I have a 6 year old very authority site for my niche and have a large article section that had all the articles ranked first page on google. Now google decides to NOT rank any of them!!!! The entire article section of my site (over 250 articles!), which is directly linked off my homepage. This is a 6 year old site with tons of backlinks and great content. I looked at my articles and remembered way back when that I submitted the same articles to several article sites that STILL rank first page google for most of them. Could it be, because of duplicate content? I mean between my authority site and all the article sites I submitted to back in the day? Will google eventually find out they are good content or would you advise I go back and tweak the articles on my site to show google they are different than the article site articles? Google shows a regular and consistent caching of my entire article directory, but rankings are GONE!
Are the pages still indexed? If not this could just be a Google glitch which will likely take care of itself in a few days. If you are referring to Page Rank. I've had many interior pages lose there rank lately but I still get the same number of hits. Once again I would probably wait a few days before panicing. The duplicate filter seems to affect your rank in the SERPs more than PR. If you have these articles on other sites, they may be getting the SERPs instead of you. You might want to reedit the articles that are affected so that they appear different to Google.
Yes...they are being cached regularly, just not ranked anymore. All the article sites they are on are still ranked first and second page, but my authority site articles are gone! This has been over 3 weeks now...because I thought it might also just be a glitch that gets cleared up...but three weeks??? I am more than willing to go into my 250 articles (UGH) and revise if you guys think it will bring them back. If not, I do not want to waste my time. The strange thing is my entire article section of my site, including main article page is being hammered by G. I used to rank high first page for my page title of the main article page and I don't even for that, so G has taken my entire content section of my site and penalized it for some reason. My articles are well-written and some of the best in my niche and should not be penalized like this.
Links - get links to the individual articles and you might find that your articles rank higher. Alternatively, you could ask the article submission websites to remove the content, but I think you would have difficulty doing that considering you submitted them. Tip; submit a part of the article with a link to the actual article on your website in future.
One thing I have noticed over the last few months is the dragging down of sites with poor configurations. One example is php error pages being set up in .htaccess with an absolute url rather than a relative one, causing a 302 status code rather than the desired 404. Another is linking in a page via relative urls, instead of absolute, giving a shot for the 302 hijack exploit to cause ranking problems. With a site that old, and assuming you published the articles first, Google should be able to tell that you are the authority. But if there are problems within your site, it might be dragging you down. Before editing 250 articles, I would look into the site first...
I'm ahead of you I have gone into those articles that are still ranking and inserted an internal like to the same keyword article on my site that I made sure to revise first. Haven't seen a change yet, but I did think that getting links to point to my articles would help. Thanks.
Also to be clear. Are you reffering to PR or ranking in the serps. If it is PR I don't think I would worry about it if you are still getting the refferals. If you have lost ranking in the serps. There may be many reasons why that has changed, including the article sites having a higher PR on the article pages. Google changes thier Algo at times, you may now have something on the pages that has changed Googles view of them. (too many keywords, other SEO methods that are now considered blackhat ect)
There is something wrong with google as well. Was the ranking drop on July 27th? Do a search and you'll find additional threads concerning serp drops which don't make much sense on that and other specific dates.
Golftrainer... Actually I've visited your site frequently over the last year. (I'm a 5 handi.) We also operate a large golf instruction website and all of our articles rank extremely well ... they too have been duplicated across the net so that's not your problem/difficulty. In looking at your site... there are obviously other factors involved in your lower or non-existent ranking.
I would be interested to hear what the "other factors" are too. Assuming we are talking about http://www.performbettergolf.com/golf-fitness-articles.html. There are a number of html validation errors, but nothing too serious and most of which can't be avouded with the current shopping cart. Just for kicks you might want to go to google http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview, and check your site though there. I have a couple sites right now that are getting decent ranking in the SERPs but are showing 0 PR on interiour pages as your site does. When you go to the page in google on my sites Google says that all of the pages on my site have a meduim PR even though the bar says 0. I don't think the bar is always correct.
Hello golftrainer if those articles your saying are all original then you published it first. So therefore google crawled it first recognizing it as the original that has been copied. Therefore the loose on serps is not because of duplicated content but on googles algorithm... Basoone
In taking a quick look at G for your site... you'll frequently see... for your listings.... "Supplemental Result - Cached - Similar pages" It's the kiss of death. It doesn't matter if "you" think your site is the authority site... the SE's think otherwise. And that's what is really all about isn't it? We, as developers and site owners have a tendency to anthropromorphize (make human or give human qualities) to the SE's when things don't go our way. Most of the time... we completely forget it's a mathematical equation making the decision... not some person pushing a big "delete" button in Mountain View. While I tip my hat to MP regarding his background, quality content and achievements ... things need to be corrected in order to once again be viewed as "the authority". Just my two cents.
That is what I would have thought too. Without a doubt they are "my original" articles, that were posted at my site first.
Why would that have happened, given I have done nothing different to that site for 6 years, other than continue to add good, keyword-related content?
It is the Red Queen Problem - you must keep running faster and faster just to keep up. If you have done nothing different in the past 6 years, then your competition has been getting ahead of you. Here is the Google Problem - if you don't try anything new - then your competition gets ahead of you. If you do try something new and Google decides it doesn't like it - your competition gets ahead of you. I am not sure what the answer is!
That's a nice thought I follow most of the SEO practices and have done nothing wrong, but add new content at a reasonable pace and have some great authority links from sites in my niche. Thank you google
afaik, the only way that it could be the kiss of death for his entire site is if *all* of his pages were in the supplemental index. in other words, you can still have pages that rank well, even when most of the other pages on the same site are relegated to the backburner. sometimes google puts pages in the supplemental index even when they have not been duplicated on other websites... all it takes is for google to think that pages on your site are too similar in nature, right or wrong. and html validation errors should not affect search engine ranking... google won't ignore quality inbound links just because the html isn't up to the latest standards.
I had a question too: When I put write articles, I distribute them to directories. Some webmasters say: Put the article on your blog first, then aftera a week or so, submit them to article sites. Other webmaster say: NO, don't put the same article, because you will be penalized for duplicate content. What is the good thing to do? ANd for your site, I heard that Google take in consideration LSI. It's a very nice site