Frustrated: PageRank back to 4 while Huge DROP in Traffic

Discussion in 'Google' started by lionc, Feb 12, 2008.

  1. #1
    Hi everyone,

    i am really frustrated now due to the huge drop in traffic :(:(. Sorry that its quite long but please read. Thank you.

    I am running a wordpress powered blog, and over 60% of total traffic came from google.

    In November 2007, I checked pagerank of my site and found that the pagerank drop from 4/5 to 0. The drop in pagerank was probably due to link selling, so i removed all the sponsor links immediately. At the same time, the traffic did not drop, instead it went up and reached the peak in December 2007.

    In Jan 2008, i saw a little drop in traffic, which i thought was normal. Then on 23rd Jan, the traffic suddenly droped over 60% as google no longer send huge traffic to my site, though my site still rank well for a few keywords. So i checked my site so as to make sure it is clean. and OMG, i found that my site was linking to a site (link exchange), which was previously a tech blog, full of porn links. I, then, requested a consideration through google's webmaster tools after i removed all bad links, bad comments, spam links.

    Last week i checked the pagerank of my site again, and found that the pagerank went back to 4 while the traffic is still low. After that, i accessed webmaster tools and looked at the stats (What googlebot sees). SHXT, the top keyword is "penthouse". I immediately did a google search with site operator (site:URL penthouse) and found that there are 16 pages of my site with the keyword.

    I then went to those pages and looked at the page source but i just CAN'T find the keyword penthouse :)confused::confused:). However, if i access google's cache of those pages, i CAN find the word "penthouse" in page source. There were many porn links being added to the footer of those pages if i access them through google's cache.

    The cache is created on 15 Jan and seems not being updated. Is my site being hacked or what? Is there anything i can do to improve the condition? I have sent second reconsideration request through google's webmaster tool.

    PLEASE HELP. Thanks
     
    lionc, Feb 12, 2008 IP