Unknown Penalty on High Traffic 8 Year Old Site

[deezin]

Hi. In this email I am referring to my site that as of a week ago was getting about 25K - 30K visitors per day. I believe that it has now been penalized by Google, but I don't know why. I know that it isn't just a drop in traffic because about 3 weeks ago our major search terms dropped off the face of the earth for only my front page - from front page to nowhere to probably on the 999th google search page (but I was still able to search for it by name and by url and it comes up first). A few days ago (so about 2 weeks later) our traffic from google dropped so much that we only get about 5K - 10K people per day. It is a very odd penalty ... some of our pages seem sandboxed in which no matter what you search for, the page won't come up (but it is in the index because if you put the url in, it does come up) however, some of our pages continue to keep their number 1 placement. Here are some info about the site:

-Site still has a PR of 5
-I already have non-www pages redirected to www (this was done years ago)
-I always turn down people who ask for paid links
-I don't do 3 way link exchanges.
-I don't ever exchange links, but about 3 weeks ago (around the time trouble started)...I partnered up with a webmaster who has 2 popular sites. I did NOT do a 3-way link exchange...I link to both of her sites and she links back to me from both of her sites. However, this could be the problem so yesterday I placed a rel="nofollow" on each of the links
-I put a DHTML menu up last week but took it down a few days ago when we started having major problems.

PLEASE help if you have any ideas of what else I can do to try to fix things or find out what the problem is. Thank you!

[helpnow]

I have the same problem!

Been havign issues since October...

Do you have a WMT account? Any messages rom googl there? Do you have any duplicate content issues? Do you have google ads anywhere on your account? Any other affiliate links, however minor?

I suspect the issue for me is duplicate content. Take a look at site:yoursite.com, and set the number o results to 100 per page. Go through the 10 pages that will list. Be critical - do you spot any possible issues?

I'd love to hear back from you, as I think we have the same symptoms. I also had tons of page 1/#1 double indented rankings, I lost lots of them, but I still have some too. And I know it is not an issue with content, some of my former P1/#1 listignsd are now on page 7, but honestly, they are much better than everything else past Page 2, so, it is a "problem", not a page content issue. I am assumign duplicate content for me, I have fixed tons of stuff, and am waitign for googlebot to pick up my fixes...

Write back! We care!

[SEOPTI]

Where do most of the URLs appear for queries?

[deezin]

Dear SEOPTI - I didn't quite understand your question, can you please rephrase? Thanks. :)

Dear HelpNow. Thank you very much for all of your kind help. I am sorry to hear that you are having problems too. You must be so frustrated since you have been having problems since October.

Yes, I do have Google Adsense on my site. I also have one CJ advertisement.

Yes, I do have a WMT account and I just used it to find duplicate content and I did have a bunch of duplicate titles and duplicate meta descriptions so I spent the last hour fixing those. Thank you for the idea. There was no message from Google there. They are supposed to send over an email when you are penalized, aren't they? I really wish that they would...especially for sites that are established.

I did as you said with the the site:yoursite.com and I didn't find any issues....thanks for the idea.

Thanks for all of the kindness that you send my way. :)

Rachel

[edited by: tedster at 5:45 am (utc) on Nov. 30, 2009]

[kidder]

I hope we find an answer to this one. 25 - 30k per day is decent traffic. You might find the traffic is being shared around a bit more, it seems happen.

[HuskyPup]

I just used it to find duplicate content and I did have a bunch of duplicate titles and duplicate meta descriptions so I spent the last hour fixing those.

I had this problem with one site precisely 3 years ago as of now, the meta descriptions were my issue. None of us here knew at that time what was happening since many sites were hit however once I'd gone through every page the site bounced back stronger than ever.

Did we call it the -950 penalty?

[buckworks]

Something else to think about: check your site for code validation errors that might be causing problems for the spiders.

Spiders (and browsers) are pretty good at coping with less than perfect code, but once in a while the wrong kind of error can cause major grief so it's worth checking. Pay special attention to your master templates.

