Google Penalty to pages 4,5,6 on March 10

[CRedou]

Hey guys, I need your opinion regarding the fact that on March 10th all my rankings went down to pages 4, 5, 6...
Also by doing a search for domain its on pages 4, 5, 6..

Which leads me to believe its a penality placed on my network of blogs, I run about 51 blogs, almost all of them got penalized except for 8...

They all have adsense on them, 4 of these blogs i was optimizing and added all adsense ads to the header on march the 1st, so that might of triggered it, but why would the whole network be affected, unless google thought its a link farm....If any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Red

[goodroi]

-Did you log into to Google Webmaster Central and check for messages?
-Are the 51 blogs interlinked?
-Did you make any recent changes to the backlinks or content?
-Has Googlebots crawling of your site changed recently?

[CRedou]

Hi goodroi, thanks very much for your interest.

-Yes I did there is no messages.
-No they are not interlinked.
-No major changes, I have been doing some article submissions, press releases etc for the past 2 months, the sites were solid seo wise.
-Crawling stats look normal

1 thing I'd like to point out is that one of my sites seems to be coming back after i removed some adsense ads from the header and removing links page where i had people i link exchange with, not sure cause there are many sites with those links pages that were not affected.

Thanks.

[Planet13]

How in the world are you able to get good content for 51 different blogs? That seems like an awful lot of properties to generate content / edit / maintain quality.

While it does sound (to me) like it could be a minus 50 manual penalty, is it possible it is just a (delayed) result of the farmer / panda update?

[CRedou]

Planet13 be nice :)

I have a team of writers who update our blogs regularly, some get updated once a week, some daily etc We do our best, this has never been an issue with google.

Some tools tell me its a -30 penality, i am not sure if its manual, but like i said one site seem to be coming back...

It must be related to the Panda update, something triggered it.

[chrisv1963]

Even when they are not interlinked Google knows the blogs belong to one person because of the Adsense code.
Blogs are known to copy a lot of content from websites (last week I found more than 10 blogs that copied from my website)and a group of 51 blogs is suspicious.
Maybe this is a new step in the Panda update to protect the original owners of content.

[CRedou]

You probably on the right spot, adsense Pub ID is what i think linked all my network there is no other way.

the strange thing is the fact that all my blogs are clean with original content etc But I'm going to use unique Class Cs for each site, one of my moves was going to change servers.

[goodroi]

I have been doing some article submissions, press releases etc for the past 2 months

It is possible that the sites you submitted to were hit by Panda which made those sites block your submissions which would have killed any link juice it was passing. Some of the article submission sites are noindexing articles with less than 400 words.

What is the readability score of your content and what is the average word count per page?

[CRedou]

Average count of articles isn't important, there are sites that sell products and have no content, there are sites that report on news and don't post much info, its just common sense.

But to answer your question over 400, some less, it depends on the subject obviously...

I doubt article submissions sites would cause a network to a penality like this, it'd be easy bringing down your competition, its just not logical.

[linkbuildr]

Well, the links you were building to them, were you targeting the same anchor text pretty much? Generally when I see someone get knocked down to those pages it's due to that.

[CRedou]

We vary our backlinks pretty much, I have another blog on a different server and different adsense code which did not get hit at all, it gets 10K uniques a day, has same backlinks etc

[purple]

Similar happened to me around 3rd March. A group of blogs and sites I run got hit dropping to page 4,5,6 and I dont rank number 1 for my domain name.

I doubt it is panda as my site is not hosted in the US it is hosted in UK and targetting uk market

[TheMadScientist]

Average count of articles isn't important

They classify documents to specific areas ... A news site will have different criteria based on classification than a product site ... A product site will have different criteria based on classification than an informational site ... This is not the Google of 2005 you're dealing with.

We do our best, this has never been an issue with google.

That's what everyone says about what they do, until they get hit...

[CRedou]

hey Purple, one of my sites seem to be coming back, any improvements?

[purple]

No improvements for me, have you made any changes, and when you say improvements what kind of improvements. Do you have any page 1 serps

[Planet13]

Planet13 be nice :)

Sorry. Wasn't trying to be snarky (honest!), just a little surprised, I guess. (Although I am sure there are many on this forum who have far more than 50 blogs).

I have to ask one question to people who have groups of blogs (or are article publishers). How many human editors do you have?

I just ask because I have seen quite a few article sites say that to conform to Panda's guidelines, they are going to increase the minimum words per article to X amount. And coming from a print background (newspaper journalist / magazine writer for four years), I can tell you that number of words has precious little to do with quality of content.

Maybe I am barking up the wrong tree, but I would suggest that possibly some sites that were hit by Panda hire an editor from the print world (not me) and have them really look at the articles that they think SHOULD be bringing in lots of traffic and bringing in lots of money.

I know in the web world we get so focused on keywords and SEO that maybe we need to step back a bit and see it through other people's eyes.

Just my two centavos... (and I am not trying to imply that anyone here has sub-par content, in case anyone is wondering.)

[CRedou]

I deleted a link page I had where i exchange links from, it had tons of links, 2 days after site came back, but no rankings, just traffic weird yea

Planet13, agree 100%, I have 1 writer for each blog...almost all of them get 10K unique readers daily, they were all hit, it must be adsense related...

[purple]

How can you get traffic but no rankings?

