Advice on saving my site! Traffic dropped dramatically after 3 months

[Mailarky]

Hello,

I put live a website at the beginning of january that reached 110,000 pages in the google index after just 2 months. I thought everything was going fine until this dramatically dropped down to 10,000 pages and continues to fall.

I released the site with 6 sitemaps and went through directories and forums trying to advertise it only at the beginning of it's life.

I have read through the forums and have come to the conclusion that i need to create a system that updates my sitemaps more frequently and try and get as many links to the site as i can. Are there any other steps i can take to bring my site back on track to how it was?

Also.. does anyone know if google blacklists as a spammer/abuser at this point? therefore basically giving no hope to saving the site.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

[edited by: tedster at 1:58 am (utc) on Apr 25, 2010]
[edit reason] no personal URLs, please [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello Mailarky, and welcome to the forums. If the site is relatively young, as your is, you may just have left the happy "honeymoon period" that Google sometimes gives to new sites. If that's what happened, then you've now joined in with established sites in the need to grow stable rankings via a growing user base and honestly established backlink profile.

Other than that, there are many possible reasons for Search Traffic drops:

technical issues with your site (See our FAQ area [webmasterworld.com])

technical problems on your server

a technical flaw at Google

algorithm changes

loss of backlinks (either removed by the linking site or devalued by Google)

sabotage behavior by a competitor or hacker

true penalties - cause by some violation of Google's guidelines

does anyone know if google blacklists as a spammer/abuser at this point

Yes, they do - but a permanent ban is not often handed out for a first offense. Not unless the manipulation was very heavy-duty. If you know that you've done something that violates Google's guidelines, then your recourse is to undo it as much as you can and come clean with Google in a Reconsideration Request.

[tangor]

Mailarky... Best give up and quit. You will never win. Best you can do is create 7 pages better than the 109,003 pages you've put up. Most folks will say I've donned my tin foil hat (and it is a doozy!) when I say the Goog has bit off more than it can chew, that phartopages (sic) are created every day by the zillions and they just can't keep up with it... but are determined to SERP every site, at least with 1 to 10,000 pages...and cut it off there. Letting all the rest reside in archive/cache.

I doubt that few will agree with me that the Goog, with 10,000,000 machines in x datacenters with a non transparent "Caffeine" algo can keep up with just the websites generated in India alone, much less all the rest of the world. Goog is good... it just isn't that good.

Every page needs to be unique in content to get their attention.

As I said, few will agree with me, but I have seen the writing on the wall. Goog can't keep up with production of pages/sites and is strongly parsing all content to a near "unique" as possible. I'd be very curious as to which of your pages rank, and which are not showing...

[Mark_A]

website at the beginning of january that reached 110,000 pages

I have to ask, just what was on each of those pages?

[londrum]

this is probably just that old sandbox thing. when your site is new google have no data on it, so they give it the benefit of the doubt. after three months they've got plenty of data on it, so it settles down at the proper level.

[drall]

Hi Mailarky,

That is just a huge amount of pages from launch. You will need a substantial amount of ibl action to keep that many pages in the primary set of serps. The content will also have to be pretty unique. If that content is used in anyway, anyplace else it is toast.

Just as an example on our PR7 site we have roughly 60,000 pages indexed and non filtered in any way and that is out of 150,000 pages and this is a 13 year old site with demon hordes of backlinks and handwritten unique to the world pages.

A long time ago in a Google far far away we used to be able to launch a site and see most of it indexed just based off of the homepage pr.

But today sadly the force in no match for the power of the dark side with its mass production of trillions of pages of junk a hour.

[kevsta]

this is the crux of this I think

website at the beginning of january that reached 110,000 pages

I have to ask, just what was on each of those pages?

quite how you ever got them to index a brand new site to 110k pages in the first place is a mystery to me.

they'll only crawl and index as deep and as much as your inbound linkstrength can support.

we have a PR6 client site with about 30k unique pages and they're still only holding between 50-70% of it in the index depending on what day you search.

and that's only if you believe the site: search really tells the truth anymore.

[helpnow]

site: does NOT tell the truth. It is broken.

[g1smd]

In WMT I see 950 URLs listed for one site. The

site:

search lists between 260 to 320 depending on the day.

It certainly doesn't give much away like it used to. The website is a bit more than six months old.

[cien]

Google needs competition badly. They need Facebook to get in the picture as Bing is useless. My site/forum dropped 100K pages in less than 2 months and I'm getting 10-20 visitors a day which I think are spam and harvester bots from thousands of visitors I used to get a day. Don't know what to do anymore to make Google happy. Leaving them alone won't fix the problem either. Google forums are full of these type of complaints as well as many boards out there. Income from Adsense dropped on my site obviously to $0. I'm thinking to sell this 7 year old site/forum and forget about everything online until Google gets some competition or their act together, which will be never? Google is the only search engine that matters and if they deindex your content... Yes, I'm about ready to cry LOL!

[tangor]

The "eggs in one basket" comes back to haunt us... Mama told that story when we were young and we have to be reminded of that common sense view as we age.

Google is not the only path, just the more traveled (at the moment). Bing is the other road. Yahoo still has mileage.

One is either in the game or is not game enough to play.