Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Site profile:
~4 months old
Pagerank 2
1000+ pages of unique content (95% indexed)
36 hours ago we lost a large chunk of positions in Google Search which include mostly long tails terms (which collectively responsible for ~70% of our traffic). Rankings for our main keywords are mostly intact.
The suspect:
- We used to have 300-400 pages on our site some 25 days ago. Then we started a new section on a subdirectory, which created new 500 pages for the site in matter of 25 days. The pages are increasing everyday because the new section contains user generated content. To be specific, the new section is a Q/A subsite, like Yahoo! Answers. Our expert answers the users' questions daily.
Google bot seemed to have always loved our site because of new content daily (if not hourly). I see that new pages are still getting indexed but with very poor rankings. All the pages are still in the Index. Do you think adding a lot of pages in short span triggered this penalty? Do you think site age could be having an important role here?
One more thing, the traffic drop on the new section is more worse than the main site. Like I said we have lost long tail positions and the new section (Q/A) targets only long tails.
When I search example.com, it's still #1. The keyphrase without the "dot com" is however a pretty competitive term for which the site wasn't ranking.
Any suggestions?
Would it help if I exclude the new Q/A section through robots.txt for some time?
[edited by: tedster at 6:17 pm (utc) on Jan. 28, 2009]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it cannot be owned [/edit]
You say this blog is 4 months old - that is pretty young, and organic rankings often do not stabilize until further in a site's history.
It is certainly possible that more than doubling your url count in 25 days threw your domain into a check-up cycle of some kind. But only you can decide if those Q&A pages are something you don't want to see in Google's index. If they hold quality content, then I would tend to make no changes right now and continue to develop quality. It's quite likely that things will change for the better as time goes on.
[edited by: tedster at 11:46 am (utc) on Jan. 29, 2009]
Regarding Q/A pages:
- Content on these pages are very useful to users because they get all their questions answered by our employed expert. A large number of people used to come through Google searching for questions which were already answered, that's also the reason that we had pretty good returning visitors.
- Most of these pages don't contain a lot of text because we always tried to answer to the point without stuffing and spinning things. Questions are mostly 2-3 sentences long while answers are mostly 3-4 sentences long. Similar questions are interlinked automatically (related posts plugin in wordpress) Therefore, on anyday I'd like all these pages to appear in the index.
Search engines like more text content that I know but as Google says - Make pages for users no for Search Engines.
I hope we are not paying for being too nice with users and search engines.
