Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Well, How many of you still remember the mass penalty which was imposed last year on 4th June? is there any one who could report a full recovery?
Personally i have tried several things from adding fresh unique content to getting new links and fixing meta issues but seems like google is still angry. My home page is still ranking number one for very competitive phrase and few other deeper pages are ranking but rest of whole site is still out of serps even the new pages i added get time to index and show deep down the serps or doesnt even show up.
Now iam considering a totally new site on same topic and wondering if i 301 my old site which was smashed from 100k a day to 10k a day and now 5k a day would have any negative affect on my new site? I had worked really hard on my old site and i don't want to loose the amount of back links i have on it. I look forward to your expert views :)
In reading through, many people felt that the threshold for an "over-optimization" or minus 950 penalty had shifted. In fact your statement of ranking "deep down the serps" sounds like that.
Many of those over-optimization penalties are related to overusing keywords and their co-ocurring terms, especially (but not only) in anchor text on your site. Have you looked at your site from this angle?
I kinda agree to what you said about over optimization, i had made sure to keep my site optimized to extreme. I also think the penalty could be due to the same or similar type of meta titles which several sites share. This penalty has brought down my morale :( Tell me about 301ing this site to a new site with different url structure, metas, design, script?
Duplicating meta titles across several domains? It sounds like a very bad idea to me. Are the other sites ranking well?
Well, its only me who seems to be affected in that niche, my competitors are huge organizations and i out ranked them on most of terms.
[edited by: tedster at 1:37 am (utc) on June 8, 2009]
I was able to escape the June 4 massacre by setting up some sites on new domains or with 301 redirects (whole domains).
I have some terms still at number one, some pushed back several pages, and some down only a few spots but overall the result is I think around a 30 or 40% traffic loss and greatly reduced income.
Or i just make new site and 301 my old site to it?
Can you get hurt by 301'ing a penalized Web site to a new Web site?Typically not because it could be a case where someone’s trying to Googlebowl you. However, if it’s a site that’s penalized and that Google doesn’t trust, then you may not be getting that much juice transferring over anyway. Sometimes its better to just start truly fresh.
[edited by: tedster at 9:10 pm (utc) on June 12, 2009]
Day1: I have added a new page to my site, i selected a product which is due to be released end of this year, the reason i picked this product is because since it is far from its launch there is no competition for it which means it should rank instantly given that my pages are not penalised.
a: I added a related page to my pc section of site and since all my fresh content gets featured on home page which is pr5, this article gets on a pr5 home page.
b: Added 400 words of unique and quality information with images and a video.
c: Wrote another informative blog post on my other site and inserted a link to my first product page.
d: Submitted my blog article to digg and got some votes, then submitted it to couple of social bookmarking sites.
e: At this point my blog article is indexed and showing up on first page of google, however, my first product page is still not indexed.
f: After waiting for a while i decided to submit my first product page to digg.
g: Google indexed digg page first and now when i wake up in the morning i see my page is indexed as well.
h: I rush to check the if this page is ranking in serps for its keywords and to my extreme grief, my product page was no where to be found in serps.
I am now going to ask couple of friends to blog about this page or when writing an article about the product area put a link to my product page as a nice resource ( experiment purpose )
I will also submit my product page to couple of socialbookmarking sites as well as create a squido lens and a hubpage.
I would appreciate if you could suggest an alternate way of testing it or just give your feed back.
Thanks
[edited by: tedster at 7:00 pm (utc) on June 18, 2009]
So, I added one page, 300 words unique article, two images and one video in that page. Waited for a while and then wrote a 400 words blog post in my other widgets site and linked to page of my affected site, submitted widget site blog post to digg and few other social bookmarking sites, after few hours i could see my widgets blog post crawled by google and i could see it in the index, at that point it was not cached, only listed in index. Hour later i could see my affected site's page in the index, however, it only showed up when i searched for the url, it did not show up for the keywords.
Later in the day i added another unique blog post in my friends site which is of same niche and has high authority, i again added link to my affected page in that blog post and submitted that post to digg and other social sites, a little later my affected page totally disappeared from google, at that point i submitted my page to digg as well, after like two days my url was back in the index and this time it showed "Cached" but it still did not show up for the keywords any where in the google, amazingly the cache date was the same date when i created this page, i then declared this as a failure and planned to proceed to my next test at weekend, however, to my astonishment today 27 june (9 days after the original post in affected site) my affected site's page is showing up 2nd in serps for its keyword.
Although it finally showed up for its keyword but the time it took and the pattern it followed is weird. Interestingly it showed up number 1 in yahoo with in 3 days of its creation.
Now what do you think why it took so long to index and then show up in serps, with this test i can confirm that june 4th penalty is kinda over, however, the effects are still there which might only be overcomed by highest quality links and regular feed of quality content.
For what it's worth, I have been going on a link-building crusade, with slight (but minimal) recovery. Also, I always add fresh "new" content to the site, and again, the combination of these 2 has proven to have minimal positive resutls.
