Index Problem or Penalization

[martinacastro]

Hi

Since today my site drop down for many important kws and drop some positions (3 or 5) for not important kws.

For the most important the site drop down 70 positions, 150 positions and other kws I can't find the new position...

The strange thing that I see, that if I search the site using its name domain, appears in the page 5 and with a different title (not the site title of the homepage).

That's why I write in the forum, to know your opinions about this issue.

Thanks
Martin

[tedster]

if I search the site using its name domain, appears in the page 5 and with a different title

That does sound like a possible indexing problem. Have you checked for information in your WebmasterTools account?

[martinacastro]

Yes. It says in the HTML section not problems to index. The last update was october 21.

The strange thing here, is that some important kws are shown with the correct title (in drop positions) but if I search by the site name, the SERPs show a different title, that I don't know where Google took that title... Also less important kws drop some positions...

You recommend me to wait a couple of days?

Thanks Tedster for your comments

[kellyman]

Hi Martin

it may be somthing else, the same thing has happend to me at the 1st October, My big keywords dropped from postion 3 and 5 in google down to page 4, and my lesser keywords dropped around 6 or 7 places.

for me now its been 3 weeks and no movement, i ruled out a penalty thinking that if i was penalised all my keywrods would have dropped, but now am ruling out a technical error by google as i know they make mistakes at times but they would normally fix it by now

So im stumpped to find what is really wrong, im just continuing building links and hoping the site comes back to its first page glory

My webmaster tools has nothing negative in there except a massive spike in the crawling just before i dropped

other than that I hope you fix your problem, and if i find any thing else here ill report back

[Robert Charlton]

The strange thing that I see, that if I search the site using its name domain, appears in the page 5 and with a different title (not the site title of the homepage).

Martin - Regarding the altered title part of this only... there has been a discussion that Google is altering the title to fit the query, and the change in your title would fit this pattern...

Google is testing altered page titles
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4206724.htm [webmasterworld.com]

As for why it's on page 5 and not page 1, and for the other drops, that's hard to say without more information. I'm seeing murmurs all over that Google has been having some indexing problems, so you can be perhaps optimistic and wait a few days. I wouldn't make any site changes, but I would check out some basics.

Have you made any recent site changes? If so, what are they?

Rule out technical problems at your end.... check server header responses; search some exact search strings to see if your pages are returned, and also if you've been scraped a lot. Who comes up for your domain name instead of you? Use view as Googlebot on affected pages to see if there's any sign of hacking.

There are many more possibilities that you can check out in our Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] section, under protect your rankings.

[epmaniac]

we dropped for almost all our keywords and many positions too... traffic is at its lowest

[martinacastro]

Thanks Robert for your time and comments

We made a technical check and seems all ok.

We did not make changes, only little ones (some images and text update), but the last update was october 11.

We own 2 sites that have one link in the homepage to the site with the problem. We discover (unkwnoldge of us) that a script wsa generatins clon pages of the homepage so we have several links with the same anchor text from the same site... We correct this, perhaps this could be an issue, but we see a lot of competitor that have tons of links in the same site to the site that compite with us.

I hope that this correction and google index issue fixed, will help me to return top positions.

I will keep you update.

Regards
Martin

[martinacastro]

one update, we detect now a time out error loading the site sometimes at the night. I have the site in a shared hosting seems that abusive scripts put high load on the server, the hosting provider is looking that now

Can this be an issue to index?

Regards

[Robert Charlton]

Martin - Yes... either the clones of the home page and/or the timeout problems might have caused a lot of this.

Hard to say how Google would look at multiple copies of home page on one of your sites linking to the other. I'm trying to get my head around what urls these clones might have been on. Would also depend on whether they had any link juice coming into them from elsewhere.

My thought is that this should recover by itself once you've fixed everything, though I'm not sure whether the multiple links from clone pages... if the clones were referenced from elsewhere on the web... might have triggered a manual check. You might want to look at your logs to see.

On top of this, Google has acknowledged its own indexing problems that should be fixed soon. See notes recently posted on the October Google Updates thread... [webmasterworld.com...]

[epmaniac]

our site also has lost traffic and serp and we also face timeout errors during high load, we use pc-connect

do u think resolving time out issue willl solve serp drop problem?

[indyank]

High server load will definitely cause a few temporary issues.Do keep an eye on unreachable and timed out urls in GWT.

It will be better to investigate the cause and resolve the load issues. you might even have to consider moving to better servers if there is real traffic causing the server load.

[epmaniac]

do you guys think that canonicalization could be behind this slump

furthermore, we are not using html canonical tag but we are canonicalizing through .htaccess

referring to the posts mentioned at google forum about indexing issue, could canonicalization through .htaccess cause the drop?

[martinacastro]

More update.
I can see using my site domain as search kw, that Google change the title to other sites, so I not the only site with that change.

Also I discover that I site, that asked my (20 days ago) to link my site, had put the link at the footer (no at the bottom) and we can see now that the footer bottom is the same for all the pages! We are asking them to delete the link.

Robert about the clone homepage script. I cant disable the script, but I dont link it anymore, the pages generated will disappear if they dont have links to them?

Last but not least... My site is running fast now, let see what happens

Thanks again for the ideas/support

Regards

[indyank]

Also I discover that I site, that asked my (20 days ago) to link my site, had put the link at the footer (no at the bottom) and we can see now that the footer bottom is the same for all the pages! We are asking them to delete the link.

Do you mean a site-wide link and do you suspect that it could have triggered it? Were they using any keyword to link to your site?

