Why am I ranking for a term for two days and then disappearing?

Ex: I publish a story on Thursday. I get immediate Google traffic on Thursday, and then traffic on Friday and Saturday (~100 referrals on Saturday). On Sunday, I'm nowhere to be found for the three-word-term on Google--not even the first 10 pages--in fact the page isn't even indexed anymore.

I did notice there are a few scrapers sites reprinting my posts (duplicate content?)

My site is fairly new (4 months) and is gossip related

Any ideas?

 

Where do you post the story? If you are posting to other sites, maybe that page already expired.

 

I post to my own blog. I also post snippets of the story in various places like digg, etc.

 

IMO, your page gets to top because of your original content, however over the time it gets pushed down by sites which has more backlink in google.

This happens to me all the time, till you get great number of backlinks this might be trend. Check the number of backlinks of the sites which are pushing you down - that should give you idea.

Anyone else has better insight....please do share..

 

That does make sense. But completely de-indexed? I don't expect to stay at the top for every new term, but I don't expect Google to deindex the page. The only things I can think of as possible explanations are:

1. Pretty much every one of my posts has a 3-5 sentence blockquote from the original article (e.g. a newspaper). Perhaps Google is penalizing my site for this.

2. The scraper sites are creating duplicate content issues

3. I post a lot of my stories to appropriate usenet groups and DIGG (usually a 3 sentence word for word excerpt and then a link back to my story). Does Google consider this spam? And will they penalize me for it?

 

I guess then its duplicate content penalty (or at least part of it). I wouldn't write a single line on my site which is already somewhere, google is very smart at catching duplicates.

Its very easy to scrape wordpress, still to make it difficult on scrappers you can tweak feed settings. Like only summary in feed or even no feed (0 items in feed).

I guess you are already using google sitemaps. Make sure your site is linked from at least one high PR site/page - that should make google spider visit your site often.

Update: I see that your site is already in signature, thats good enough IMO

 

Google has been doing that to me lately.. The weirdest thing is that I have a link on a PR6 site that links back and google says that they have spidered it, but I don't see it in my links:www.crazyfilesandthings.com search results. I'm not sure what the deal is.

 

Well it may happen that other site pushed your site down... or it might be possible that you got the penalty... but keep patience this is what happening with me before.. just increase the backlinks with good anchor text....

 

I see the same thing. I think google is once again giving a boost to "fresh" content. It makes sense doesn't it ? If I search for something like "Heroes Recap" or "TomKat in NYC" the best results would very fresh content from a blog.

I think your just seeing a 2-3 day boost and then it settles into the normal algo.