see on screen; so if you have twenty pages with the same bulky code, the same menus, the same links to the clients other sites ... and a couple of lines of 'unique text', then all your rivals, even those who use just two sentences, will do better. Now consider what happens when those identical-ish pages get into the thousands ... not a lot!
The site-wide links from the clients other sites probably don't do any harm - though that's possible - but they almost certainly carry virtually no benefit.
Compare your site with a few of those that rank well for 'your' keywords. Can you see Google's point of view?
1. get some content
2. clean up the navigation - xenu is your friend
3. remove the javascript - put it in external files where you can; if it does nothing useful, then get rid.
I'm wondering how old the site is? If it's fairly new, then the previous high ranking is probably the transient 'sandbox'-type effect. If it's older, I'm wondering what changed for Google to remove those rankings?
Quadrille - Website is 8 years old, so probably this wont be an issue.
I have an idea about what to do. So, thanks again for all the help.
When i said "no content" this might have given a different picture.
It can also be a -950 penalty.
Over 2500 pages were added in a day, and the very next day the rankings dropped.
Thin is not in.
The opposite may also be true. Very long pages (of mine) have more recently got killer rankings.
Over 2500 pages were added in a day, and the very next day the rankings dropped.
Google considers lots of new and empty or nearly empty pages a signal of spam. (They look like auto-generated spam pages.)
p/g
