One of our sites USED to have DP co-op on it, but we took that off almost 2 months ago. Now, all of a sudden we're experiencing the huge drop. Could this be due to the fact that the cached versions of some of our pages still had co-op links on them? We thought we had pre-empted the Google penalty on co-op, but apparently not. No idea where to go from here... we've just been working on pure organic link exchanges etc for the past 2 months.
I'm not sure if there is a place to go from here... I'm kinda thinking that this is an error on google's end and I don't know if any changes we make on our own sites will make much of a difference. It doesn't make any sense that a search for my unique business name shows tons of results - all sites that mention me or link to me - but my home page is not among them. Just checked and now google has no cache of my home page. Still pr 6, still lists hundreds of backlinks. Several other high pr pages on my site also aren't cached (but others still are). They all should be... they've been cached for years and I haven't made any recent changes that would affect cacheing. This is google just being really fubar.
The co-op's pretty much killed my website even though I've removed the ads. Ranked pretty high for the past 5 years now I've totally disappeared from the top 100!!
Well I'm back from my week long holiday and still there has been no return of rankings of keywords in Google, it actually looks as if my site rankings for all it's keywords in Google have been dropped off the radar... has there been any new news about these issues in the last week? Has anyone seen a return in their rankings?
Nope. No good changes for me. Everything is the same for at least a month now. Hundreds of pages in supp hell, rankings in the toilet, and only a trickle of the goog traffic I used to get. And I have no idea why.
It has nothing to do with the billion page spam. Senior members have been monitoring these extensive drops since early march 2006. There are several thread discussions available that shed detail information and theories around this topic.
Well I actually have some positive news today. It would appear that whilst may rankings in Google have not return, my rankings according to Google sitemaps have return to similar levels of old, I don't know if this a sign of things to come, but when my rankings were dropping Google sitemaps was recording somewhat "preemptive" ranking drops, meaning that my rankings according to sitemaps dropped before there was an actually drop in the SERPs, so hopefully this will mean that the increase in my SERPs is just around the corner.
Burta this is good news. I have Google sitemaps set up on a couple of my sites but I'm not sure what's you're talking about. What is the specific thing you are looking at in Google Sitemaps? Thanks! Eric
OK! Yes I hadn't noticed it dropped in SiteMaps Statistics during this Rankings Drop this past month, but I see it is normal, it shows me for #5 for my main term which is where I've been at for the past several years. Right now for the last month or so I've been at #30 and further back. Thanks for the heads up, you give me hope! This is off-topic but I see it is interesting in stats that it reports that in May this was the page with the highest PageRank on my site -- http://www.mp2kmag.com/update/mappoint.newsletter/2006-04-04/ then in June and July it says that my home page has the highest pagerank www.mp2kmag.com Due to the great backlinks I got for the newsletter page, I was predicting that page would become a 7. so if my home page is higher, maybe that will also be a 7 with the next toolbar update, I can wish anyway. Eric
Yeah my sitemap rankings are still holding, and are actually improving so this is room for hope but non the less I think I will be removing the coop ads over the coming days, it would appear that whilst google is running off cached data the moment it would appear at least that they are planning to penalise coop users. I'm also quite interested to see what Goolge does with there PR update, I'm expecting some big improvements in my sites that actually being penalised so I'll be interested to see what happens there...
Just a quick update, my website which was penalised has appeared to have the penalty removed after a reinclusion request. I'm happy again.
My penalty seems to have been adjusted. Rankings returned on about 10% of the pages on the site sometime last week.
I removed the co-op and submitted a reinclusion request. However, I am not convinced the events are related. The site is still penalized heavily, it is just not penalized 100%. The current penalty is eerily familiar -- it looks very much like a penalty another site of mine has been suffering under for more than a few months now. It seems that the pages with inbound links are OK, but that the weight of those pages is not being shared with the other pages on the domain.
Here is an example of how messed up google is. Check the 2nd search result: visit montana This is returning results from a proxy! How messed up is that?
OK well I removed the coop ads a couple of days ago, 4 - 5 and submitted a re-inclusion request and behold... I'm climbing back into the top 10 rankings for major keyword terms... YAY! I highly recommend everyone else still suffering from the coop penalty jump on this bandwagon, and get those Coop ads off and go submit a re-inclusion request, saying something to the effect, I was so silly for joining the program, I didn't think it was wrong and shalt never tempt Mr. Google's wrath again... I promise... . But seriously, the removal of coop ads and a sincere apology and request for re-inclusion seems to have been working for more and more people, and I sincerely don't intend to get involved in things like this again, I'm going elnaturale in regards to linking from now on.