I know this was probaby up here in the last few weeks, but I couldn't find anything related to it. At the beginning of this week, google nailed me with a penalty of some sort. After doing a little research, I found a little info, but I haven't found anything that relates to what might have caused it, or what might resolve it. My site has had every listing for my primary key words drop from page one to page 6......consistently. Every page is now on page six of the search results in google. Now, I don't think I've gone against any of the webmaster guidlines, so I have no idea at all what the penalty could result from. However, last thursday january 8, my server crashed, and I was unable to get things restored to normal until monday. In order to get things back online, I temporarily switched hosts and I'm am still with the temporary host. On monday, after restoring everything, traffic from G seemed to be at its normal level. When I woke up on tuesday, I found that my PR had dropped by 2 and that G traffic had ceased. I have found some blog posts and other information related to this dating back to decemeber when some others got hit by this same penalty for no apparent reason, as well as some information from last January (2008) that looked like the same sort of penalty. Does anyone have any other info about this?? Should I contact G or let it ride out?? thanks! dave
Hello... when you type in your sites name.... joesbodyshop is it on page 6 also? If so.... your screwed Only options are... 1. contact them and ask for reclusion... (this can take an eternity or never) 2. Buy another domain and transfer content (make sure you fixed problem) thx malcolm
I think if anybody got a reply from Google about it we would already all knew about the reasons. Google seem to be shuffling quite senseless these days.
Well.....oddly enough, until today that was the situation. I've just searched it now and it is appearing in #1 position. Other key words and phrases are still sitting on page 6. Actually, the results range from page 5 to page 7 today. dave
I would give it a week or two and see if its just an error but it sounds like your in the penalty box for whatever reasons. just going to have to hang in there and see ... laterz malcolm
There is some weird stuff going on my my webmaster tools as well. There are quite a few webcrawl errors showing up. Sitemap Errors - 68 HTTP Errors - 141 Not Found Errors - 163 In visiting the said broken links and such, the pages are coming up just fine. Google is reporting these errors from January 10 to 13th. Right around the time that I finally managed to get everything back to normal. In moving to a temporary host after the crash, I also had to change DNS in order to get things back. Could this result in the above errors if the domain name had not resolved for all G data centres? Google does continue to index new content that I have been putting up in the last few days as well.
I also get a couple of webcrawl errors, but i usually ignore them because when i test them myself, they work, so i don't understand how google says they are errored links?
With the amount of utter crap that they have, I don't think they will hold the number 1 spot for long. A lot of legit sites get penalized for no reason while spam rules!
I am experiencing the same thing with you, my site hold number 1 ranking for quite a long time, today when I wake up my site ranking dropped to page 5 for some keywords and page 8 for another keywords, I am not sure what is happening on my site too. Errors for URLs in Sitemaps : 33 Unreachable URLs : 88 The pages are coming up just fine for me. Can any expert give some advices for us?
Google systems have gone from bad to worse.....and we are seeing lots of re-shuffling..and that too...very often ! I just hope things stabilize at their end...quickly... Regards, RightMan
The problem caused due to down time and also its not a problem , keep doing the SEO what u r doing now also try to update the content . THis will be OK within few days I hope
I hope so Rena, Its been in this position for a week now though. Its interesting that so many others are noticing the same thing.
I feel a Supastar here cause i was the first (unlucky guy) that reported this penalty here, last 28 October. Anyways, i asked for re inclusion of the sites (all of them on 5th page) and kept working as usual. But nothing will be the same: I was a model webmaster, playing with every rule and guideline in my mind, always providing relevant unique content, relevant sites... You know the drill. Right now i feel stupid as a cow cause after 3 years doing it as a professional and taking care of those sites as it should be, Google kicked my whitehat ass to 5th page and placed at top 20 sites with no content, blogger blogs with ripped content (well, 3 lines of it) and a regular placement of adsense in almost every site/blog at top 20. So these days i'm up to work on those sites as usual, BUT since things will never be the same, i'm learning and putting to practice black hat techniques. They fu%$ed me real hard, from now on it's their time to pay the price.
So do you have any idea what caused the drop in search rankings scubita? And you had 5 sites all end up like this?? Of the half dozen sites I run, this has only happened to one of them.
No i don't. Frankly speaking, i believe its just a human edit of some kind that was made and BANG they slapped the sites to 5th page for every keyword. What i really love to know for sure is WHY and WHO has the power to this, cause no algo will slap 5 completely different sites at once. The only thing in common is the who is. I had more than one site slapped at October 28th. The only one that escaped is a site with no content at all (just a stupid lorem ipsum article , auto related, that ranked top 5 for a major keyword. I've placed 500 words of text in it, some affiliates and there he goes ranking high till today. How stupid is that? The good ones go down, and this cracker with no content at all ranks high.
How long ago did you submit a reinclusion request? The search results have changed entirely for most of my affected key words. Ton's of spam has replaced many good sites that ranked in the top 10 results with mine. I'm hoping its an algo screwup......whatever it is, its nasty!
I submitted the reinclusion request as soon as i noticed that issue. The issue you bring on keywords + spam is exactly the same i see for the keywords i regularly check: mfa's, spam blogs filled with keywords... you name it. I even noticed "Yellow pages" (my country similar) ranking #1 for holidays keyword... Its shameless.
@fish: I suppose your site might have been pushed that hard because at the time of downtime and moving on to a new temporary host, G might have thought that your site is a duplicated site and G is not paying any value for your site in the SERPS. If I were you, I would target at different search engines rather than Google and post quality content just as you might have done earlier. But, dont feel bad for that and get on. Hope you get back your position soon.