Day After Day getting down in serps!

Can't stop going down! Do you have any idea?

[Noximus]

Hi All,
I have a site, quite old about 4 years. All the time the site was on the first page of SERPs for the very competetive travel related keyword. The place of the site in serps varied from #3 to #9. Two months ago the the site began to go down in serps. It got the place #11 than place #16, 20, 23, 28 and now it is on the sixth page. When The site began going down I began to take usual measures what we all do in this case, swap links, optimize better, add content and so on. But nothing helped. There is one important thing also When I check my site in serps with "&filter=0" it is on the old places. Do you have any idea what kind of filter my site has got in? The site is quite big, several thousand pages. Please tell me if you have any ideas or have had the same exparience. In advance thank you for any comments.

Noximus

[submitx]

Won't be easy to tell without seeing your site. Google is always expanding ontheir filters. Are you using any CSS with negative values? Sticky me your URL.

[Noximus]

I'd like to add some issues, keyword density is not high it is about 5-6%. I can tell that it is highly optimized, can this hart? Is it overoptimization penalty?

[ownerrim]

if the keyword density is what you say, why do you think it is highly optimized? the percentages you mentioned would seem to indicate that the site is not overly optimized.

you can actually boost your keyword density to 15% without making it spammy if you do it right (i.e. have enough logical and useful-to-viewer text on the page)

have you analyzed the density and backlinks of your competitors?

if you don't want to give out your url, i understand but i wouldn't mind taking a look at it either.

[Noximus]

I don't think that there is the backlink issue. Because with the approximately same number of links I've been on the first page for about half a year, Maybe more.
The problem is that the site began to fall dramatically in a short pariod, not month by month, it has been falling week after week.
I don't understand why I have got in the filter. I don't have any relations with any adult sites also. When I search my site with "&filter=0" I'm on my old places with all the keywords.

[webhound]

check who's linking to you. we just discovered that someone is linking to us from crap throw away domains using the same anchor text over and over on the same page. We've emailed the big G about it, but I don't know what will come of it.

[northweb]

Could it just be the competition. I have a travel site where a few years ago results for my two main keywords were around 200,000 - 6 months ago over 7 Million...then with google big increase in pages it now has 14 Million. Wild! Luck i'm still number 2.

[your_store]

When I search my site with "&filter=0" I'm on my old places with all the keywords

It sounds like you have a problem with duplicate content. Are you seeing the number of pages indexed from your site reduced dramatically? Are a number of pages being put into the supplemental index?

I guess the duplication could be occuring on an external domain, but I would say to investigate your own site first.

[Spine]

How does &filter=0 indicate duplicate content? On a couple of terms, when I add that to the end of the query string, I'm number one, instead of page 7 or lower.

[your_store]

Go to the last page of SERPs for most phrases and you'll find the following message:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the X already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

The included link simply adds the paramter &filter=0 to your query.

[ownerrim]

"Because with the approximately same number of links I've been on the first page for about half a year, Maybe more.

Maybe your competitors have gotten more competitive with regard to their link building campaigns, perhaps?

[walkman]

"Maybe your competitors have gotten more competitive with regard to their link building campaigns, perhaps?"

why woudl it show high without the filters though? When he tried &filter=0 he said he ranks high.

Question: Is this "&filter=0" just a dupe content filter, or can it be any other filter that Google has?

[edited by: walkman at 12:12 am (utc) on Nov. 27, 2004]

[zeus]

your store -"It sounds like you have a problem with duplicate content. Are you seeing the number of pages indexed from your site reduced dramatically? Are a number of pages being put into the supplemental index?"

YES all that and I simply cant get it to work again, I see many site, if I click there link I get to my frontpage and I have seen some with tracker2, what would you recomend me to do, I have tried to contact host without luck

[Noximus]

your_store,
Yes, I've noticed that the pages indexed by google reduced with about 60%. Do you think that this means that I'm in dublicate content filter?

[your_store]

Noximus, it sounds like the combination of duplicate content and a reduced number of indexed pages is what's hurting you. Were you relying heavily on internal anchor text to rank by chance?

This is pure speculation, but I have a feeling the bulk of your remaining indexed pages are being filtered as duplicate content. When this happens the links from those pages are no longer counted, hence your rankings drop.

[Noximus]

Thank you all very much, You helped me a lot.
Special thanks to your_store.

[Spine]

Yes, this has been a helpful thread for me too. Thanks.

I've been babbling in other threads about how my custom 404 line in my .htaccess was set up to direct surfers to my index page instead of a 404 page.

Recently I noticed with a site: command, and then 'include ommited results' (which adds the &filter=0) that google thinks my deleted pages still exist, but have the same content as my index page on the URL of the deleted page.

Something to do with how they handle redirects has changed, somewhat related to the 302 hijacking that has been observed lately.

When I add the &filter=0 my index page is number 1 for it's most obvious keywords again, instead of page 7-40 in the SERPs.

I've removed the redirect lines from my .htaccess, so I hope in time google realizes that my deleted pages are gone for good, and not still there with the same contents of my index page.

It's partly my fault for having my .htaccess set up that way, but something changed in the past few months as far as how Google handles redirection. The lines in my .htaccess have been there for 4 years, but only started causing this problem recently.

[walkman]

"It's partly my fault for having my .htaccess set up that way, but something changed in the past few months as far as how Google handles redirection. The lines in my .htaccess have been there for 4 years, but only started causing this problem recently. "

did you ever use?tracking_tags...no matter how long ago? Now (maybe I just noticed or maybe now it started to matter to G) they show as separate pages but the cache is obviously the same. Maybe Google sees them as dupes. No solution yet even though the links have been removed many months ago.

[Spine]

I don't think so, but...

I did have a PHP based forum running for a few days, and from what I've learned, gbot hit the few pages of my forum a few hundred times, and got a unique session ID in the URL each time. They seem to think I have 400 forum pages, when it's probably more like 20. As I said in another post, ignorance sucks.
I had no idea google bot would crawl the same pages with session ids over and over.

I took the forum down in hopes that the false URLs will fade away - when that happens I'll look into getting the forum back online, but without the session ID problem.

I seem to have hit a 'perfect storm' where the new 404/ .htaccess issue causes google to think I have 20 copies of my index.html content on different URLs , and my sess ID ignorance makes G think I have 400 dup pages of a forum that's actually brand new and empty.

Blah :(

[zeus]

Any news on what to do, if your see less pages indexed by Google, almost all say Supplemental Result and almoste no visits from Google which used to be around 30.000 unique just from Google.

Its hard to think that a search engine like Google is so bad at fixing this problem, so many sites are in trouble because they had to play around, but what can a webmaster do because I dont think they are fixing this problem, its hard to contact every host where sites are located that are hijacking or redirecting, mostly ist .ru or .pl domain or they just dont reply.

zeus

P.s One more thing I have seen a lot of discussion on this topic on other sites, maybe its time to send a newspaper a letter about this, this is a big issue for many sites and I bet they would like such a story or what about MSN news.