Hi, I'm just wondering what could be the cause of a 5 year old site that has over 1,000 backlinks and has always been ranked very well within Google, which has now dropped rankings so much that it no longer gets hardly any traffic from them and even when you type in "site:domainname.com" the first listing for the site is listed on the 4th or 5th page for the actually domain and the listings above are sites that actually link to the site. Does this mean that the site needs more and better quality backlinks or could it be something to do with penalities for something that the site may have done wrong. There is no hidden text and no illegal activities on the site. The is duplicate content on some of the pages, but most sites on the web has a few duplicate content pages even Yahoo and Google and MSN.
It could and probably is a matter of many things. My buest guess is that your competitors are just getting more agressive. This has happened to me in the past. Just continue to do what you are doing. Keep an eye on your competition and what their doing. And try to keep your site as optimized as possible. -Tim
Another problem is that I had re-designed the whole site about 2-3 months ago to make it much more professional and neatly written. I have heard that Google is about 2-3 months behind. So what ever you do to your site today it will take Google about 2-3 months before they start applying the changes or you start noticing changes happening to your sites rankings.
Hello, Please, Don't say, your competitors bla bla bla bla bla, there are many websites affected for this situation.... Jakomo
Its not true, what is connection between his competition and not ranked for its own domain. I have same situation, and when I type my domain, it ranks on page 4 or page 5.That doesnt have anything with competition, no one should rank first for its own domain
Good point. As I understand it, when your site isn't even listed first when you search for your own domain, it IS a penalty. Do check for the standard SEO DON'ts like hidden text, hidden links, cloaking etc. Maybe your site was hacked and there is stuff going on that you didn't know about.
Have you done such search? http://www.google.com/search?q=mysite.com&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&start=30&sa=N Are you on 31st place?
Hello! I have not hidden text, I have not hidden links, cloaking, etc etc etc..... If you read around digitalpoint or webmasterworld.com, there are many websites affected. I HAVE around 800 pages with UNIQUE CONTENT....... I was reading that websites with many pages were afected.. Best regards, Jakomo
Jakomo, I have also noticed, that it is a massive penalty-30 or whatever. Have no idea what to do next. I don't want to start to change my website, because it's absolutely not spammy. I think I will wait for things to return.
But how long will we wait? I do understand, that there is nothing you can do. I lost 2/3 of my adsense daily income, that's painful.
I have checked on from 100 results, my domain.com is not even on the 1st page. Infact I have my subdomains ranked higher than the main domain and the main domain is where most of my advertising has been linked to and also has the highest PR. Even though my sub domains rank higher, they also use to be ranked 2nd, 3rd, 4th position, etc and now they are about 4 and 5 pages.
The odd thing is, my site had been online for 5 years has over 1,000 backlinks, always has received over 50,000 uniques minimum from Google per month, it has over 200,000 pages in it, it is not spammy and there is no hidden text or nothing as I done a re-design and know much more about programming and SEO now so I made sure that it didn't break any of the guidelines and then now it is ranking poorly.
John, I'm in the same boat with one of my major sites. Have been for a very long time. I am sorry to say that but there is not much you can do since it's (seems to be) a human-imposed penalty that is really hard to get out of. Basically, you need to get another human at Google to look at it again, and, since you've been already labeled a spammer, it's hard to get anyone at Google to devote any more time to a "spam" site. They seem to simply move on to reviewing other sites and they seem to be willing to take a risk of leaving good sites out due to this approach. It would be very nice if these penalties were expiring at some point in time but they don't. There are reports of people having this penalty imposed on them for 14+ months. I am going to be pushing that with my current 12+ months. So, having just negative experiences with this I cannot tell you what to do but I can tell you what NOT to do: Don't panic and sell or shut down your site in a hurry. There may still be plenty of Yahoo traffic or type-in, bookmarked or IBL traffic if your site is any good. Also, take the time without Google traffic to see if you have any obvious problems like canonical URL issues, duplicate URLs or unnecessarily duplicated content. Reading your post I see that you did make some relatively recent changes in design which might have affected internal navigation and also that you have multiple subdomains. Those things combined may create a very dangerous mix if not tested and implemented properly. If, on the other hand, you do have a pretty good idea about what might have caused the penalty, by all means, do correct that and submit re-inclusion request. I have seen some success stories posted about that on WMW. Good luck!
If its a dramatic drop i.e. the site losing rankings and barely anywhere to bee seen then its more than just competitiors catching up because, iff you have been tp for so long, you should not go out of sight all of a sudden.
I had the dreaded position 31 penalty. I think that it is a manual penalty for minor infringements. I removed a few none related (but to my own sites) links out, put in an on topic link to a university page on the same subject, and worked on getting a few closly related links to my site. After about 2 months the penalty was dropped. Good luck.