Went from #1 ranking to lower than 500

[gbgamblers23]

Alright, one of my sites had few top three rankings in my key terms, and all of the sudden my site fell so low i can't even find it. When i search for my site via the site:www.example.com method all my pages are still indexed but i just can't find them when i search for the keywords.

At the same time i rank first in every one of these keywords on yahoo.

I'm wondering if it could be a result of using the same template on another site. I really like the template of have on said site so i used it again for a site in a completely different niche. The content is completely unrelated but does anyone know if this could be the reason for my sites sudden drop into oblivion?

any helps appreciated, thanks guys

[phranque]

have you checked out the Google Hot Topics - FAQs [webmasterworld.com]?

[pageoneresults]

Did you make these changes recently?

new webmaster please help with redirect
redirect url to url.html
2009-01-10 - [webmasterworld.com...]

How new is your site?

an inner page is indexed but no other pages or homepage
indexing
2009-01-30 - [webmasterworld.com...]

[SEOPTI]

Lower than 500 is a -950 penalty.

[antoineFR]

You could check this point :

Verify that your have not duplicate content troubles.

You can check it via a google request with your company name (if possible).

Check also if there is not another domain that drive to the same site content so that Google gave him more rank.

For exemple for one of my clients.

He was always on top 5 of very good keywords, he had a domain example.com . Suddenly he drops.

I realize that there was the same site in .fr and google gave penalty to the example.com. I made a 301 on example.fr to example.com and two weeks after it was ok again.

Cheers.

[edited by: tedster at 9:31 pm (utc) on Feb. 8, 2009]
[edit reason] switch to example.com [/edit]

[ffctas]

check for over optimization on affected pages

[gbgamblers23]

redirect url to url.html
2009-01-10 - [webmasterworld.com...]

How new is your site?

an inner page is indexed but no other pages or homepage
indexing
2009-01-30 - [webmasterworld.com...]
"

pageoneresults, no i didn't make any changes but my site did end up getting completly indexed

ffctas, i don't think it's overoptimization since i haven't changed anything but i'll test some stuff out and see

[maddawg]

It sounds like a -950 penalty. The same thing happened to me and I de-optimized - stopped interlinking being the pages, there was a bunch of repetitive keywords in hyperlinks to articles that I changed, and am in the process of reducing the keywords in our main navigational menu on each page.

I haven't seen any results yet but this is the type of deoptimization that has been suggested in the forum.

[trillianjedi]

This may be related to your link-building strategy.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Robert Charlton]

i don't think it's overoptimization since i haven't changed anything but i'll test some stuff out and see

The algorithm and other factors on the web can change without your touching a thing.

I'm wondering if it could be a result of using the same template on another site. I really like the template of have on said site so i used it again for a site in a completely different niche. The content is completely unrelated....

Lots of sites on the web that have nothing to do with each other use common templates, and they have no problems. As long as the content, niche, and link sources are different, the template shouldn't enter into it. If you were throwing up hundreds of spammy machine generated sites, or creating a closed link network, Google might look to template signatures to help track them down, but that doesn't appear to be the situation here.

I repeat the above suggestion of doing some reading in Hot Topics, which is pinned to the top of this forum's home page.

In particular, do some reading on the minus 950 penalty. Since your site was previously top-ranking, I'd say, without knowing anything further, that the minus 950 is a natural place to start looking. This penalty often does involve a degree of overoptimization. Here's a good intro thread....

Google -30 & 950 Penalties - brief summaries
[webmasterworld.com...]

[gbgamblers23]

thanks for all the advice robert, trillianjedi, and everyone else. I'll spend a few hours reading through this stuff and see if i can finally get this fixed haha it's killing my traffic

[asinah]

It could be that you exchanged links or 3way links. A friend of my called me last night and told me he doesn't rank any more for most of his keywords. He told me that doesn't know what happened but he run some link campaigns. I advised him to dump the links ASAP because from my experience manipulated link building is a waste of time and I stopped it 5 years ago.

[gbgamblers23]

alright i think i figured it out, i was using a 301 redirect for the affiliate links on my site because i didn't like how the links would be to xyzljk.tld/93084aff=?238479 or whatever so i made a 301 redirect in my htaccess file that redirected the links to something like www.example.com/recommended/product .

I guess google saw this as a shady redirect and penalized my site. So my new question is does anyone have a method of affiliate redirects that isn't penalized by google? Maybe using a php script or something instead, possibly using no follow and robots.txt to block the links? One more quick thing do i need to have an actual file on my site for the file im linking to if im using 301 redirects via my htaccess file or is that not needed? ( as of right now i dont have any files for the links and it works just fine but maybe that could be a cause of the penalty too?)

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 3:34 am (utc) on Mar. 3, 2009]

[kidder]

Use nofollow for an affiliate link, I use this and a php click counter and don't have problems.

[trillianjedi]

I guess google saw this as a shady redirect and penalized my site.

I have never known Google to penalise for redirect scripts. I have used them for years and never had a problem.

WebmasterWorld uses one and does not appear to have a problem.

So I don't think it's related.

[gbgamblers23]

trillianjedi

I don't think it was just because i used a redirect but rather because i set up 301 redirects to affiliates so when a user would roll over my links they would come up as www.example.com/recommended/product.html

I'm positive it is something related to this since my site got hit hard ( like 950 hard ) in a niche that isn't competitive and i have the only domain name with the niche and the only site that is devoted to this niche. Honestly as soon as my site was penalized i started a blog and put one post on it about the niche with a link to my site and that blog has a top ten ranking on google.

And it must be related to the links because the site is identical to a few other sites i have (template wise) the only thing different is the content and the affiliate links.

I really think what i need to do is what kidder said and no follow the links and possibly even block the directory ( which isn't even a real directory on my site) with the robots.txt. Heck maybe ill go so far as to buy a domain soley to host my affiliate links then just directly link to the new site haha

[nalf]

Please let us know what happens with your site. I have the same kind of problem.

[gbgamblers23]

yeah i will, i took out my affiliate links and filed for re-inclusion so we'll see what happens

[gbgamblers23]

just updating for anyone who was wondering

my site is still under penalty, im still getting ok traffic numbers ( around 700 uniques a day give or take a few hundred 100 or so ) but still not listed anywhere on google's top 900 ( still number one overall on yahoo though )

[gouri]

If I could ask, how many uniques were you getting a day before having a penalty?

[gouri]

I think 700 unique visitors a day if you have a penalty is really good and I hope you get out of it and return to the traffic levels that you were at.

Looks like you have really good content.

[johnnie]

This surely smells like a penalty. -950s are usually handed out for cloaking, landing page spam, hacked sites and other severe breaches of TOS. Have a look at your site's security, maybe you've been affected by parasite hosting.

[gbgamblers23]

gouri - my traffic averaged around 1000 uniques a day before hand (according to GA, it varies a little depending on the analytics software) but my traffic has stayed up because of some luckily timed reviews and quality links in the last couple months. I don't know if the content is anything special, i found a pretty niche with a good amount of search's with next to no competition ( literally i made a blog when i was penalized and it's on the 1st page now )

johnnie - that's what i'm thinking as well, i was using htaccess redirects for my affiliate links but i wasn't no following the links, using php pages, or blocking anything with the robots text. I think the problem might have been that google would follow the links to pages that didn't exist ( i didn't even have blank files on the server) and the htaccess would automatically redirect them to my affiliate links.

My intentions weren't to be "shady" but i didn't like the "shady" looking links used for the affiliate network ( ie zjkdosy.tld/19287-dsf-392479fjhs) or whatever.