hi, One site owner comes to me with very strange problem and i have to reply him if i can solve his problem or not. Let me breif you what is the problem. His Site was having PR-5 since last few years and was doing good for 2-3 words keywords. His site was having some 5,000 -6000 pages with unique content in product and category pages. All of sudden he decide to increase his number of pages to build internal backlinks and get some good traffic as he has seen same technique followed by his competitor. He has very practical issue with his category pages , as they were 100s of product in categories he has implemented pagination. Along with pagination he has also given sorting so that customer can sort by price,name,stock,popularity. Now problem he was facing was his page numbering and sorting were implemented through posback of Asp.net so when customer do sorting or go to next page the url remains same but data changes. Because of this if some customer bookmark 6th category page after sort by price and when they open from the bookmark they were not getting what they have bookmarked. so in order to solve this problem he has decide to create new page url for each of his sorting and page number criteria. He implemented this new urls for page numbering and sorting in mid of dec 2006 and because of which his total number of pages increase from 6000 to 25000 - 30000. Not only he added sorting and numbering pages but in order to keep his page url very simple he changed his url pattern and he have implemented 301 redirect from the old url pattern to the new url. Now google somehow seems to be not liking such sudden increase in pages in his site and his site was removed from most of the important keywords. after 26th Dec update. He then again regain position for certain Keywords in SERPs on 15th jan and was again lost in 26th jan and He again appeared 13th Feb and is disappeared. He is very much frustrated and depressed. He has done nothing wrong but goole somehow doesnot like him keeping his customer's happy by adding few thousands of pages and also google donot like him changing his lengthy ugly URL pattern to short and simple url. So what he was asking me is that should he take one step back and get rid of the sorting and pagenumbering urls and do 301 redirect to the actual category page. So that google can see that he has removed all suddenly increased url and he can again gain this position or should he wait for google next update. Nextly he was asking that as he has changed the URL patterns his PR might not have transferred through out each page. All his category and product pages who were having good PR have not got PR transfered yet but his homepage is Still PR-5. So he was asking should he wait to get PR's transfered to NEW Urls from old urls (of which many pages were having PR-4& Pr-3 ). If he wait and if the PR's are transfered over than all pages will get importance and may come up again in SERPs. So please you guys if you can help us in above to questions 1) Should he rollback newly added sorting and paging urls and do 301 redirect to actual category page or should he keep as it is as google will not count it as spam or sudden increase in thousands of pages 2)Should he wait for google to transfer PR's to new urls from old urls so that new url get importance and may help in pushing his site in SERPs for his imp keywords. thanks vicky
Vicky, I don't really have an 'answer' for you. However, I can tell you that many of us have had major serp fluctuations on or about the dates you mention... with no major changes in our site/page structure. It - may - not be related to anything he has done. I would avoid doing any 301's if possible, google seems to struggle with and be suspicious of those.
hi guyfromchicago, if you have read my full post then ,actually my client have already done 301 redirect for all his site pages to new url pattern in mid dec 2006 and along with that redirect he has also added 1000s of new sorting and pagination pages . so my question was in order to get rid of those newly added 1000s of sorting and pagination pages show i do again one more redirect for those newly added sorting pages to the actualy category page (which is new url from mid dec 2006) hope you would got me what i mean to say thanks vicky
I thing you are getting mixed up with 302 temporary direct's. 301's are the best directs to use if you have to redirect a page.
I would not do anything just yet. As G says "build your site for your visitors". I have had one established site in and out of SERPs for a couple of months now, and many others have as well. Plus, even though new pages may have been crawled, it could take 2-3 months before G analyzes them all and re-calculates formulas. I suggest he sit tight, and re-evaluate in a month or so. /*tom*/
I bow to those with more experience/posts. It just seems to me that I've heard a lot of people complain about 301 redirects going awry in google. Maybe I am thinking wrong though, sorry. I agree with longcall911, it may be best to wait, sit on things for a while and see what happens.
Build your site for your vistors and also make sure that you follow the Webmaster Guidelines. I guarantee that if some people didn't know about the Webmaster Guidelines and just built their site for their visitors, then they would have got banned from Google for doing something that was against their TOS that they didn't know about. So Google says build your site for your visitors, but also keep the Webmaster Guidelines in mind. Hope all goes well.
hi friends, its nice to get suggestions from you all , so what i summarize from your valuable output is that : 1) either i should wait for 1 month ,so that G analyzes all new URLs and re-calculates formulas. OR 2)I should restrict those sorting and pagination URLs in robots.txt to be crawled by search engine. thanks vicky
From what I know, building up your internal links should not affect the ranking of your site, even if it's in a fast manner. But with the recent Google changes, perhaps that changed, too.
I would most definately wait, as what you are describing is quite common. Your SERP's will fluctuate quite a bit while Google "finds your new place" in the index. In the mean time my 2 suggestions would be: 1) Get some backlinks to your major sub-pages with relevant anchor text. Example, say below your main page you have product categories such as Cars, Motorbikes, Boats etc and these all have related pages below them try getting backlinks to your Cars, Motorbikes and Boat "sub-index" pages. This will help Google greatly in indexing your inner pages, and determine your keywords for SERP ranking. Remember a "naturally" backlinked site won't just have 1,000 link to the main .com, it will also have a % of backlinks to internal pages. 2) You could try grabbing a script and generating a sitemap, with less then 100 links per page and link this off your index page. I know it's frustrating but keep at it, without seeing the the site and by what you have told me im sure things will come good. Just keep hitting those important internal pages with backlinks.