I don't know what Google did over night but this morning I've dropped over 300 places for almost all of my primary KW's. Also dropped about 75 to 100 places for Allinanchor for the KW's as well. Using site: command everything still looks normal and my BL's are still showing the same as before. Other SE's no major changes. Anyone else seeing anything like this? The only thing changed on the website is that over the weekend I added a shopping section feed using Amazon. I kept all products related to site. It's a virtual section done through perl. Does Google not like Amazon or virtual pages for some reason? Any ideas or comments would be greatly appreciated.
That's interesting because I suffered the same fate on Dec25th I too have an amazon feed. I had internal backlinks on each amazon page - do you ? I linked out using a cgi script - what's your link to amazon ?
my amazon script went grey bar over night using mr rats script in a sub domain some of my main site keywords have also taken a dive by about 50 places
Interesting...I have internal backlinks on the virtual pages also. As well as the Coop Ads. I link out using CGI script also. I'm using Associate Engine script for what that's worth. Did you find it was temporary? Has the site recovered? I hope so. Any other input would be appreciated. I'm having a heart attack here. What I really find strange is the drop in allinanchor? Since the BL's reported are the same and the anchor text hasn't changed I don't see how the allin could be affected. It should go up since the anchor text on the Amazon pages are the KW's.
yep - I had a drop in allinanchor as well No coop scripts It had been there for months I have seen that most pages are earmarked for dup content (ie: links shown in G for site:.... have only the link shown with the URL - no text underneath) I have now simply linked to amazon No recovery in serps at all but I have now taken off my internal links No crawling by g.bot either
My Amazon pages are white bar but they've only been up 5 days. Did your SERPS crash when the script went grey? How long have you been using the Amazon script? Is your site a shopping oriented site or are you using the script as an enhancement to the site? Sorry for so many questions but I'm just trying to figure out what the hell is going on and why Google is dropping me like a rock.
Hi Lou Script online for 6 months or more Managed thru .htaccess Pages have a PR of 1 or 2 (still) It was an enhancement Can Google read .htaccess to tell that you are dynamically generating pages?
Hi Leeds, Mine is managed through htacess also. I don't know if Google can tell your dynamically generating pages or not? I don't know what difference that would make though since there are a lot of pages generated dynamically on the web. None of my virtual pages are indexed yet but I can't see how they would be considered dup content since the only thing duplicated is the template part of the page. Each virtual page has different content. I'm about ready to dump the Amazon feed completely. There's no way I can take dropping 300 places in the SERPS and survive. We'd have no traffic at all.
I'm thinking of getting rid of my amazon stuff I have maybe 20k pages marginally indexed in G How do I get G to delete these ? Simply undo the htaccess ?
I would think changing the htaccess would take care of getting rid of the virtual pages but have no idea if that would repair the damage already done? Google seems to take ages to remove pages already indexed. Their still showing cached pages for me that were deleted almost a year ago. At this point I'm assuming it was the virtual Amazon feed that caused the problem. So far it seems likely but I can't be 100% sure about this. I've searched the web and really can't find anything indicating that having a shopping feed in a site should hurt the SERPS. I'm far more interested in recouping the loss in SERPS right now. If anyone else has any experience with drops in serps after adding Amazon or any other feeds to a website please chime in.
Have the same problem. I have two sites that have the Amazon pages. One site is seeing a huge drop in serps. The only thing I changed about this site is that I bought some links this month. I am taking the amazon pages out of both.
I've left my Amazon section up for now just in case it's a temp think because of Gbot all of a sudden finding lots of new pages and kicking in some sort of filter. That would be the only logical reason I could think of for the drop in serps. I even made sure that the Amazon pages were theemed to my site (Russian products) and removed any links to Amazon that could be followed to any of the general product categories. Guess we'll see what happens. I even wrote Google and asked them if they were pissed at Amazon or something? Surprisingly I got a reply within 24 hours that sounded like it was actually at least partly hand typed. But maybe not. Basically they told me they couldn't do individual reviews and to read their guidelines. Which I've done of course and can't find anything I've done wrong. They did say something that might be pertinent to what you wrote, they said buying/selling of links to increase PR or SERPS was a no no. Don't see how they could tell if a link was bought or a reciprical one though??? I've copied the reply they sent be below in case you or anyone else is interested. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi Lou, Thank you for your note. Unfortunately, we are unable to act personally on all of the requests we receive to review individual website content. Certain actions such as buying or selling links to increase a site's PageRank value or cloaking - writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users - can result in penalization. Please review our quality guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html for more information. If you identify problems with your website and make the changes necessary to comply with these guidelines, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are sorry that we cannot provide individual assistance at this time. Regards, The Google Team --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I got the same mail when I asked about my site I then followed it up several times and I believe it may be the cloaking issue IE: linking to amazon with a cgi script Anyhow, all my amazon pages are out of my site/ .htaccess and googles index I improved overnight - not to where I was before as I have a 302 going on - but I think redirects on YOUR OWN site are not good (as google is trying to clear up their own 302 redirect problem which has dammed sites all over)
I'm by far not an expert on programming or anything else when it comes to websites so I'm not sure about the cloaking issue. I can't see where anything is cloaked? The pages are pulled up via a template and displayed via rewrite in the htaccess file and displayed in my site in the browser. If that's done through cgi, asp, php, java or whatever, it isn't cloaked in my opinion. But I'm not Google. Who knows what they think? Anyway, I'm glad to hear that your site is recovering. I hope we both get back to where we were. Speaking of redirects...I had been redirecting all 404 errors to my main page. I then read that this could possibly cause dup content problems? Not sure if that's true or not? Anyway, not to take chances I made a custom 404 page to redirect to that still shows it as a 404 page not found but has links to pages in the site for people to follow. Other then that the only redirect I use are 301 directing to pages I've moved or changed the name on. I think this is actually the preferred way to handle moved/name-changed pages?
Cloaking also came under the guise of "dodgy redirects" Google pointed me to that twice I assume what they mean is that it is not a real link - and the link text may not be "buy this at amazon" so it is essentially cloaking I also had the 404 to my MP so have made a 404.html and changed htaccess Let's see what happens - thanks for the tip
Try your search with &filter=0 appended to the URL. If the SERP comes up then there's duplicate content filter applied to the site.
One of my sites took a dive in the Goole SERPS and I have no Amazon feed. Looks like results from this summer on my KWs.
Hi Leeds...Don't think doggy links are the problem. Only links on the page are either to the details of the product and the "Buy At Amazon" link that does what it's supposed to. The only other links are for searching the product categories and I have them filtered to diaplay only products related to "Russia". So who knows?? Thanks for that tip Commando. I tried the %filter=0 search and got a "does not match any documents" response so if I did it right we must not have a dup content penalty. My SERPS are still in the toilet. :-( Interesting observation Vegas. After looking at it my SERPS are now probably close to what they were during the summer/early fall before I activly started working to improve them and before joining the Coop network. same with my Allin rankings. Maybe the drop after adding the Amazon feed is just coincinental and theres something else going on?