So, a couple of months ago I decided to go through my site, tiptopvillas.com and deal with anything that could be deemed even remotely dodgy by google. There was nothing dodgy, but I was airing on the side of caution. Things I did included: * looked at all my link partners and got rid of any that were being penalised in Google (only homepage indexed, all supp pages etc). This left a short list of quality, highly relevant out going links. Nots - there were never any outbound links to non-related sites. *Made titles and descriptions of each page more unique and re-wrote pages so that keyword density was not too high. This resulted in pages reading more 'naturally' and less 'written for search engines'. *Turned off all coop ads that were pointing to the site (this was done a while ago but several coop links still point to the site as they take a while to filter out I guess). I have not had coop ads on the site itself for ages - probably 6 months or so now. The coop weight of ads pointing to the site has always remained fairly consistent so its not like there were ever any massive gains in backlinks. The result: Google reduced number of pages from ~10k to ~3k, with all but 100 supplemental, losing all of its decent and even not so decent rankings. As of today, there are now 38 pages indexed, but none of them are supplemental. Google traffic has dropped from ~4000 uniques a month to virtually 0. The site is not in the first few pages for its own name anymore - even crappy sites rank above it for its own name. Google is obviously placing a serious penalty on the site, i have accepted that. What I can't figure out for the life of me is what the penalty has to do with. The site is alround probably the 'cleanest' it has ever been, gets new pages of non-spammy content added pretty much daily, doesn't link out to anything dodgy and yet I am getting hammered for something. Other things: *There is a link in the footer of every page that links to another very relevant site, that is paid for by the site owner *A lot of data was lost from the database a while back which causes some old pages in google's index to display errors. These pages are not accessible from anywhere in the site - the ones Google knows about are old and haven't been live or linked to for months. *I found some random code on the homepage a while back which has been injected via someone hacking - it was basically hex code for a 1x1 pixel that linked to some sort of tracking. This was removed about 2 months ago and all has been well in regard to that since. *Google sitemaps stats return 404 errors for pages that don't and have never existed. Things like .html versions of pages that are actually php pages, and are always, both throughout the site and the sitemaps file, referenced the correct way (i.e. php and not html). * the site suffered quite badly (in terms of rankings, nothing else) in the yahoo update a couple of days ago, and also the most recent major MSN update. That really is just about all the info I can think of - I hope I have provided enough for someone to pick up on something and be able to help me out - I am really lost as to what to do here! Any help / thoughts appreciated guys, cheers.
I sympathise tiptopvillas. Have a look here - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reinclusion-request-howto/
Thanks, I have tried that before with other site - it only seems to work it the site was completely banned i.e. either completely removed from the index, or just gor teh home page url (and no description) indexed
Go here and sign in to your google account. https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/reinclusion?hl=en Click "Submit a reinclusion request" and tell them everything you've said in this thread about how you broke the guidelines and how sites linking to you are now outranking you in the SERPs. Be open - there's a huge text box for you to give them full details of your naughtiness. Tell them you regret doing this and that you will never never never break their guidelines again. (or words to that effect.) Ask very nicely and humbly for them to look over your site and check whether it's now acceptable within their guidelines. Maybe someone else knows better, but as far as I know, this is the only route you can take to getting a penalty removed manually. p.s. Be very sure you comply completely with webmaster guidelines before you submit your request. Best of Luck
ok, an update: I submitted a full, honest reinclusion request 10 days ago and I now at least rank top for our brand. This indicates that some sort of penalty has been removed, although the number of indexed pages are the same as previous, as are the number of supplemental. When I search for a very specific term (3 bedroom Villa rental in Madjare, Borovets, Bulgaria) that relates to one of our pages that isn't supplemental (and has this exact phrase in the title) we rank 17th of 35. There is obviously still some very heavy penalty we are hitting... Does anyone know if reinclusions are done in phases or is this likely the best we will get? Cheers for your help guys.
Glad to hear you've had some movement out of Google. You'll know yourself that the great G can be unpredictable, though, so there are no guarantees of anything. What is likely (but no guarantees) is that in the coming weeks or months, your site's performance will improve in Google's SERPs and regain some or all of its previous positions. A few more links from highly relevant sites won't hurt.
I think this is all about what is happening in Google - not your site. My indexed pages have gone from 9K to 900 (back and forth) three times in the last month. I can only guess this is Google doing "something", which I doubt has anything to do with my site. Could it just be Google internal changes that you are seeing?
This could be due to a scraper directory that has put your title in their title and either spammed that page with your title/description/keywords several times (check the alt tags) or it could be a directory that lists your site in several categories depending on the keywords in your title and repeating your title and description on each page. They usually don't link to your site either making the information look to the search engines like their own data (they scrape your data and use it for their own puprpose). Either way this can allow them to rank above your own site. To find them do any of these searches in Google (I have found the first to be the most successfule in finding them being as they don't link to your site: yourdomain (without the .com on end) inurl:yourdomain.com intitle:yourdomain.com link:yourdomain.com (also try the above with the www in front of your domain) If you see any site ranking above your site with your title in their title then they are suspect. Check them out thoroughly and see why they are outranking your site--you may have to look at source code.
thanks, Fortunately my site is back top for 'yourdomain (without the .com on end)' searches - the sites that were ranking above me were mostly article directories (that I have submitted to) etc. As I remember none (or at least very few) of these contained my domain in the page title - that was what lead me to believe it was some serious sort of penalty. The site is not starting to rank (when I say rank I mean top 100) for a few terms according to DP keyword tracker which is another step in the right directions, also some more pages have come out of the supplemental index. Will keep you posted of any further developments over the coming weeks