Google link dilution issues

[Webguy0481]

So I run a website that has 40 1st result keywords, or at least did last week. Now all rank is in the 2nd, 3rd page!

Here’s what happened. The site has 2000 links, all indexes, performing well for over 5 years as first result. Last week I thought it would be a food idea to add a gallery. I uploaded 1500 photos, to a specialized gallery that created a new page for 20 albums, and all 1500 photos. So I added 1520 urls. The gallery extension I used added a page for every photo like a product. Immediately after I fetched on google this new directory, and uploaded my site map/ requested indexing of all links, it indexes a bunch by the next morning, and then bam. Result positions plumped. Traffic dropped like a website ghost town. I had no idea what I did. After reading a lot I believe I caused “link dilution”. Meaning I had X amount of pages with good seo and keywords, with ranking. Now I had X pages plus 1500 with bad seo. Diluting my ranking across those pages and removing everyone of my 1st results overnight.

I am trying I fix this now. I added NOINDEX to that directories pages, and will follow with a robots txt blocking that directory, but not until google sees my noindexes. Am I doing this correct? Should I fetch to show google the no index? Or should I change the directory name and add that to robots disallow. And let google crawl a ton of 404’s and remove them. I don’t know what to do and the fastest way to undo what I have done to get ranking back before it’s too late.

Please if anyone has any ideas, Im all ears

[JesterMagic]

So if I am reading this correctly by links you mean actual pages on your site or are you referring to internal links only?

[justpassing]

So I run a website that has 40 1st result keywords, or at least did last week. Now all rank is in the 2nd, 3rd page!

Sine you do not mention it, the question is : did you really lost traffic ? Ranking is personalized per user, per device, per day of the week, per hour of the day, etc... You apparent ranking loose might simply be because of a change of the method used to estimate your ranking. If you didn't loose traffic, then no panic.

That being said, what I would do (I do not pretend to be right), is add a "noindex" to the pages, and also remove them from the sitemap.

I don’t know what to do and the fastest way to undo what I have done to get ranking back before it’s too late.

Hard to tell. Indexing , scoring, ranking, spreading , all this is totally obscure.

ps: it's best to let Google (and other SE) find your page by themselves, instead of using the fetch tool (in fact, I thought the fetch and index was removed)

[Webguy0481]

"So if I am reading this correctly by links you mean actual pages on your site or are you referring to internal links only? "

Created actual pages and internal links to those pages

"Sine you do not mention it, the question is : did you really lost traffic ? Ranking is personalized per user, per device, per day of the week, per hour of the day, etc... You apparent ranking loose might simply be because of a change of the method used to estimate your ranking. If you didn't loose traffic, then no panic. "

Average position went from 1.2 to 15.9 overnight. Traffic plummeted with it.

"(in fact, I thought the fetch and index was removed)"

You can access it by clicking "use old version" or with the URL INSPECTION tool

[not2easy]

The Fetch tool is to allow you to see how Googlebot and visitors see your pages. If you are using it to try to speed up indexing, Google has said that is abuse of the tool and they do not appreciate that abuse. Read the news here, from last March: [webmasterworld.com...]

There have been numerous questions and complaints on the web recently, including several on this forum, about Google's slowness in indexing pages submitted via the Fetch tool. This has to do, it turns out, with spammers' misuse of the tool to crawl and index pages.

John Mueller of Google has said that Google has set "pretty aggressive limits there at the moment."

[JesterMagic]

Average position went from 1.2 to 15.9 overnight. Traffic plummeted with it.

That is pretty quick ranking drop for adding a Gallery. Unless this Gallery added/changed the source of all or your pages somehow (by adding a widget or something) I would think something else is going on. Does the date of this change correspond to any Google Updates as reported by others?

[keyplyr]

Check to see if your site is being hijacked by iframe (or other methods) and served from a different domain that has moved into your ranking spots.

To check this, do searches for phrases found on your pages. See if they are on other sites.

Do some detective work.

[Webguy0481]

That is pretty quick ranking drop for adding a Gallery. Unless this Gallery added/changed the source of all or your pages somehow (by adding a widget or something) I would think something else is going on. Does the date of this change correspond to any Google Updates as reported by others?

The ranking and traffic drop is identical to the date i fetched the gallery directory, and added a gallery sitemap. What occurred is link dilution, the page rank from my really good pages diluted amoung these 2k gallery pages that had NO seo on them. so probably had 1.5k / 2k 75% good SEO and now i have 1.5k / 4k 30% good seo pages.

My goal is to reverse this. To remove these pages. I have added NOINDEX to all of these gallery pages, as well as a 410 http code meaning "gone".

My question is, how can I ask google to re crawl these link if fetch is not working. Should I upload another gallery sitemap asking google to crawl it to find all the no indexs and 410's? I feel the quicker I get all of those not good pages off the google index the faster my ranking will (hopefully) recover.

[Webguy0481]

Check to see if your site is being hijacked by iframe (or other methods) and served from a different domain that has moved into your ranking spots.

No hijacking. Just too many new and bad seo pages. Every gallery page is simply header - photo - footer

[not2easy]

Don't submit a sitemap full of 410 response URLs, submit a new sitemap with only the URLs you want indexed. If you have uploaded a separate sitemap for the gallery pages and subsequently added noindex and a 410 response, delete that sitemap. If the gallery pages were submitted on the same sitemap with your other pages, resubmit that sitemap without the gallery URLs.

The gallery pages cannot contain both a noindex meta along with a 410 response. It is one or the other. Of course you could X-robots noindex the gallery directory and supply a 410 response.

[NickMNS]

So I run a website that has 40 1st result keywords, or at least did last week. Now all rank is in the 2nd, 3rd page!

At the end of September, one morning I sneezed all over my screen. After that my rankings fell and my traffic plummeted. I tried cleaning my screen but to no avail.

At this point your thinking, this guys must be nuts. And you are probably correct but likely for the wrong reasons.

Correlation does not equal causation.

Over the past two month Google has been rolling algo updates one after another. My sneeze coincided with an update, so in fact after sneezing my rankings did drop, but the events were unrelated. My point is that your drop in rankings has likely more to do with the recent algo updates than it does with any one specific action that you may have taken.

Here is link to SERoundTable.com with a list of recent reports, some are speculative and others confirmed by Google.
[seroundtable.com...]

Messing with NOINDEX and/or redirects or removing content or whatever is likely to cause more harm than good. At a minimum you should likely wait out the update soup, let things calm down and then reevaluate.