Hey, I've been running a vBulletin BMW forum (http://www.unitedbimmer.com) everyday for over a year, and today I was poking around and tried searching Google for "United Bimmer", and we're pages deep. We've been number 1 for our own site name pretty much since we started, so that means we've been penalized somehow. The thing is, I have never done any black-hat SEO, and I've worked for thousands of hours over the past few months on building genuine, good backlinks.... and now I'm worried about what's going on. In the Google Sitemap webmaster area, it says "Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Jun 28, 2006.".... about a week ago! All datacenters are still reporting PR2 (very competitive category I've found), and our forums, the huge part of our site, just went supplemental!!! We've had everything from Slashdot to the New York Times link to us, and with the dedication I've given to this website, I'm hoping there's an easy answer to why Google would randomly do this. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Hi Komodo, Welcome to our supp-hell club. We meet on Wednesdays at 7. I'll get you one of our cool jackets. Ok, seriously. You and about a million other webmasters, including myself, are having the same issues. There are at least a dozen posts on the google forum right now about it. I "THINK" it's a result of the new crawling and indexing by the latest google debacle known as "Big Daddy". I also "THINK" the pages that are being supped are pages that do not have enough internal links pointing to them, nor do they have external -backlinks- pointing towards them. So the combination of only a few (or one) internal links, coupled with NO backlinks is leading to pages that are perfectly legit/whitehat being supped. That's what I think. I have absolutely no proof. So my free advice is worth exactly what you paid for it.
Hi Komodo.. sorry I cant answer you, Iam new here... But i went to your site , and Iliked it ... can you tell me what software you used to do it? thanks..
The forum is vbulletin and the main page is vbcmps a free add on hack for vbulletin. I run the same type of setup also.
Can I be assured there it is on Google's end, and has nothing to do with my site itself? It would be a lie to say I'm not worried, heh.
Yeah, it's almost as if now Google is treating all sites as evil by default and unless you are Wikipedia one wrong move will dump you into the supplemental results. I think it boils down to Google waging a war on spammers and many legit sites are casualties in this war. Just remember that Google cares more about their own algorithm's organic purity than they do about anything else. They can and will ban any site that they please without cause or recourse. It's Google's index and they can do what they want with it. They are the gatekeeper.
They are some rather odd search results. Most of them look like directories and lists of sites. Only two seemed to have anything to do with bimmers. Here's a sample of what shows in the top ten for united bimmer on my dc: http://www.ezilon.com/more_info/83277.shtml (looks like a search engine with adsense) http://www.hot-car-sites.com/index.php?a=stats&u=ubimmer (another "lists" site packed with adbrite ads) http://www.blinkfile.com/ (What the hell does this show in the top 10 for???) Looks like some kind of image upload directory/listing? http://www.lsblogs.com/details.php?site=9923 (another list/directory of blogs) http://www.bimmerfest.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-102072.html (this site at least seems relevant) http://www.digg.com/tech_news/United_Bimmer_-_BMW_Community_and_Forums (a digg article - relevant) http://www.netvouz.com/komodo?tags=bmw (looks like another search engine???) Is this normal for your SERPS?
No, those SERPs are all mixed up. However a few of the sites, like BlinkFile, are mine as well... so they're connected.
I tried co-op, but removed it a while ago because for some reason DP wouldn't give me over a 3 ranking. =/