[martinacastro]

The link is in the bottom is not the last text in the page but yes in the bottom and repeats the same in all the site. The link have kws that I drop now ...

Regards

[Robert Charlton]

Martin - Good that your site is running fast now and not timing out. Apart from other problems, that should help you a lot.

Robert about the clone homepage script. I cant disable the script, but I dont link it anymore, the pages generated will disappear if they dont have links to them?

I still don't understand what you mean by clone home pages? Are these simply non-canonical urls? Could you explain more about what's generated and why?

Re "dont link it anymore", not exactly sure what you mean. I'm thinking you mean linking one site to the other, and yes, that is wise not to do. I wouldn't link one site to the other site in any case, particularly if they are similar, but that's just me. I like to keep my sites separate.

Re the dupe home pages, Google may or may not see them. Google does pick up urls from publicly available server logs, etc. Please explain what these pages are, using example.com to describe urls, and maybe we can figure out what's going on and what you should do.

we are canonicalizing through .htaccess

epmaniac - Canonicalization is a good thing to do, and, on Apache servers, .htaccess is the best way to do it. This isn't a good thread for discussing that though... too far off topic. With regard to the recent Google drop and rumors of canonicalization tag problems (not the same as .htaccess canonicalization), the blog indexing problems discussion would be a more relevant thread... [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:55 pm (utc) on Oct 23, 2010]

[martinacastro]

Thanks Robert

The script that was running in the other site, generates random images each time than a user click in link call More. In other words when the user clic in "more" and new page was generated with the same content but different pics. The extension of each page, is like this:
domain.com/home.cgi?numbers+IPofTheVisitor (in google webmaster tool I see the IPs of the different googlebot). Google webmaster tool says that I have 130 links of this type.

About "but I dont link it anymore, the pages generated will disappear if they dont have links to them"

I mean that I delete the link "more" son the users or even googlebot cannot generate more /home.cgi?numbers+IPofTheVisitor pages, but the page exists because it was generated and google have it in its index.

Hope you undertand me

Again THANKs for your support!

[martinacastro]

Hi

some update, my site still not rank as last thursday (21 october), but I found for some kws, position 12, 65, position 360 for kws that were top 10, and position 460 por kws that were top 70 last week.
In other words my universe of kws, the 90% decrease positions.

My backlink profile is the same that other site that is ranking fine for similar niche.

I found some massive new links from footers/side bars (Im working to delete/disable them)

Seems to be google index issue or seems a penalization?
Any idea of google index issue?

Regards
Martin

[martinacastro]

Could the usage of a hidden counter, be the cause of the penalization/drop of my SERPs?

Regards

[brinked]

martin, do not rule out a penalty just yet. You can be hit with a penalty for certain words and not others. For example if you were found to have too many anchors for "blue widgets" you could get penalized for related terms that have blue and widgets for example "true blue quality widgets" but your rankings for "quality widgets" might not get hit.

This is from my own experiences. So dont think that a google penalty effects all your SERP's because it doesnt.

As for the hidden counter...I highly doubt that would be the cause, most counters are hidden, and most do put hidden anchor text such as statcounter, and I doubt google would punish the webmaster for that.

[martinacastro]

@brinked

Thanks for your post.

We discovered using WebmasterTools that 35% of the backlinks are from the same sites. We are trying to solve that.

Also we see now, that the GWM is counting mydomain.com as an external link to my www.mydomain.com

Perhaps the problem are there... what do you think?

[epmaniac]

hey

how do u know gwm is counting mydomain.com as an external link to www.mydomain.com ?

in which section? could u guide me?

[martinacastro]

@epmaniac

That info I have it at Your site on the web -> Links to your site -> Who links the most

I think that this is a canonical error ... what do you think? also I appreciate comments of the other members :)

[epmaniac]

my links to your site shows links from my subdomains

[martinacastro]

me also, but it shows only a few and says that I have more than 200 links, and all my subdomains pages sum 10 pages not 200, so is counting mydomain.com also as an external link to www.mydomain.com or I think that or google is confuse?

I put a 301 redirect from mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com

[indyank]

Did you put the 301 redirect, recently after seeing how google treats them? In any case, it sounds ridiculous that google is counting on links from mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com.

I too saw a recent suggestion in GWT to add the www version as a verified site, when i actually redirect it to the non-www version, and the reverse suggestion was made for the other sites. But someone did say to me that it is natural and one need to verify both the versions.Though some sites have been in existence for more than 5 years, google is suggesting this in GWT only now.So, google is doing something here and may be it is facing some technical glitches.

[edited by: indyank at 4:57 am (utc) on Nov 5, 2010]

[indyank]

My point is how can a domain be owned by one while a subdomain owned by another? Is that possible?

Even otherwise, Why should google ask us to verify the subdomain, when i have not set up a different site on it and explicitly asked it to track it separately?

[martinacastro]

@indyank
I put the 301 redirect today. I saw the links from mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com since last week but today I put the redirect.

I also discover now using yahoo that a third site is linking me to mydomain.com ...

[indyank]

It is good that you are redirecting now as you should have done it much earlier.

did GWT ask you to verify the two separately. I know that you would have already verified www.mydomain.com, if you are using GWT.But did it ask you to verify mydomain.com?

[martinacastro]

@indyank

By now I only verified www.mydomain.com. I don't see in GWT request or messages to verify mydomain.com ... I only have the add site option

Also in my site configuration settings I have as preferred domain: www.mydomain.com

Thanks for your support