Again, I am lost. I have read so many threads here on 301 redirect, and some devolve into arguments, so it's hard to glean the wheat. on April 23rd, my law site, the name is in my signature, I moved over to wordpress. Naturally, all my "htm" filenames are now wordpress permalinks. So, I did a 301 redirect--that part worked perfectly. My site has a php-based dictionary that I did not move, and about 400 legal articles and reference pages that I DID move over to wordpress. I took my first hit in the rankings on the first 3 days--all the individual pages dropped way way down in the rankings--like into the 40s and 50s, which is pretty bad for a keyword phrase like "Michigan small claims court limit"--that's a long tail keyword. But, after that first 3 days or so, my key pages were all ranking where they were before. Because of the natural attributes of wordpress, my site was stickier, and my adsense click throughs were up, and my revenues were up. It was working. The google toolbar, though, was showing "no page rank" for all the individual pages--no problem there because that's a historical rating anyway. Here's where I got boned: On about May 5, my rankings all dropped way down again. So, for a phrase like "rule 144", I used to rank #5 in G, and now I rank #50 in G. I did invite a law firm's "SEO" guy to upload 3 articles on May 1--later I found out that he had posted the same 3 articles somewhere else. My site outranked his for the same articles--but could this duplicate content have triggered some filter? Is it temporary? Is it fixable? What exactly did I do anyway?
if you're exactly at position 50, that sounds like a classic Google penalty. This happened to me for keyword saturation (by mistake, I had a two word keyword appearing way too many times within a main menu, and I was bumped down to 50). If you have doubts about any duplicate content, only keep the original up and remove the duplicates. Everything can be reversed if you 'make things right' again. Also, the only time I ever did a 301 redirect was from a PR5 to a N/A. It took exactly one month for the PR to pass to the new site.
Where do you guys come up with this nonsense (like double-dip and 50+1 "penalties")? Thundercow, what you're seeing is natural. A LOT of Web sites are "dancing" within the rankings as of late - evne resepctable sites that provide quality unique content that people would kill their own mothers to link to. I'd probably go ahead and try to get the duplicated articles pulled - other than that, just sit tight, build up quality content and attract more incoming links to your site - just make sure those links are quality resources and don't come from the "shadier" sides of the Internet, if you know what I mean.
Dan, I have come across a lot of your posts, you definitely always have something wise to say. The reason I used the term "double-dip" was just to try to accurately describe how my rankings dropped twice. Anyway, I may not have explained this perfectly. I don't think I have any duplicate content. The old pages are GONE and each old page is 301 redirected to the NEW page--the new pages have the same exact body text as the old pages.
(re: double-dipping) Ah, I see. You were using it as a metaphor, not a "penalty" name. Gotcha. Anyway, I was referring to the articles that your site's "SEO guy" posted on the other sites. Have you gotten those removed yet? I still think that what you're seeing here is just Google trying to readjust to your site's new structure. Give it time; I think you'll be fine in the long haul.
Ok, thanks Dan. By the way, your "everything you need to know about SEO" article is a great concise read--I actually have directed quite a few people to that article...
I do not think google will punish you for having one article on your site that has already been published on another site. There are many article submission services on the net that will submit an article to hundreds of article directories. If this was true all of those article directories would have been penalized for publishing the same article. I think your change in the serp is just temporary, I think if you wait a while your rankings will be back to normal in due time.
Hey Thunder Just another thing that you might want to think about too. As you've migrated your site to wordpress there is an on-site duplicate content situation. I'll quote some text here from the duplicate content cure website: "It turns out that the default Wordpress site structure is extremely un-search engine-friendly. The same archives, categories, built in search, and home page paged navigation that make navigation extremely easy for people, but don’t feature any unique content at all. They usually feature excerpts of the full posts, or complete duplicate copies of the full posts in chronological order. All of these extra pages with the same content repeated again and again, dilute the value of the most important pages on the site: the posts and pages." It might be an idea to install this plugin just incase http://www.seologs.com/wordpress/wordpress-duplicate-content-cure/ Cheers Col
Why waste a perfectly good Plugin (and server resources) on something that can be blocked via a robots.txt file in the first place? Better off, using something like Top Level Categories or the Category Base Killer Plugin in combination with the robots.txt file will take care of it as well.
Well, some good points, but I am showing excerpts only in the category and archive pages, and no tag navigation at all. So, the full articles would not duplicated on any navigation pages. While duplicate content is certainly an issue in Wordpress, and the fixes are warranted, something much deeper is happening to me--it's totally site-wide, and it is much as if I am in the sandbox. Seriously, I could not be doing worse if I had simply gotten a brand new URL. Interestingly, in the past few days, my rankings for some key articles have risen from the 60s, 70s, and 80s into the 40s and 50s in the google results. Knowing what I know now, I am not sure I would have made the migration to wordpress. So far, my benefit from it is negative.
Just to close this one out, in case anyone subscribed...my initial confusion is quite clear now. It is a 50 point penalty. I rank at position 51, 52, or 53 for a lot of long-tail keyphrases that I used to rank 1, 2, 3 for. My page rank actually went up from 3 to 4 in the last update, but I was not one of the fortunate people who enjoyed an expiring penalty. The penalty is due to either: -I sold some links to some guy with a lawsuit funding site, real trashy -I did the DP banner sharing thing.