Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have one year old site (directory of widgets, no original content, affiliate links but not everywhere), which is currently with a penalty - has almost all pages with grey bar (one page even has natural PR5 link but still grey bar).
After reading this forum a lot (thanks to everybody, please continue your good job) I understood, that I made lots of mistakes from the beginning:
1. I used links with underscores throughout the website, but later found out that it's much better to use dash, so I 301-ed all old links to new.
2. I didn't disallow links to widgets affiliate links which point to my site but get redirected to vendor site, so G indexed thousands of those links with no content at all, no a single character. site: command showed 70000 pages some time ago but then suddenly it started dropping and eventually dropped to 4000. If I search site: on search.aol.com it finds only 150 pages - the rest in supplemental index.
3. After some honeymoon (not competetive keywords) I got to sandbox (back then I thought I did, but not I'm not sure, may be just a penalty), so I started optimising it very badly and I believe ended up with over-optimisation. It was in May-June, I got tired and believing the site is still in the sandbox just stopped working on it.
In December I started again with reading forum and hoping to get out of the sandbox (or any other filter/penalty). I substantionally removed over-optimisation, took care of duplicate content ( I previous ly had many pages with nothing on it, like "Nothing was found" but with main keyword in H1 and title/meta - of cource now I understand it was very big mistake as well.
I want to continue developing the website, to make reviews of widgets, to buy nice design with nice logos, to add other extra features like user-area, etc., but at the same time don't want to waste time in case if sites with such a disease never ever appear in serps again - may be it's just easier to copy everything across to a different domain name and start from scratch?
Following Google guidelines, they are alright with affiliate websites as long as there are extra nice features to visitors - tools, reviews and so on. My idea is to add a few nice features and send reconsideration request describing what I've done and how it can help my visitors.
If you have any thoughts, opinions, experiences - you are heartly welcome.
Thank you.
If the pages are in the index - search for [unique strings of text]. If you find your pages, then they have page rank; then eventually, if your act is properly cleaned up, they will get visible pagerank.
With the site's history, it may take a while; possibly months - don't forget that visible page rank is always several weeks, sometimes months out of date.
Sometimes I have visits from Google, but as a click on last result in serps, sometimes right before ominous "Some pages were omitted".
I hoped to get rid of some grey pages after last-December PR update, but in fact this page I referred before (with link from PR5 page) had PR4! - but now grey. If I search by thid keyword another page comes up - wich has list of widgets and this widget is on it.
It definitely looks like a penalty, so my biggest worry is whether or not to appear in serps any more...
- Has your server exerpeinced dubious activity lately? Try http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=[URL]
[edited by: tedster at 2:36 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2009]
[edit reason] delink the url example [/edit]
You made major changes in December; have they (yet) made a difference to (a) your key search results and (b) your Google referrals?
If your Google referrals are rising, personally I'd wait a little while, then look afresh at the site, and try to see what still needs work.
If referrals are not rising, then you may need to look more quickly. But, where you can, give Google time to digest changes, or you may miss out on Good News by simply changing again before you get the benefit!
Always think of SEO as a long term duty; quick fixes got you into trouble - they won't get you out of it. :)
Reminds me of the old prayer "God, please give me patience - and give it to me NOW!"
Content is not unique, it contains vendor descriptions and specifications, but there are heaps of sites like mine in the serps having good ranking.
No, after all onsite changes nothing changed in terms of amount of traffic from Google.
I have been waiting for almost a year without result :(, can wait longer, but would like to make sure all thi waiting will give result, that supplemental pages can go to main index.
I recently submitted sitemap, WMT reports some 6000 pages already in the index.
May be this case is very similar to those you encountered with in the past and know how to fix?
- Why would google bother indexing and serving up a site to its users if its content is identical to other sites?
- If there is little intra-page variation, why index the entire site?
Maybe you should consider adding some unique valuable material to your site. Think of in the lines of product guides, a gadget-blog or anything else that might be enjoyable and useful to your customer. You can also try implementing a product review functionality, so your customers can do part of the job that is called content creation. Dont purchase reviews in bulk; they'll be duplicate and often times worthless. Instead, incentivize your customers to do a review 2 weeks after they receive the product. Give them a coupon code upon submitting an accepted review, maybe enter them in a prize drawing... Possibilities are endless if you need content created for you.
The main question for me is - whether this site already doomed to be supplemental or somebody already has an experience to move pages to main index...
