Same thing that happened mid september, lost my rankings for 2 weeks and they came back...now mid-January when people were saying they lost their rankings so did I for one of my sites. Dropped from top 10 for a popular keyphrase to about page 6-8 which killed my traffic, anyway today I'm back stronger than ever in spot #3-4!! Hopefully some of your sites will come back and stay there too Also I should mention that I did change a few things but whether any or all of them had any effect on my rankings coming back I don't know, here's what I did: - updated content on the main page (I noticed some sites were stealing phrases) - 301 redirect non www to www - I had my htaccess set to redirect any 404/error to main page so I changed that so they actually get an error ( I have read this has caused problems in the past - duplicate content) - I blocked some IPs of sites where I found some phrases/content stolen, these were mostly scraper sites - I blocked an IP of proxygate dot de because Google had indexed pages of my site through the proxy, I don't know if someone did this on purpose or not but I actually found out about it when I saw that proxy site outranking me for a term, it seems now that my rankings are back and since I banned their IP address Google removed those indexed pages it had through the proxy ( I'm actually suspecting this might have been the biggest issue) - Removed the url from my signature here but that was just the other day so I doubt that had any effect but thought I'd mention it Some people wait and get their rankings back others change stuff and really it has no effect. Seems like a lot of this is on Google's side too so if you're going to do any of the above things do so at your own risk, these are the changes I made.
I hope it holds true for you because it did not for me. I had a site that was penalized for 4 weeks and then 10 days ago if returned to normal. By normal I mean that when i searched for mysite.com I would be the first result instead of the 98th result. The site remained in this position until today and then dropped back to 98. When checking the pages that google had indexed for my site I found 4 problem pages that were previously removed but mysteriously returned to the index. I think the main issue I had was being inexperienced and had to many affiliate links. I think that was the problem because I ain't smart enough for black hat. Anyway I hope your recovery last longer than mine.
I got one site back few days ago, too. It dropped on 27.12 And I have changes some things too, I had lot of content that was sitewide, I changed that and placed it only on homepage. But I dont have idea what should I change ( if changing anything have any connection with coming back to SERP's ) on my other sites.
Very easy , you can't even imagine how dumb some people who steal content are!!!! `u may find duplicated content: -By searching in google after your phrases ... most of the time accidentally! Like searching after your website name (people just copy&paste, forget the keywords from ALT tags, there,etc ) Or by : -Watching server logs. People again copy&paste, and if things works just fine, they don't modify the code, if you got something like <body background="H H T T P : // yoursite.com/img.jpg"> , you will see in your Cpanel logs how people ask that image,etc... Also some people steal your whole content, and forgot about some backlinks there. They usually steal content or even the whole website design , and later alternate it... i saw a guy who stolen one of my websites design , and he forgot to replace the "contact us button" lol ... i was getting questions about HYIPs as mad... he did a very bad thing! Some guys may also forget there the javascripts statcounter code, or google analytics code... because they don't have a clue what it is! Or by ... If you are a well known websites, people will report him to you !
Well like I said this happened around september too and I was back until this whole recent update. I don't feel I did anything wrong so I'm pretty confident my rankings will stay, it was just a matter of time before their new algo ran through all the sites I guess. gene: Most of the time these scraper sites will just take phrases and not whole content from your site. Pick a short phrase about 5-10 words and search for it with quotes around the phrase in Google, I'm sure you'll be surprised at what you find. As for the proxy thing I have a feeling someone setup some backlinks to the proxy link that goes to browse my site through it, just ban the ip and you're good to go =)
m0rtal, You say you updated the content on your main page. Did the return of your rankings in the search happen at the same time as google indexed your new main page, or was your new main page indexed in google at a low ranking and then suddenly went higher? Also did the return of your rankings happen at the same time as the proxy site dropping out of the google index? Or was there a delay? Thanks, davism
Google's cache shows the updated page since January 30th so I wouldn't say it happened when Google indexed the new page. As for the proxy like I stated I think this might have had some impact. I believe the same day my rankings came back my site through the proxy was no longer indexed in google. That site seems to have some weight to it so I could see how it could have caused problems.