Hi All, I have a very basic site that is not commercial (apart from the fact that I am using AdSense on it). It is a free resource where people can find a number of recipes for creating homemade protein and bodybuilding shakes (the link is in my signature). The site was first indexed by Google sometime in March or April of 2005. It seems the site is making no progress in Google results and referrals have actually been dropping over the last couple of months and I can't see why. As far as I can tell I'm not spamming and I'm not banned. I have a PR4. These are my only thoughts about what could be causing this: I have written 2 articles and submitted them to a number of article directories. Initially I submitted the first article to a handful of major article directories before posting it to my site. I mixed up the formatting and bio of the article a little each time I submitted to a directory. Is it possible Google is seeing the article on my site as being duplicate content and therefore punishing my entire site? A search for some of my keyword phrases ('homemade protein shakes', 'protein shake recipes') returns my articles on the article directories but my site is not inside the top 100! Because the recipes are all short it means the pages can be very similar. The 'template' means the navigation stays mostly the same and the only thing that changes are the titles, meta tags, recipe ingredients, link path, recipe name, etc. Is Google seeing these pages as too similar and therefore punishing me? I just did a search to see how many pages are indexed and Google is returning only 32 results. This is strange as when I last checked (maybe 2 weeks ago) there were 140+ pages indexed. Is Google dropping pages? My positions in Yahoo! are also not so great. MSN on the other hand is of course ranking my site well. Any advice would be appreciated.
I know one thing. The articles you submit to article's directory should not be on your site else obviously, it will be considered duplicate content.
Thanks Jim. So you think I should delete them? I'll take them down now. Has anyone had problems with posting their own articles on their site as well as submitting them to article directories?
Okay, I've removed the articles and left a message saying they are no longer there. Would it be better just to remove those files alltogether so that Google gets a 'page not found' instead? Thanks
I've removed the page altogether. Funny thing... this thread comes up higher than my site in Google's results for one of my phrases