Anyones Rankings Just Sunk?

That "might" work, but at the same time Google is such a big organization the chances of a letter finding it's way to the Search Index department then being read and acted upon by someone who has the ability to do something about it i feel are pretty slim.

Bringing the incident to the attention of Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik or someone similar would probably yield the most success. I know Matts been actively involved in sorting issues with a number of sites like DazzlinDonna's, and HysterSisters which i also helped the owner with.

The only problem is i've intentionally kept my name out of the SEO Industry, so nobody knows me despite having more success in the SEO field then some of the ones who pimp their name and are well known.

I didn't find it that hard to rank for, i hit page 1 for "SEO Company" in 4 weeks and top 20 for "SEO" about 3 months after setting my site up.

The traffic isn't that great, definitely not in the top 100 of traffic keywords i've ranked for even when i've been on the first page. It would be without doubt more profitable to rank for several easier SEO related terms.

I mainly done it because a lot of people told me i wouldn't break in to the top 50 inside 18 months because it's just too competative, so it was more a personal test than anything.

I havn't really done anything to promote the keyword since Nov last year, it's still sitting there from the initial work i done.

Thanks for the link, i remember going over that patent last year when i read the article. I'm going to sift through the patent again now i'm dealing with something similar to see if anything sticks out this time around.

I don't think it's directly related to what's happening, because my content is written my me along with a number of other people. So if my writing style is detected as a spam document, in theory other documents authored by different people shouldn't be penalized. The spam document detection should only effect the document, not the entire domain however there's still nuggets of info in some of these patents.

 

Perphaps G has patented "pay as you go" .....you can't rank organically unless you spend a minimum amount on adwords...

 

Now that would be a huge money maker for G.

 

Which do you think would make more sense to Google:

* Have a single Premium Publisher with a proven track record and a long standing site dominate a niche, and earn the bulk of the Adsense revenue for that niche. They have existing communication with that person because they have their own account manager with Google.

* Have an unknown site, or a couple of unknown sites taking over a Premium Publishers turf when they have little history with Google and there's no telling what will happen with the sites from one day to the next.

Bear in mind the Adwords/Adsense programs success relies on how well Ads convert for publishers. If advertising is converting for advertisers, they are going to be happy and up their spend or take on new keywords or even tell of the success with the program and entice new publishers to join.

If the Premium Adsense site has a history of high conversion rates, and new sites are overtaking it that do not convert as high it makes perfect financial sense to knock the new sites on the head in order for the Premium Adsense site to continue dominating the niche.

The longer my site fails to rank, the more the above scenario makes sense because my site has not in any way breached the Google Webmaster Guidelines and there's nothing to algorithmically explain why the disappearance has occurred.

 

But if this was the case, and it was leaked, wouldn't there be a mass exodus from the adsense program by all but the premium publishers? In other words, G couldn't keep this info to themselves, and the release of it would topple google. The public and non-premium publishers would revolt.

 

Yes and no, a lot of people earn their $2 a day which over a month pays their hosting so they think it's great. They are also spurred on by the success stories of the odd successful Adsense publisher and will carry on with a vision of increasing it to $5 a day in the next 6-12 months and one day making the big time.

That right there sums up probably 90% of the Adsense Publisher population. People get told by gambling on the slot machines they have 1 in a Billion chance of hitting the Jackpot, and most will end up broke by playing them but people still do it because of "that chance" of it paying off.

Proving anything that happens inside Google is practically impossible. However you have to remember Google isn't a search engine, it's an advertising company. All this free stuff like Search, Gmail etc is just a side dish for their advertising model.

If they can manipulate any characteristic of their search engine to increase advertising revenue, they will.

 

Not me...Unchanged so far...

 

Well... man I had never thought about it that way. You're right.

I believe the answer may be to get some publicity over your situation. Offer facts, links to this thread, etc. to the right people. Open up to bloggers/ seo folks in the loop. Get your story out there and see where the chit falls.

Yes, you would probably need to reveal your identity, but at this point so what.

My 2 cents. Good luck pal.

 

I just don't think they would do that.
Everything G has ever done is bluechip and ethical.
My site is fixed and ranks once again incidentally

 

Well, I think, after you have tried all means to get your site back - and in case it fails, It would be more wise to reveal the site publicly. This way, probably, the site will get more attention, with hundreds of people talking about it.
Obviously, your site wont get back up there, and revealing publicly will just lower the image, but I guess, you can do that as the last resort. Try to popularize the controversy, and fault on Google's part... We can't do much after that...

However, personally, I think, it is a waste of time now, the only thing you can do is curse Google and move on..

 

It certainly would be possible to build conversion rates into the google algorithm as a quality factor

 

A wise man once said to me
"you far more to fear from internal problems and squables than outside competitors"
The ranking saga is caused by a site penalty, not by a "special ops" Google team that goes around twaeking rankings.

 

There are some manual penalties but they are rare. Google prefers to use an automated process.

 

I am seeing serp increases..

 

Me too but they have been very slow increases over the past 2-3 weeks. My sites also dropped significantly in Mid-January.

 

A site that I'm adding a link to every two weeks just went to no.3 from no.6 today

 

sweetfunny, any updates?

 

Another factor in the rankings is that Google tries to return a balance of commercial and informational sites in its search results.

 

Just curious, as an example what would you penalize Wikipedia for? Having a lot of great content and a lot of people linking to it naturally?

Also what would be the reason for building a couple of sites, same structure, same size, same SEO and promotional techniques both on and off page just different verticals and all sites are booming that profit through direct sales of products but the one monetized by Adsense threatening a Premium Publisher gets knocked out of the index?

Valley, i've been doing SEO since AltaVista in 1999 and the amount of sites i have worked on is well in the x,xxx range. My SEO approach i've refined over a number of years and i've never had anything remotely like this occur, yeah i've had "a" keyword or phrase head south which took a bit of work to get back but never a complete wipeout of tens of thousands of page 1 rankings in 5 minutes flat.

For such a penalty to occur, i'd have to be doing something severe like cloaking 500k pages stuffed full of keywords to Googlebot and showing visitors something completely unrelated with a link selling network on top.

I've had a couple of well know SEO's look at the site and they are also still scratching their heads, the site is as clean as a whistle and it could serve as an example link on the Google Webmaster Guidelines page on how to build a compliant site.

It's not a penalty, it's either (a) a glitch/flaw in the Google algo or (b) not supposed to dominate it's niche and take out a long standing premium publisher.

No updates, the site is still slowly dropping pages from the index and visitors are getting less despite it's backlink count being up from when this started.

So am i on 99% of the sites i'm working on or have worked on... It's the 1% that's been penalized without reason i'm concerned about.

 

It makes sense to me that a premium publisher would be more trusted.

Who knows what the future of free search is. There are only a handful of free search engines left. Yahoo was playing around with pay for inclusion and wisenut is gone as one example.

http://www.wisenut.com