[CRedou]

I know its strange man, analytics is WAY off, lots of people are reporting the same thing, some sites it tells me 0 visits and on adsense its making me some money and shows 2000 impressions for example, weird man

[Planet13]

I know its strange man, analytics is WAY off, lots of people are reporting the same thing...

I will add that back in mid-October last year, the bounce rate on my site dropped from around 65% to around 29% and has stayed around there ever since. None of the other key metrics changed....

[TheMadScientist]

Are you sure they're real clicks?
What do your server logs say about visits?

Are there 0 visits in your server logs too, or only for GA, JS (blockable code) visits?

[crobb305]

CRedou,

I'm curious to know how much of a traffic reduction you have seen from G? I was also hit on March 10. My traffic is down 58% to 62%. If you use WMT, look at the search queries, and run a report from the day before your penalty to the day after, then sort by average position change. Do you see specific phrases hit hardest? I have one 2-word phrase that was hit hardest, by an order of magnitude, over all other phrases. This 2-word phrase fell an average of 300 positions according to WMT. However, I see it on page 56, down from page 1, so in reality it fell about 560 positions. Nevertheless, I am trying to figure out what I did to get spanked so hard on this phrase. Panda? OOP? Both?

[indyank]

CRedou,

I had seen the same. Rankings were down after panda but traffic was high.I dug into this. It was like this for 10 days and on all these 10 days, direct traffic was up.So if my normal direct traffic would be say 300 constituting 10% of my overall traffic, on these days the direct traffic was around 1000 making it almost 20% of my overall traffic while search traffic as a percentage of verall traffic came down from 70% to 60%.

All these disappeared last friday.Now my search traffic share has come back to 70%.however, panda has wiped out a lot of US traffic and there is a big drop in my overall traffic.It had been artificially kept high for 10 days with some bad direct traffic.If you wonder why it was bad, read on.

On analyzing the direct traffic it was from all over the world like I would normally see from search traffic.The proportion of traffic from various countries was almost the same like i used to get from search engines.

But what was interesting is these people would come and just click on ads and go away.As a result the time spent on site was brought down heavily and all my metrics were screwed for these days.It happened from march 7 to march 16.Adsense eCPM from direct traffic was way high on these days.

Now the question is, who were doing these? Is it any competitor with big money? How could they have done that from across the globe?

Or who else would be doing these?

Do you see anything similar? go to analytics and check your direct traffic.See whether it is up for you. If yes, analyze it by choosing country as a parameter.Also check the adsense eCPM for this direct traffic.

This kind of attack is not just to screw up with adsense but also other usability metrics that google is said to analyze after this panda update.

[indyank]

Another interesting fact was that though the direct traffic was to most of my pages, it was distributed to my pages in the same proportion as search traffic.Thus, direct traffic to my top pages were higher than to other pages.

Normally, the proportion of direct traffic would be higher to recent pages but during this attack period direct traffic almost behaved like search traffic, except that they didn't stay long and just clicked on ads and went away. They just screwed up the avg. time spent on site.

[tedster]

That does sound like an attack - I wonder if it was intentionally timed to coincide with Panda. If so, that would be the creation of a very devious mind.

I have not seen that kind of direct traffic in any of the sites I analyzed for Panda effects. It sounds automated, doesn't it - especially when you consider the ad clicks.

[indyank]

Yes Tedster, it does seem to be a well planned one.But what surprises me is not just the timing but the following.

1) How do these people know the traffic to my individual pages? The traffic was sent in the same proportion as search traffic.

2) How come they managed to send it from all parts of the world? The highest as anyone would have expected was from India followed by U.S., U.K. and so one..

3) Why has google not discounted these ad clicks, as these obviously look like a click attack with the intention of damaging not just adsense but search traffic as well.All these happened for 10 days.Looks like someone hired someone for 10 days.

4) Do anyone here know on how I can take this to google? Can someone pls. help on this.

[tedster]

...ultimately it is the publisher's responsibility to ensure that the activity on his or her ads is valid. For this reason, we highly recommend that you review our tips for preventing invalid activity. You can also notify us of sabotage incidents

[google.com...]
The red type above indicates https links - they don't work with our board software here so please copy/paste the link at the bottom of the quote box to visit the Adsense page directly. I believe that second link (notify us) goes to a form within your Adsense account.

The kind of geographic variety you describe can be accomplished through proxy servers, networks set up like Mechanical Turk, or even a botnet.

[mark79]

The same has happened to me.
Sites that were on first page have been sent to positions between 45 and 60.
They all had same adsense pub id. Two sites that were on same server and didn't have adsense get also the same penalty.
The sites weren't interlinked.

I suppose it's a manual penalty and there isn't much to do.

[CRedou]

"indyank" I seen what you said on 1 site, the direct traffic is way up but there is no rankings...

Its not a manual thing, its a filter that triggers, after making some changes i hear it takes 90 days to get out..

Searchig for "mysites.com" it comes up but when you do "mysite" its on pages 4, 5, 6

Also all pages still indexed, PRs are the same...which leads me to believe its temporary...

I also might think having the same adsense code on all is an issue, so i might split them to 2

[mark79]

@Credou

it's exactly what happens to me.
searching for mysite.com the site comes up on first position but searching for mysite they never come up before page 4.

i also noticed that a competitor has the same problem since the same day.

i wonder what can be the problem. content on sites is original and they are updated on regular basis.
backlink strategy is not the same on all that sites.

i have no idea.