Even if code errors aren't the issue here, improving validation certainly won't hurt.

While you're at it, run a broken link checker on the site and fix any problems you find that way. In particular, keep a sharp eye out for old links that are redirecting to something different now. Better yet, run two different link checkers, because sometimes one will identify a problem that the other didn't report.

[Front]

I feel the pain guys, same issue here. Big drops in the serps since 26 october, some keywords stayed at their spot even in very competetive fields, while others dropped of completely.

I see some interesting things on our site:
> 3 word queries seem to do quite well.
> when I take a snipped from the title I often see pages rank that mention our page and link to it ( like look at "title page" and then a link to the full story on our site. )
> we see pages rank that are really not as good as ours ( no bragging here.. )
> older pages rank better than new ones.

We tried this some time ago
[webmasterworld.com ]

nothing changed yet..

[TheMadScientist]

Have you looked at internal navigation, especially navigation with repeated text in the links?

Also, you said you canonicalize your domain but do you serve the same content to multiple URLs EG:

http://www.example.com/some-dir/url
http://www.example.com/index.php?dir=some-dir&page=url

Third, keep in mind we're having our first ever 'Partially Caffeinated Christmas' season, so it's not a good time to 'just react' ... Make sure you have a good reason to make any changes you make and don't just make them because your traffic is down, because if you change things 'the wrong way' it could hurt you more in the long-run. (Just keep the preceding in mind, obviously your traffic is way down, so there's not too much immediate risk it would seem, but the point is, make sure they're long-term 'changes for the better' if you make any.)

[deezin]

Thanks everyone.

HuskyPup - In some ways this reminds me of the 950 penalty. I fixed all duplicate meta descriptions and titles last night. Hopefully that helps.

Kidder - Thanks for the comment. I think if the traffic was just being shared a bit more that my listings would be down lower, not missing.

Buckworks - Thanks for the suggestions. I just fixed validation errors this afternoon per your suggestion. I will run a link checker tonight. Thanks for the suggestions.

TheMadScientist - Hi. Nope. Everything on my site (other than the blog) is built static html so I only link to each link in one way.

Front - Sorry that you have been dealing with this since late October. I hope that all of your hard work pays off soon and you will get your site rankings back. :(

Thanks everyone.

[TheMadScientist]

I only link to each link in one way

That's one of the things I would look at... Some have reported OOP (over-optimization penalties) when linking using the same phrase too often in the link text. It's something to look at. Here's an example of what might be considered over-optimization for the term blue widget if these are your links:

blue widget instructions
blue widget information
blue widget sales
blue widget returns

other than the blog

How are the links and the text in the blog?
Are the links nofollowed when they are outbound?
Is the blog moderated (reviewed for spam)?

To me it sounds like Google made a change, not you, so I would personally be very reluctant to change anything, unless I knew I had to, even though that's probably not what you want to hear.

[TheMadScientist]

Also... Blogs are notorious for creating duplicate versions of pages (content), so it's probably a good idea to make sure there is only one version of the URL showing the information posted. Most popular blog software has the mod_rewrite to 'consolidate' the URLs readily available, but it's definitely something to look into and make sure you have installed.

[zehrila]

I would listen to what TheMadScientist has said, i am going through the exact same situation and it never got fixed. Fixing duplicate meta titles won't help, code validation won't help, adding unique content wont help.

I would like to think,

1: It has to do with your sitewide links. I would say Reduce them to 5, keep them on home page only and nofollow them.

2: Do you have excessive keywords in your footer? e.g smart widgets / blue widgets / green widgets / gray widgets. Remove them to see if it leaves a positive affect.

3: As TheMadScientist said, are you using specific keywords for internal linking? for example on home page, do all of your links use same keyword such as "new item widgets" "old product widgets"? If so, you might want to change them to "new item" and "old item"

4: Probably do not repeat your meta titles e.g "Latest New Blue Widgets - Download Fresh Blue Widgets" Instead use " Download Latest Blue Widgets"

Please let me know if it helps you.