I have a site which has, for years, gotten about 1000 visits daily from Google. The site is a detailed database, definite long-tail material, and has about 9500 pages. Some of the content exists elsewhere but this one is more detailed, complete, and accurate. It validates perfectly, contains no malware, foul language, unauthorized copyright content, or anything with the slightest taint of impropriety. It has a smattering of backlinks, not a huge number, but about 100, some of them from fairly authoritative sites. All are organic; I never participated in any link exchanges or anything. A couple days ago it just vanished from Google's results. I mean, it's still in there if you go looking for by copying and pasting long phrases into the search box, and it still scores well for a tiny number of keywords (even beats Wikipedia for those) but for the rest it's just gone - from page 1 to page 10 or later. On my second most important keyword, I used to be on page 1, now I can't even find my site all the way through to page 50. Yet when I search for site:my.site, that page still comes up 4th out of 8000+ listings. Additionally, all my backlinks have vanished from Google's index. If I search for them, I only get internal links, and only a small number of them. The only change I've made, other than minor routine content updates, was to install Kontera on it. Is it possible that caused the problem? The timing is very close - one day I install Kontera, the next day the site all but vanishes from Google. It seems hard to believe it would be as simple as that; if Google were doing this on a regular basis they'd be staring at papers from the Justice Department. All the other sites on the same IP address have also stopped receiving any significant Google traffic. None of the other sites contain any unacceptable content, black-hat SEO techniques, or the like. A couple of them have a lot of cross-linking but they're both subs of the same domain and in similar niches. One of them is very old and hugely backlinked, again all organic. That one was knocked out of the results too. I'm kind of at my wits' end about this. There seems to be no plausible explanation.
hmm. i think a day is too small a timeframe to decide what caused the situation. kontera shouldn't cause it anyway since many websites use it and still rank well and google doesn't have a problem with it or affiliate links etc. mine is a similar case, but definitely not as disasterous. my site, ranking #2 - #8 on google (kept fluctuating between these positions) went to page 2 (#14) and then straight to page 3 (#21)! we didn't make any changes to the website. the only activity was the regular one: we regularly build links for the website, so that's all we were doing. other competitor websites were also affected, some got reshuffled. same as you, my website has nothing illegal going on. i am as baffled as you are.
Google has started filtering more and more pages with duplicate content lately (starting from the beginning of May). You said that some content exists elsewhere so maybe this is the case. It is not a penalty, it is only filtering, to avoid showing the same content from different sites on the first pages of search results. It happened to one of my sites too. Just continue updating your site with unique content and the visitors will come back.
I sure hope so. The older site, the one that had all the backlinks until a few days ago (now it only has 16 listed where a week ago it had at least 1000) is completely unique on every page, all hand-written text and my own photography, a labour of love for many years now. It wasn't about Adsense with that one - I just enjoyed having people looking at what I made and getting all the nice emails about it. So it's particularly sad to have it gone. The more I think about it, that bothers me much more than the money.
I think there is something very strange going on in Google's datacenter. My website is also losing its position. Sometimes it is on page 1 then on page 2 and on page 3. There is no more peace left with Google :S
google like to have a shuffle round of positions it seems! I have an old established site that moves between 1-4 for the main keyword. It's always the way... I just go with the flow.
You know something strange, i had a site vanish from 14,000 uniques per day down to 200 overnight. The only thing different was i got an email from a Kotera manager about starting a campaign, and i replied saying i was interested in giving it a trial and 24 hours later my site was gone. It was previously running Adsense earning around $450 a day, and dropped to $2 Coincidence?
If a site: search at google shows any of your pages, then your site has not been blacklisted by Google. It could be as simple as the sites linking to yours have been discounted for whatever reason. It could also be that your site was discounted for whatever reason.
dont worry friend it happened to at my site ! 90% visitor from google gone from my site... and hope it will back soon !
the same here, I lost all my #1 keyword.. 90% traffic gone but I'am not optimiste for the future ps my content are 100% unique!
This thread really illustrates well a point I have been trying to make for a long time. We are making a huge mistake with our marketing when we focus only on achieving and keeping good rankings in Google. Google only accounts for about 60% of search traffic - while that is no small number, it shows that 40% of all search traffic is directed from the other 60 or so search engines. The way to survive the whimsical nature of the Google serps is to ensure that you will receive traffic from a variety of sources. Ironically, inbound links from third-party websites will provide you a constant source of traffic, in addition to helping your Google, Yahoo and MSN rankings. Yes, I have an article website and I have hundreds of articles on the net pointing to my domain. 59 search engines only accounted for half of my traffic volume in 2007; and I had one quarter million unique visitors landing on my website in 2007. If my website disappeared from the serps tomorrow, my traffic would only be cut in half. But most people make the mistake of putting all of their eggs in one basket, and when that basket falls and breaks, there is nothing left to pick up the pieces.
I agree with you comment here. However, how do you accomplish that. It seems to me that google is the fastest search engine to pick up a web site and for sites that get small amounts of traffic to begin with it seems google is the only source of traffic at times. How do you rank well in the other search engines. So much of the information out there is concentrated on google yet it is worded as how to rank well in "search engines". It seems most people only think google when they think "search engines". Even a small outline would probably be helpful to everyone. Take care
If I recall this happened to you late last year. Did your site ever recover? @obzokie Had the same problem recently on one of my sites. After four days of being knocked from postions 4-6 to 800+, my site recovered with better rankings then before. Good luck
It does appear that the site was victim of duplicate content. Google saw this and acted. Even though the content was merely similar, I guess they've become more strict. How does your site rank in Yahoo!? We have found that our top rankings in Yahoo! for one of our sites has been really well for us - better than we expected, and a lot easier to obtain than trying to work with Google.
Yeah it was Jan 26th, and it still hasn't recovered despite trying everything imaginable. I've pulled sites out of some serious bans/penalties for people before but this one won't budge. The site is as clean as a whistle, i filed a reinclusion request about 4 months ago to the day and nothings happened. Considering it was averaging $450 x 113 days = A $50,850 penalty for nothing. I've seen a lot of sites wiped completely out of the rankings lately for what appears to be no reason, many earning far more then my little site.
only thing i can think of is that you abused some of the TOS so maybe some duplicate content, illegal content just have a look over the content on your site and try and find if other sites have copied it
For my part, it's because I get almost no traffic from Yahoo or MSN. On a day when I get 1000 visitors from Google, I might get 20 from Yahoo and 5 from MSN. This seems to be the case across every site I've ever made over the years, regardless of the technology, content, or hosting provider. So I've stopped worrying about the others. Probably lazy but I'm out of ideas for the others.