One of my friends have a small static site with a PR 3. A few months back, she decided to add content to the site in an attempt to get more search engine traffic. She got one article directory, got a PHP script with mod-rewrite to generate SE friendly URLS and did some normal SEO work. She even added a google sitemap. But it really backfired. The site is penalised for duplicate content(I guess) and only the home page is being indexed now. In spite of all the efforts(sitemap etc.), google refuse to index the rest of the site. She has almost 14 pages in Supplemental Resuls and just the home page in normal index. Now to get out of it, I am thinking about removing the article directory and requesting for re-inclusion as matt cutts adviced. Another alternative is to get a new domain and 301 redirect the current home page to the new one. All the incoming links are to the home page(almost all), so I guess the PR will be transferred to the new one, and it will be easier than getting the penalty removed. I would appreciate your thoughts and advices on this issue. The site URL is: http://www.silverspoonmurals.com/ Site also have a link exchange program. I am not sure if that is one (or main) reason for the penalty. I will also appreciate your thoughts on this.
First of all you need to create different titles, h1 and meta tags for each page. Currently the titles start with the company name, if you have to keep the name in there for branding purposes then have it last. If not then remove it. Is the article directory original content? If not then remove it and write your own articles. You have relatively few links so try and build some good quality ones. Indexing is related to PR so you do need links.
Matt Cutts has stated that if you engage in excessive reciprocal linking you may end up in the supplemental index because of the changes from BigDaddy so I would definitely get rid of most reciprocal linking especially if it's unrelated to the theme of the site. I checked a few articles in the directory and they are duplicates from other sites. You can use http://www.copyscape.com/ to check if you want. I don't think you get penalized for duplicate content but having articles about politics and religion and other unrelated themes doesn't help the visitors and it's unrelated duplicate content which may be a problem. I would keep the articles that are useful to your visitors because then it will be theme-related and I don't think you'd get penalized for that but those articles will probably just be supplemental. Edit: I would also add that I think you should start with the things that may have gotten the site penalized such as the reciprocal linking and duplicate unrelated content. Changing your titles and h1 tags to be more descriptive of the page is good for seo but I really doubt that that played any role in this penalty so I would do that after along with getting good, relevant one-way links as mad4 suggested.
Absolutely brian... Well to get out of supplemental reault just make google feel that your site is one of the good one... dont just go for links and links... link to sites that have something similar... which are related to your market... there in no problems with recis too... but only with the sites that are "like" yours... Take care
Thank you BrianR2 and Manish Pandey. I think we can agree on two points. 1. Remove the duplicate content. 2. Remove the unrelated reciprocal links Now, the major issue. After we remove the duplicate content and links, will it be better to: 1. Request for reinclusion and wait ..(I guess it may take 3-6 months, if Google process the request) 2. Create another site with same pages, except the articles and links. 301 redirect the current homepage to new. Will it transfer the penalty to the new site as well? Time taken to come out of the sandbox, I guess would be 3-6 months again. Which approach is safer? Expecting your valuable feedback.
First off, if you remove all reciprocal links and all duplicate content then your site probably won't be as good for your visitors so I would keep relevant duplicate content that helps your visitors as well as relevant links that help your visitors as long as you don't have too many reciprocal links. Don't just focus on google and forget about your visitors who are looking for helpful information. If you are in the supplemental index you may be still getting crawled but less frequently. I think you only need to do a re-inclusion request if you have been banned and aren't in the index at all. If you are still getting crawled then the changes you make should get picked up by google and you should be taken out of the supplemental index. If you haven't been crawled in a long time then I would look into the re-inclusion request to see if it applies here. I wouldn't do the 301 redirect to a new site because it will probably take a lot more time to get where you were before you went supplemental and where you should return to if you remove the troublesome items.
The site is in supplemental resullts for more than 6 months now. I have seen a site PR -6 in summplimental results for almost 2 years and still not making any differnce. Its not just about being helpful to the visitors, I need more visitors. After being put into supplimental results, search engine visitors reduced drastically. I want to be useful to the people, but people must find the site first! Anyways, thanks for the reply. Noted your remarks on re-inclusion. Probaly you are right about that.
Get visitors the old fashioned way! Tell people about them. THAT way you can say "Screw you Supplemental pages!" Come on, think about it... just attract people like the Internet was brand new.
I don’t think a reinclusion is going to help with this as there are many issues that need cleared up first. I would first suggest in changing your Title and Description tags for each page (as already suggested), they don’t come across as being ‘natural’ or user friendly. If you read over the title and description of a page and it doesn’t make sense (for us humans) then it just might be best to change them, take a more natural approach as if you’re describing the site to a friend and not a computer. As for the duplicate content, it’s not just your content is on someone else’s site but its more of you have the exact same pages on that site. For example I found the following urls being marked as duplicate: mural_pricing.html (Mural Pricing) muralpricing.html (Mural Pricing) muralspricing.html (Mural Pricing) You need to pick one page, go with it and get rid of the others and any links that point towards those pages your selecting to delete. Personally I try and name all my pages like mural-pricing.html as this is more SEO friendly. Another example of dupe pages found: links/linkdirectory.html links/LinkDirectory.html links/linksdirectory.html I would start by getting rid of LinkDirectory, name all your pages with lower case. Speaking of the Link Directory, do you really need something that big with so many different types of links? The site is to provide information on murals so linking out to sites like shopping, wedding, gardens etc won’t help. Keep your outgoing links 100% relevant and mix them in with your content, but only slightly. I would link to other mural sites, art sites or authority sites based in the Florida area and the method I use for linking is not www.maindomain.com but www.maindomain.com/about-us.html or something similar - that way I am deep linking into another site but also proving my visitors with more relevant information on my topic. Another tip is to make sure the page you are linking to has PR but more important is in the Google index. If you want, make a links page instead of mixing links into the content keep it to a single page but also keep it to a low number, no need to have 20+ outgoing links on one page. As for the article directory, pull it down and start writing your own content about the service you provide. Most of the articles on there are not relevant to the murals subject and it honestly looks as if someone had an article submitting spree on any old topic that can be found on the net. Also, have one single page as the sitemap and link each page on the site to the sitemap, if you upload a new page you’ll need to add it to the sitemap as well. Remember your pages need to be within 2 clicks of the home page so having any pages buried deep in the site isn’t going to be found by the search bots. Have a link on the footer of every page that points towards the sitemap. For now nuke the Google sitemap as your only assisting their bots in spotting the damaged pages on your site. Once you have the site 100% clean then create a new XML sitemap and submit it to Google. Download GSiteCrawler for free and allow it to crawl your site. This program will send a bot across your site and report what pages and url’s have problems. That’s how I found the problem pages mentioned above and there probably be no way I would have seem them without it. I was going to attach a full report from GSiteCrawler to this post but the crawler is still running, 15 minutes later, so I am giving up at this point. Download the program, let it crawl and see what it comes up with. It will give you a better insight to your pages and also what needs to be fixed. Right I am off for a coffee and a smoke, good luck with this and hopefully I helped