Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Hi
Let me just preface this by pointing out that I believe I have read all the relevant threads regarding falling page rank/dropped pages on google, and I have been unable to find an answer to my problem (apart from basic solutions).
We have a fairly successful site selling a lot of similar items, and we have been doing well for the individual item searches
Yesterday all of sudden we noticed that our traffic had virtually collapsed, with pages/searches that are usually on page one or two on google dropping down to 350th or so.
Now:
our PR has not changed
the pages are still indexed (about 30,000 for English language), but have dropped dramatically
We make many small changes, the only larger changes we made over the last month are:
1) Adding a Spanish site and then 10 days or so ago an Italian site, so adding 60,000 pages (half of which are now indexed in Spanish, not many in Italian). We've already had a German and French site for a few years. We've added these under example.com/es etc
2) Adding a link to our blog
We've not experienced this before, and although traffic usually drops after the 25th of Dec, it's virtually stopped, as our pages have completely tumbled in google.
We have been slightly naughty in scraping info from wikipedia, but we have done this for a while. There are also well over 100 links on the home-page, but they are all internal links and have been there for ages, so I don't think this has caused this.
The answer may well be that the problem sorts itself out in a week or so, but I'd rather find some answers now.
Thanks
[edited by: tedster at 11:58 pm (utc) on Dec. 27, 2008]
What appears to coincide most closely with your drop is the addition of those 60,000 pages.
One thing I'd look at right away is the internal distribution of PageRank, particularly from your home page, or from any page where you have a large number of inbounds. Did the addition of these pages, eg, add many links to your home page?
Also, how are these new pages integrated with your site? Are you doing anything like cross-linking all pages in different languages?
In your reading, did you cover the so-called -950 Penalty [webmasterworld.com]? I say "so-called", because the particular number used in that original name has proven to be a bit of a misnomer. -350 is an equal possibility for a ranking fall, as well as many other rather large numbers.
What Google has confirmed about that penalty is not much - just that it is for "over-optimization". If you haven't read up on this one yet, there's a LOT of discussion over the two years since it first appeared, [url=http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3215939.htm]beginning here[.url]/
The addition of the new pages in Spanish and Italian only added two extra links from the homepage, i.e. you can click on a link taking you to the homepage in the new language.
I have checked the internal distribution of PR, and it does not appear to have changed.
The -950 problem does reflect our situation partially, I would say where we differ is the fact that we appear to have been penalised for all search terms, and in all the three languages (English, German, French) we have been using for the last three years or so. There is just the odd page that is doing ok. For example we added a blog recently, and did well for the relevant search for that blog - we have now fallen massively for that search, too. The blog is under the same domain, so it appears that google is hitting all pages under our domain.
Another thing we have done is to do some automated searches within google to see how the pages in the new languages are doing. We have been doing these on and off for the last 6 months or so. I know google does not like this - do you think we may have been penalised for this?
Thank you
The addition of the new pages in Spanish and Italian only added two extra links from the homepage, i.e. you can click on a link taking you to the homepage in the new language.
Again, is there any cross-linking among the new pages, and to and from the old pages?
I have checked the internal distribution of PR, and it does not appear to have changed.
How have you checked this? Toolbar PR, eg (if that's what you used) is not a reflection of current PR.
Note, btw, that the -950 or -350 or whatever penalties can be triggered by changes in upstream linking, so changes in nav structure could have caused a sudden drop if you were already on the threshold.
The timing of the drop may be entirely coincidental, but with the addition of so many pages, I'd certainly look carefully at what changes you made.
...automated searches within google...
Excessive automated ranking searches generally would cause Google to block access to Google from your IP. I've not seen or heard that this would cause a rankings penalty.
There is only the usual amount of cross-linking amongst the new pages for navigation, etc, but no links form the old pages.
I have checked the PR using toolbar - what would be a better method?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by upstream linking.
Thank you
Anything as dramatic as that is bound to take a month or so to be digested and evaluated. Put yourself in the position of Google.
However you have done it, the googlebot has probably linked those extra pages to your core site and it wants to make sense of what's going on. Nowadays there are a whole pile of "oh so clever" webmasters trying to spam and misdirect Google. They have not suprisingly become very cautious.
My advice, now you have added those pages, is to stick to your guns and wait it out. Don't remeove them, it will only confuse matters even more.
Next time, slowly but surely is the the best way. Good luck.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by upstream linking.
To oversimplify...
Say your homepage links to a section page that links to many of your articles. Assuming most inbound links are coming into your homepage, the homepage is upstream of the section page, and the homepage and the section page are upstream of the article pages.
Link "juice", like water, flows downstream. If you make navigation changes on an upstream page or pages, that is likely to modify how your link juice flows to your downstream pages.
It's likely that the addition of 60,000 pages would change upstream navigation somewhere, and that could reduce PageRank flowing to existing pages enough to trigger the -950 effect... particularly if those pages were already on the threshold because of other factors.
