Not ever posted about this on here but it's been one of my many banes over the last year. Basically May or so last year my site was absolutely thriving and getting about 100,000 uniques per month and we were very much riding on the crest of a pretty awesome wave. Then, about end of May and onwards until about September our Google rankings disappeared and we were listed in the supplemental index. Traffic dropped and has continued to do so until today when we are lucky to get 20% of that traffic. Income has gone down by a similar amount. In about November of last year I filed a reinclusion request citing the co-op ads as a possible reason but I got no reply whatsoever or any reinclusion. It seemed the only plausible reason. My PR remained though, I had a site cache and 88,000 or so pages listed (although only 200 were normal non-supps). Now jump forward to the beginning of February and I bought vbseo for my website. The whole site was in supplemental so I didn't see any harm in it and I doubt I've caused any. However, now my site: command only shows up 260 results (quite short considering I have 22,000 members) and there is no cached page of my site. Googlebots are hitting me daily, have been hitting me daily for about a month now and I've seen no change and no reintroduction of Google results. I'm certain I've been penalised but what am I meant to do to sort the problem out, I've done everything I can think of including submitting their clearly useless reinclusion request. What would you do in my situation? especially considering a new domain is out of the question. Thanks, Ed - site is rouseindahouse.com by the way
You should try to think back to any changes you may have made at the time you lost your traffic. There should be something that may have contributed. The site: query at Google is no longer reliable. Try this one for instance: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:rouseindahouse.com+house&btnG=Search vBSEO will definitely improve your SEO - but you should still try to find out what impacted you negatively in the past, as it may still be impacting you.
I see many sites where the following statement is in top of the page: Results 1 - 1 of about 260 from xyz.com Why 260? The sites are not penalized, they get traffic from google. Why 260 for hundreds or probably thousands of sites? Why not less or more? Is this some kind of penalty?
So you spent $149 on vBSEO for nothing? Isn't it supposed to help your forum? Atleast wouldn't you think that, after you spend you hard earned money.
I had a similar problem with a site. Heres what I did: 1) Went through the entire site and made sure it didnt violate any of the google webmaster guidelines. 2) Removed several thousand pages and consolidated multiple pages into one page to reduce the total number of pages without reducing the total content of teh site. 3) Cleaned up the code. Removed most of the inline CSS and put it in linked style sheets, got rid of overly used title and alt tags. Simplified the linking structure and number of links. 4) Submitted reinclusion requests ( actually about 3 over a 3 month period each time i cleaned the site up even more) It took almost 4 months but then all of a sudden - bam - back in the SERPs - i do have the 260 thing but if you click "repeat the search with the omitted..." it shows much more - i dont think that affects the SERPS too much.
Doesn't look banned here. I'm not even seeing a fair amount of supplementals which you would normally see with a site showing 99,400 cached pages. Can you go back through your logs at the time of loss of traffic and find out through which terms you lost most of your traffic? That would be my best guess. Maybe you lost some really good links around that time - a webmaster cleaned up their site and accidentally deleted your link - a website shut down?? Just some guesses. Hope you find the root of the problem soon
The exact same thing happened to me last year. At the end of May, Google kicked me completely out of the index. It didn't occur to me, until November, that having 3 domains all pointing to the same content (free Myspace backgrounds) was NOT A GOOD THING. However, even after cleaning it up, and changing the content to unique on all domains, the most profitable of the domains is still kicked out of the index (the other 2 are indexed). When May hits, it will have been one year. Google is a harsh mistress.
I m suffering the same fate too , plus can't even rank 1 for a search of my exact domain, cleaned up code removed overused kw's and did reinclusion still nothing as yet.
That seems a problem to many of us, I had several sandbox blogs as well but most of them are blogger blogspot
Hello, I had the same problem months ago, now the site back take easy, and try to add more content, update your main page and make more backlinks to your site... Best, Jakomo
I had no idea the site index had changed like that, I presumed that because it was showing the updated urls, that was Google's main site: command but seeing as there are 99,000 mostly non-supplemental results in the other one, it seems it is considerably closer to the mark. Guess, I can be thankful to vbseo there and just as a note I'm by no means critical of vbseo in this thread, if I do have a sandbox or a penalty or whatever it's definitely pre-vbseo. That said, the homepage still isn't cached and hasn't been for a while. It's showing the newly changed titles and it's showing 24 Mar, so why can't I see the page? I've done all the consolidation of content and everything, vbseo helped me with that but clearly the majority of my content is unique because it's in the very nature of a forum. It'd seem the issue on the whole isn't really a penalty or being banned but just having such a small amount of traffic from Google that puts my traffic at the highest estimates at about a quarter of what it once was.